How personal, conversational email copy and tone impacts donations
Live Action
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 02/09/2017 - 02/13/2017
Live Action has the largest online presence for the pro-life movement. They are experts in the pro-life space and present their content with professionalism. Lila Rose, their founder and president, is the voice for a lot of their communication, including their monthly email appeals. They hypothesized that because the email was coming from Lila, the tone of the emails wasn’t matching the personal communication medium that email is.
While keeping the value proposition from the control email intact, they completely rewrote a treatment email with a conversational tone and inserted personalization throughout the copy. They also stripped all the elements of branding and the picture of Lila out of the email to make it seem like it came from a person, rather than email marketing software.
They split their email file in half and tested.
Research Question
Would a more conversational and personal email help increase the number of donations?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 0.19% | ||
| T1: | Personal approach | 0.34% | 74.9% | 99.5% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 9,920 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 39,830, and the level of confidence is above 95% the experiment results are valid.
Flux Metrics Affected
The Flux Metrics analyze the three primary metrics that affect revenue (traffic, conversion rate, and average gift). This experiment produced the following results:
0% increase in traffic
× 74.9% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The treatment email produced a 74.9% increase in donations. What this tells us is that:
- More people will respond when they feel personally engaged.
- People give to people. People want to feel that Lila is personally emailing them rather than an email marketing machine.
- Donors want authentic and conversational communication in high-touch channels like email. Email provides an opportunity for Live Action to personally connect with their audience unlike any other communication channel.