How sending a personal follow-up affects open rate
NextAfter
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 07/20/2016 - 07/21/2016
We wanted to re-send a live broadcast invitation to email recipients who got the original invitation, but never opened it. This is a fairly common practice – filter for non-opens and schedule your email for a different time, often with a different subject line that hits on a different aspect of urgency or importance.
We wondered if instead of running the resend in the typical marketing fashion, we could lift open rates by writing a personal follow-up email that you might get it if you didn’t respond to an email from a colleague.
Research Question
Will increasing the personal tone of the subject line and preview text in a resend affect open rate?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Open Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Standard Resend | 10.5% | ||
| T1: | Personal Follow-up | 22.0% | 109.8% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 80 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 3,377, 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:
109.8% increase in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
With an increase of 109.8% in open rate, we’ve learned that our email recipients are much more likely to engage with a re-send email that feels like a follow-up email a colleague or friend might send.