How the cost of a premium affects conversion
Dallas Theological Seminary
The DTS mission is, “to glorify God by equipping godly servant-leaders for the proclamation of His Word and the building up of the body of Christ worldwide.” They strive to help men and women fulfill the Great Commission and the Great Commandment, or more simply: Teach Truth. Love Well.
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 04/16/2015 - 06/24/2015
As part of the a name acquisition campaign, Dallas Theological Seminary was giving away a free eBook in exchange for a visitor’s email address. After the successful email acquisition, visitors were sent to a contextualized donation page. In an effort to boost conversion on this follow up donation ask, we wanted to see if offering a relevant premium (a hardcover book on a similar topic) would boost conversion.
As a result, we created two landing pages, with one that had a premium offer for a gift of any amount.
Research Question
Will a premium boost the overall conversion and revenue of a donation landing page?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | No Premium | 1.6% | ||
| T1: | With Premium | 1.3% | -17.6% | 70.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 13,829 in order to be valid. Unfortunately, the required sample size was not met and a level of confidence above 95% was not met so the experiment results are not valid.
Key Learnings
The donation page with the premium offer did not have any statistically significant impact on either conversion rate or revenue. Since this book had an associated cost to the seminary, it didn’t make sense to continue offering the premium to donors.
For many organizations, premium offers will often have a positive impact on donor conversion and average gift but there are times where, as in this case, the impact was negligible. This is why it is so critical to test any changes to a donation form to ensure the impact with worth the cost.