How urgency and a repositioned call-to-action increased donations by 89.4%
Harvest Ministries
Harvest Christian Fellowship exists to bring Christians closer to God and to bring nonbelievers to a saving relationship with Him by showing how God's Word and faith in Him are applicable and relevant to everyday life.
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 12/09/2015 - 12/10/2015
Harvest Ministries prepared an appeal for their year end campaign that offered a book, “The Biggest Story”, as a premium. They had prepared an email that told a personal story, made a financial ask with a call-to-action button, and then followed up with some information about the premium. On the landing page, there was a callout box that indicated that time was running out to order the premium and receive it before Christmas.
Their team formed a hypothesis that if they moved this callout earlier in the donation funnel, that they would attract visitors with a higher motivation. They developed a treatment that added urgent copy that emphasized the impending deadline, and moved the call-to-action button after this copy. They then ran an A/B split test to see the results.
Research Question
Will highlighting the urgency of a deadline increase donor conversion?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Low Urgency | 0.73% | ||
| T1: | Emphasized Urgency | 1.4% | 89.4% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 1,881 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 14,885, 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
× 89.4% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
This tells us that when we have a deadline, we must message it as early in the funnel as possible to make sure the incentive (why you should give now) reaches donors who might be a motivation to give. There are always people who intend to give, but think it can wait. By giving them clarity (and not false urgency) on when the incentive expires, we were able to convert more of these people.