The Heritage Foundation

How the call-to-action in an email affects click rate

Experiment ID: #573

The Heritage Foundation

Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institution—a think tank—whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 12/15/2014 - 12/17/2014

At the start of their end of year campaign, Heritage crafted four different emails that would offer insights into what motivated their donors visit the campaign landing page.  The goal was that by testing these different approaches, we would be able to gain insights as to what messaging approach was most appealing to the visitors to help craft the rest of the campaign messages.

Research Question

Which messaging approach for the year end campaign is the most appealing to the Heritage Foundation audience?

Design

C: Short Copy
T1: Choice of Links
T2: Find Out More
T3: Donor Centric Language

Results

 Treatment NameClick RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Short Copy 0.96%
T1: Choice of Links 0.86%-10.0% 87.3%
T2: Find Out More 1.8%90.2% 100.0%
T3: Donor Centric Language 0.55%-42.3% 100.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 990 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 181,647, 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:

    90.2% increase in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The shorter email with a softer call-to-action was able to drive incremental amounts of traffic with additional gifts (although the response rate did not have a level of confidence above 95%).


Experiment Documented by NextAfter

Question about experiment #573

If you have any questions about this experiment or would like additional details not discussed above, please feel free to contact them directly.