CaringBridge

How changing the sender affects open rate

Experiment ID: #1666

CaringBridge

CaringBridge offers free personal, protected websites for people to easily share updates and receive support and encouragement from their community during a health journey. Every 7 minutes, a CaringBridge website is created for someone experiencing a health event.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 04/09/2015 - 07/14/2015

CaringBridge had an automated email as part of their new name conversion strategy that had been sent in a designed template using their founder as the sender for years. Since most of their development emails came from their founder, Sona Mehring, they wanted to test this with a more personal email from a member of the development team.

Research Question

Will a new sender increase open rate?

Design

C: Control
T1: Treatment 1

Results

 Treatment NameOpen RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Control 49.6%
T1: Treatment 1 52.7%6.3% 100.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 1,994 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 28,048, 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:

    6.3% increase in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

This experiment showed that it can increase open rates to use a new sender. Credibility has an important impact on email performance, but that doesn’t mean that every email needs to come straight from the CEO.


Experiment Documented by Jeff Giddens
Jeff Giddens is President of NextAfter.

Question about experiment #1666

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