How direct copy affects donation page conversion rate
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: 07/01/2017 - 08/03/2017
CaringBridge’s primary donation page had proven to show better results with a broader value proposition, as opposed to the highly personalized value proposition presented on their tribute donation pages.
In a copy review of their tribute donation page, they wondered if the question posed in the headline: “What does CaringBridge mean to you?” added cognitive friction as people tried to answer this question for themselves, instead of continuing to ingest the value proposition.
They created a treatment that instantly offered an opportunity to the reader—”You make CaringBridge better.” The treatment copy removed questions and made statements, telling them that if they valued CaringBridge, their donation was vital.
They launched an A/B test to determine a winner.
Research Question
Does more direct copy increase the force of the value proposition and result in more donations?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Control | 40.0% | ||
| T1: | Treatment 1 | 38.7% | -3.2% | 61.6% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 11,521 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 experiment did not produce a statistically significant result either way, which showed that more radical changes need to be made to the page to deliver a result. Since this page has a high donor conversion rate and low traffic, it might be difficult to prove a winning treatment due to higher visitor motivation…but we will continue testing.