How an individual sender impacts the open rate of an organizational email
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 11/28/2017 - 12/04/2017
For Giving Tuesday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute was sending out a fundraising email to their house email file. Historically, these fundraising emails had come from the organization instead of an individual. We wanted to see if sending from the organization’s president, Kent Lassman, would be able to improve the email results. Since it was coming from an individual, we also modified the email so that it had a more personal tone.
Research Question
How will an individual sender impact email engagement?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Open Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Organizational Sender | 15.9% | ||
| T1: | Individual Sender | 20.3% | 27.5% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 595 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 9,199, 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:
27.5% increase in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The treatment resulted in a 27.5% increase in opens for the house email file. We believe this is the result of two factors from the email: the sender and the first sentence. Prior research has found that sending from an individual increases the likelihood to open the email. Additionally, by modifying the first sentence, we changed what was viewed in the preview pane of the email. In this case, we were able to incorporate the individual’s name so that the email appeared to be send from an individual to an individual instead of from an organization to a wide list of people.