Care Net

How putting a countdown clock in the body copy of an email appeal impacts conversion

Experiment ID: #8289

Care Net

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 12/27/2017 - 01/31/2018

During Care Net’s year-end campaign, they wanted to see if they could increase motivation of their email file to click through to their donation page towards the end of the campaign by increasing urgency in the email appeal. To do this, they inserted an animated countdown clock in the body of their email copy and tested this against the control version that didn’t have the clock. The clock counted down to the end of the year and informed the end reader that their time was running out to make their year-end donation. All other copy remained the same. They split their file in half and tested this approach

Research Question

Will a countdown clock increase conversion?

Design

C: Without countdown clock
T1: With countdown clock

Results

 Treatment NameClick RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Without countdown clock 0.37%
T1: With countdown clock 0.57%54.5% 76.8%

This experiment has a required sample size of 8,901 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

White we weren’t able to validate the experiment, there was a definite directional lift with the treatment of 54%. By adding a countdown clock to the copy, we were able to increase urgency to the message and motivate more people to click-through to the donation page. This tactic will be implemented moving forward for high-urgency campaigns in an effort to not only get significantly more people to click through to the donation page, but potentially give to their organization.


Experiment Documented by Courtney Gaines
Courtney Gaines is Vice President at NextAfter.

Question about experiment #8289

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