How the length of a story in an email affects webinar registrations
NextAfter
Experiment Summary
Timeframe: 02/13/2019 - 02/20/2019
In this experiment, our original email was trying to communicate the importance of a/b testing by telling a personal story. This is typical of many emails that we write – we often look for a personal story to make help the recipient see that we’re humans (not just marketers) and use that connection to lead into a content offer of some type.
But we wondered if it might be more effective to tell this same story in a much shorter format, and spend more time talking about the specifics of what someone will learn in the webinar, rather than solely relying on the landing page to cover those details.
Research Question
Will spending less time on the story and more time on the content affect webinar registrations?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Conv. Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Long Story Format | 1.4% | ||
| T1: | Detailed Content Focus | 2.1% | 48.4% | 98.4% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 2,807 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 8,489, 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:
0% increase in traffic
× 48.4% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
Our treatment saw a 48.4% increase in webinar registrations. This is a very interesting result as it can make a significant impact on how we structure of emails related to free content offers in the future. It’s often hard for us to validate an experiment like this based on our scale, let alone see an increase this large. So a 98% level of confidence gives us great reassurance that this strategy will be on to continue test and iterate on moving forward.