How using a button instead of a raw link impacts conversion in a cultivation email
The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate
The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate are a Roman Catholic congregation of priests and brothers founded after the French Revolution by St. Eugene De Mazenod to work among the poor. Today there are nearly 4,000 missionaries working in more than 60 countries around the world.
Experiment Summary
Ended On: 01/31/2019
The Missionary Oblates had tested into using raw links for the hyperlinks in their email communication. This finding was over a year ago and they have continued to use raw links in all of their emails since then. As they were sending a cultivation email to their email file they hypothesized that maybe their file had grown used to the raw link and it wouldn’t have the same impact as it had when they had originally tested it. They developed a treatment that used a button instead of a raw link and split their file in half to see the impact on clicks.
Research Question
Would a button instead of a raw link increase clicks in a cultivation email?
Design
Results
This experiment has a required sample size of 26,366 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
We saw a directional lift of 5% from the treatment that had the button instead of the raw link. Because of the volume of emails that the Missionary Oblates send, we’d recommend testing this approach again in an effort to validate the approach and track conversions all the way through. We ultimately want to see the impact this kind of experiment has not only on clicks, but donations as well since the cultivation email offered people a free content offer that had a donation ask on the end of it.