How a personal message of impact affects clickthrough rate on a recurring donation ask
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
Ended On: 10/22/2019
CaringBridge launched a new effort to acquire recurring donors. Since the most likely people to become recurring donors were people who had visited the site multiple times, they created an exit intent popup that fired as someone left CaringBridge after their second visit (and only their second visit). The first iteration of this popup was a “faceless” message that made a direct ask and sent the user to a recurring-only donation page. They hypothesized that making the ask from a mom who had used CaringBridge would increase clickthrough rate and get more people to the page, thus generating more recurring donors. They launched a test to determine a winner.
Research Question
How will a personal message of impact affect clickthrough rate on a recurring donation ask?
Design
Results
| Treatment Name | Click Rate | Relative Difference | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C: | Corporate | 0.84% | ||
| T1: | Mom Message | 0.06% | -93.0% | 100.0% |
This experiment has a required sample size of 663 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 76,018, 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:
93.0% decrease in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift
Key Learnings
The personal ask treatment reduced clickthrough by 93%. Interestingly, the mom-centric ask had almost a 30% conversion rate, but clickthrough was so much lower that it only generated 1/3 as many gifts. CaringBridge will continue to test value propositions both on the exit-intent popup and the recurring donation page to optimize this funnel. Additionally, they will also test conversion rates as they roll the popup out to more traffic—including people who have visited CaringBridge five or more times.