CaringBridge

How clarifying the call-to-action affects donor conversion

Experiment ID: #2636

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

Timeframe: 11/20/2014 - 11/25/2014

The Tribute widget drive the majority of Caringbridge’s organic site revenue. It is small advertisement on a patient’s journal page that asks the visitor to make a tribute gift. With the volume of Caringbridge’s site traffic, improving the conversion rate of this widget would have an exponential impact.

A treatment was developed with the goal of clarifying the purpose of the gift. The idea was that if we can have visitors better understand the purpose of the gift, they will be more likely to make a gift.

Research Question

Will increasing clarity of the call to action while adding language to increase the “fear of loss” increase donor conversion rate over the existing treatment emphasizing the more general ask?

Design

C: General Ask
T1: Personalized Ask

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: General Ask 0.01%
T1: Personalized Ask 0.01%85.8% 100.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 267,222 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 3,943,119, 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
× 85.8% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The resulting treatment made multiple impacts along the path to conversion. By itself, the new widget language increased the number of clicks by 19.3%.

Not only that but this increased traffic was more qualified than the visitors that the control would drive since they had a better understanding of the purpose of their gift. As a result, the visitors to the subsequent page had a 52% increase in conversion and a 54% decrease in refunds.

The cumulative effect of all of these lifts resulted in an 85.9% increase in donor conversion.


Experiment Documented by Jeff Giddens
Jeff Giddens is President of NextAfter.

Question about experiment #2636

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