The Heritage Foundation

How increasing the force of the value proposition affects revenue

Experiment ID: #3437

The Heritage Foundation

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 03/09/2016 - 03/15/2016

The Heritage Foundation was sending lots of traffic to their “Conservative Declaration”, a document that asked conservatives to unite under shared principles. Immediately after signing, the visitors were presented with an offer to become a member of The Heritage Foundation by making a donation. The entire experience took place within a single design.

Heritage had another membership page that had been performing extremely well. However, design was a key part of this page, and it didn’t match the design of the Conservative Declaration. Knowing that congruency is a key part of conversion, they decided to test it anyways to see if increasing the force of the value proposition outweighed design consistency.

Research Question

Will a stronger value proposition increase donations and revenue, in spite of a different design?

Design

C: Control
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Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidenceAverage Gift
C: Control 0.65%$28.33
T1: Updated Value Prop 3.5%443.2% 99.8%$29.24

This experiment has a required sample size of 192 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 944, 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
× 443.2% increase in conversion rate
× 3.2% increase in average gift
460.4% increase in revenue

Key Learnings

The treatment produced a 460% increase in revenue, despite breaking from the design of the original offer. This is a powerful learning that shows that the message is more important than the container.

This also points the way to a future test to see if revenue can be further increased by working the new value proposition into the existing design and increasing congruency.


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

Question about experiment #3437

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