Donation email focused on one value point: all 4 versions lost
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsRewriting a Consumer Reports donation email to focus on a single reason to give made it worse: all four focused versions underperformed the original.
MECLABS Institute ran this pre-test with Consumer Reports before a live test at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016, and it was published as a MarketingSherpa case study.
The exact figures were shown only in images, so no percentages are given here.
- Response: every one of the four treatments underperformed the control. This is a loss.
- Exact clickthrough and donation figures were not stated in the text.
Control
A donation appeal email to Consumer Reports subscribers that mixed several reasons to give in one message.
Variant
Four crowdsourced versions, each built around one reason to give: unbiased reporting, the personal impact of Consumer Reports, the quality of its research, or a fourth category the audience picked.
Why it likely lost
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Different donors give for different reasons, so focusing on one may have turned off people who cared about the others.
- The team thought the layout and structure of the new copy may have added friction.
- Donors may have been unclear on what member benefits they get, and none of the treatments explained that. The next test did.
Caveats: Exact figures appear only in images on the source page and were not shared in the text. The copy was crowdsourced from blog readers, and sample size per version was not stated.
Who ran it
MECLABS Institute ran this test and published the results (MarketingSherpa case study). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on MECLABS Institute →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we focus our appeal email on one reason to act instead of several, then more people will respond because the message is clearer.
- Primary metric
- Clickthrough rate to the donation or sign-up page
- Guardrails
- Revenue per email sent
- Average gift or order value
- Unsubscribe rate
- Who should test it
- Nonprofits and lead-gen businesses whose appeals list several benefits. This result suggests a broad audience may respond better to a mix, so be careful if your list contains many different kinds of supporters.
Questions
Is it better to focus an email on one benefit?
Not always. Here, all four single-focus donation emails lost to the original that mixed several reasons to give.
Why might a focused message lose?
If your audience gives for different reasons, picking one can leave out the reason that moves many readers.
What did Consumer Reports test next?
The team tested explaining member benefits more clearly.
Those versions lost on clicks but raised revenue per donation by 32%.
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