As fundraisers, it’s easy to get stuck in old habits, but we should constantly be experimenting to find what really works for our donor bases. There are so many different things you should be testing to learn about your audience and increase performance.

Today we’re looking at the different elements of your email appeals that you should A/B test, including:

• Email tone and writing style: How should you write to your supporters? What type of verbiage motivates your donors? Are your emails friendly/down to earth, urgent, serious, professional, inspirational, short, long, factual and to the point or more abstract and narrative?
• Email sender: From whom is the email coming? Do you use the organization’s name? CEO’s name? Other person’s name?
• Email subject line: How many words is your subject line? Is it personalized with the recipient’s name? Is it enigmatic, funny? Do you use punctuation? What about capital letters?
• Call-to-action buttons: Review your calls to action; are they prominent or subtle? Are the buttons small, medium, or large? What color are they?
• Design: How is the email designed? Do you have a beautiful HTML design that features colorful images with a branded header that includes your logo? Or are you using a simpler template that’s more bare bones and makes it super obvious to give?

Case Studies: Email A/B Testing Offers Valuable Insight to Nonprofit Organizations

David C. Cook

David C. Cook is a nonprofit organization dedicated to publishing and distributing leadership and discipleship resources. They wanted to increase donations for global missions and wanted to determine if video included in their emails was effective for increasing engagement and ultimately, donations.

In order to test this, they created two separate emails with identical components (time and date sent, subject line, design, content, sender’s name, and so on). The only difference was one email had an embedded video player in the template. They divided their large list of supporters in half; one half got the usual email and the other half got the video email.

David C. Cook discovered that link clicks on the video email were 43% better, and their donations resulting from the video email were 114% better. Their email recipients respond very well to videos in emails!

CaringBridge

CaringBridge, a nonprofit organization that provides websites for people to update with their health journey information, wanted to know if using a different sender for their emails would affect their performance. The control email was sent from the CEO of Caring Bridge. The variable email was sent from Kelly, a Senior Development Specialist. The second email had some other differences, as well: the copy and tone were different, and it didn’t have a PS.

CaringBridge discovered that changing the sender of the email improved open rates by 6.3%, and the changes made to the body of the email significantly increased clicks.

They didn’t stop their testing there, though. Next, they wanted to test their email template. The control version had a big image, a button and background colors. The variable didn’t use any colors or graphics. Instead, it was mainly text and looked more like an email you’d receive from a friend. They saw an 80% increase in click-through rates with the simpler, scaled-down email template.

Email A/B testing was invaluable for these nonprofits and offered some feedback that could be acted upon right away. Remember: different things work for different organizations and testing is about learning as much as you can about what works and what doesn’t. While hopefully tests increase results, give yourself freedom to let things not work because that’s how you learn!