Does adding visual callouts about Covid-19 to a website help or hurt non-profit donations? The answer might surprise you.
Watch this episode of The Cro Show, a game show for conversion rate optimization and marketing experimentation fans, and see if you can guess which test variation performed better during a recent Cro Metrics client experiment.
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Full Transcript:
Katie Green: Another biweekly test showcase, excited to show y’all this one. So, this is a test we ran for a nonprofit client, and this is on their main evergreen donate page. So, anybody who lands on their donation form would get this experience regardless of referral. And this is a little bit of a two-parter. So, really excited to get into the conversation with this, because it is our trusty handy dandy hand-drawn arrow which we saw initially calling out the monthly donations with that visual, with help homeless youth every day. We were able to lift conversions regardless of the cadence. So, we were specifically calling out monthly, but we saw an increase in monthly and one time donations from this visual call-out. So, the next step here was to test what that language was, because here we’re focusing more on the community that people are joining when they donate monthly to be a part of this nonprofits membership. And our next iteration, we tested our initial win, which was help homeless youth every day. Join our community of more than 23,000 dedicated monthly donors, to help homeless kids suffering through the COVID pandemic every day. So, this was a natural next step because we wanted to be timely, we wanted to be relevant, and we thought we would see an increase with changing this language. So, I wanted to get anybody’s thoughts, on using COVID language versus this community language. Curious what everybody thinks.
Cristi Alvarez: I think personally, the control one in this situation, just because it could be that people are not necessarily tired of hearing about COVID, but just with a lot of the COVID language it’s been happening, it’s just kind of floods the space. And so it’s kind of like you’re hearing it so much that it doesn’t feel real anymore. So, that would be my guess.
Ally Kuhn: I agree. I think the control one as well from a test that I ran previously around COVID language. It did seem to induce a little bit of fear and stress. So, I’m gonna go with control.
Cara Binsfield: I’m gonna 2nd/3rd that because I think there’s COVID fatigue.
Ryan Lucht: I’m gonna 4th it, just ’cause I remember, I think I remember a test that got ran back towards the beginning of the pandemic about imagery with masks versus no masks, and the masks were freaking people out.
Grant Tilus: I was curious about the community aspect. Joining the community and feeling more connected versus yeah, you’re helping suffering kids, which is great but you may be potentially losing that connection of being a part of something.
Dave Albert: I agree. That’s why I said control on the chat because, to me it’s not so much the COVID message, but more that the control has a better message, that makes it feel like more inclusive.
Carla Lord: I think control as well, but I’m really a bit torn because I think that the idea of homeless kids suffering through COVID might change the dynamic a little bit, so that it becomes something that’s very topical and something that is-, people who are really really suffering through this pandemic. It might bring some awareness to that and some feelings of needing to help those people.
Emily Schreiber: Yeah, I’ll go for the variation winning as well. I think it’s a simple and easy to read statement. There’s a little bit less text. It’s easier to consume. I don’t know for sure that there’s fatigue around COVID yet. And there definitely may not be fatigued when it comes to vulnerable communities. I think there’s fatigue when it comes to everyday life, but I think it’s been increasingly clear that vulnerable communities are suffering even more. So, I thought would be that the variation here might be a little more impactful.
Paul Swinand: I’m going to jump in with a non COVID reason for the variation which is the first one is two messages, help homeless youth and join the community. Usually two message ads, at least in advertising on TV, don’t work.
Grant Tilus: So, thumbs down in if you think it’s control, thumbs up if you think it’s variant. Alright, hit us with it, Katie.
Katie Green: Okay. Well, that was our thinking too, Emily and Carla, right? Is, this is an incredibly vulnerable community. This is this nonprofit’s entire focus is helping youth experiencing homelessness. And what we saw was that it did not increase conversion. So, many people who are right, we actually saw a decrease in total conversions, but especially that one time conversion thought a -12% decrease. But our next step here is to test a little bit further into if actually hand drawn arrows are the best visual to represent. There are many different ways to call out this language with this ask but TLDR is, users have COVID messaging exhaustion.