A/B Testing Donor Landing Pages: A Live Example

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A/B Testing Donor Landing Pages: A Live Example

This year, I’m helping a non-profit dip their toe into the waters with online donor development activities and A/B Testing is part of it.  One of the first things we are doing is to build out a tripwire test campaign.  Basically it is an easy initial ask that precedes the main campaign by asking for a low-dollar, relatively easy, painless ask.

There’s two objectives here:

  • Attract early donors to help build our list while we prepare for the main end of year holiday fundraising campaign.  This allows us to build a relationship and cultivate an affinity for the organization and cause.  We will also able to give them the opportunity to have a greater impact later by participating in our main #GivingTuesday and End of Year Holiday Campaigns.
  • Test our traffic acquisition targeting (both earned media and paid traffic) as well as messaging.

TESTING TO OPTIMIZE CONVERSIONS

I’m a firm believer that if you have the time and capacity to test, you need to test, test, test.   The #1 objective from a donor communications standpoint is to define a conversion point and optimize it so that you can consistently convert leads and prospects into donors.

WHY A/B TESTING MATTERS

A lot of people shrug off A/B testing because to be frank, it is a huge hassle.  It takes patience, diligence, and you need to be detail-oriented, organized and analytical.

BUT, the upside is when you make some small tweaks to a page and run it through A/B testing, you can get results like this below.  Take a look and tell me that there isn’t anything actionable from these results?

Results of AB Testing

A difference between a 2.1% conversion rate and a 6.4% conversion rate means that you’re almost tripling your success rate.  That means while Variation B might pull in $100, Variation A would be pulling in $300.  Think about the difference in donations received as you scale traffic to those basically similar pages except some small differences in messaging, headline or button copy?

Are you a fan of A/B testing yet?

CHANGE SPECIFIC ELEMENTS FOR A/B TEST

So let me share a live example with one of our landing pages.  For this page, we’re A/B testing the copy above the fold – the Headline and Sub-head.

Our baseline offer page for one of our tripwire campaigns features a call to action to donate just $4 to help supply socks to the homeless in NJ.  We want to raise enough funds to buy and supply 2,016 new warm socks this winter.

BASELINE DONATION LANDING PAGE

AB Testing Landing Page baseline

 

A/B TESTING CHALLENGER LANDING PAGE

In the “challenger” landing page version, we changed the focus of the headline from an educational one to a more campaign/ goal-oriented message. We moved the educational factoid to the sub-head.

example challenger A/B testing landing page

 

Now, we sit back and wait.  We’ll throw traffic at both pages on a 50%-50% split basis until we have enough traffic and conversions to make some decisions.

In a couple of days, I’ll circle back and share the results.

WHICH LANDING PAGE VERSION DO YOU THINK WILL “WIN”? AND WHY?  Leave a comment below and let’s see how it goes!

Kenny Jahng is a content marketing advisor and communications strategist who helps nonprofit, cause-driven and faith-based organizations / churches. You can connect with Kenny on Twitter @kennyjahng

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