Are Your Fundraising Emails Over-Designed?
See How Email Design Affects Donations
Online Fundraising Testing Series Part 2
In support of using data to make better fundraising decisions, ProActive Content will be reporting on some online fundraising experiments from NextAfter for the next four weeks.
See Part 1 – How Much Donation Page Copy Should We Have?
Today’s question:
How Does Email Design Affect Donations and Response Rates?
Humans like pretty things. This leads many to believe that pretty graphic design is better than plain text. You see this belief applied to printed marketing materials, websites, emails, and videos.
But what do donors respond to the most?
Especially in online fundraising and marketing, authenticity seems to matter more than polish. Real trumps beauty.
NextAfter ran an experiment comparing three different versions of an email.
Version 1 was a fairly typical, minimally designed email offering a free book in exchange for a donation of any amount.
Version 2 used the same design, but added in deadline-driven copywriting to increase urgency.
Version 3 altered the copy to sound more like a letter, and presented it as a text-only email with no design.
The results?
Version 2 – the deadline-driven one – outperformed version 1 by 36%. Deadlines and urgency are time-tested tools of direct marketing. Deadlines work, and you should be using them.
But version 3 beat version 1 by 116%. And that was 116% more real donations, not opens and clicks. They made more money.
View the actual emails on NextAfter’s page here in experiment #2
I would have liked to have seen a fourth version, one that used the urgency combined with the text-only email. But the results nevertheless speak clearly – the design-free email performed far better than even a minimally designed one.
So many organizations keep doing the same thing over and over, never questioning if there might be a different and possibly more effective way of communicating with donors and potential supporters.
And while this one experiment isn’t definitive for reasons you’ll see in a bit, it nevertheless makes clear that beautiful design isn’t always preferable, even though visually, it’s much prettier. This is the principle you must let through to your mind:
It doesn’t matter how it looks. It matters if it works.
Why the Design-Free Email Outperformed the Designed One
People have been marketed to their whole lives. This means we’re pretty good at spotting it. And that’s okay – a good offer is a good offer, and if we need what they’re selling, we might buy it.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
But how a person interacts with an email, in particular, has a lot to do with how they perceive it. Authenticity is powerful.
If they perceive it as marketing, they’ll interact with it as such. If they perceive it as personal communication, they’ll consider what it’s saying with a different mindset. Less about pressure and convincing them to take action. More about relating to them and telling them about something they might like.
That’s why they changed the copy in the third version. The relaxed copy style fits the text-only email. It feels like a personal email from a friend. It’s more authentic.
Another Explanation
Now, all that said, one other explanation for these results must be proposed. It’s called ‘pattern interrupt.’
Whatever you’re doing regularly, once you break from that pattern, it gets people’s attention. So, if you were sending text-only emails month after month, and then one day sent an email with more graphic design, that designed email would probably get a higher response because it caught their attention.
So while the text-only approach in this experiment garnered far better results, that’s not to say you should never send emails with more design elements.
The greater lesson is to use a variety of approaches and don’t let your fundraising communications, especially email, get stuck in a rut. This is why, for example, it’s a good idea to change your sender’s name now and then, as the data in this article reveals.
Want More Online Fundraising Experimental Data?
See more discussion of NextAfter experiments:
Part 1 – How Much Donation Page Copy Should We Have?
Part 3 – Where Should Your Email Signup Form Be Located?
Part 4 – How Much Copy Should Your Facebook Ads Use?
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