How can A/B testing help you listen to your donors?
A/B testing is a tool to listen to your donors. When you split test to optimize your emails, landing pages, and other supporter communication, you learn more about what resonates with them, helping you to be even more responsive.
This week on The Responsive Weekly, Nathan Hill of NextAfter joined us to show us how this kind of testing works and how we can use it to get better results and communicate more effectively with our supporters.
The Quick Summary
Top Takeaways
- A/B testing is a tool for determining which version of a communication to share with your supporters. By sending two versions to a randomized subset of your list, and seeing which version draws more engagement, you can send the “best” one to the broader audience.
- Start with a hypothesis based on research. Your research might include data from surveys you’ve conducted, conversations you’ve had with donors, or best practices and ideas from other nonprofit resources.
- A/B testing isn’t just for email, you can use it with landing pages on your website, donation forms, and more.
- In order to A/B test in a meaningful way, you need a large enough sample size to achieve statistical significance.
- Sharing what you’ve learned within your organization is an important stage of testing, too!
- Even if you cannot conduct a perfect A/B test right away, it’s worth trying little experiments to start.
