Combining FB + email to reactivate members

Below is an experiment run by GetUp that shows some evidence that a combination of Facebook ads and emails is the most effective way to re-engage inactive members. Test run by Ben Raue, contact ben@getup.org.au for more info. 

Emails vs Facebook ads for reactivating members

Background

There are a large number of users on the GetUp list who have not taken action recently, and we are looking to find ways to reactivate these members.

Recently there was a large petition on our decentralised petition platform CommunityRun to remove Australia’s Goods and Services Tax from tampons and pads (nicknamed the ‘tampon tax’).

The campaign started on 5 May 2015, and had attracted about 72,000 signatures by 13 May 2015.

We decided that we would like to use this campaign as an opportunity to target non-active GetUp members to be reactivated.

Target audience

In examining the demographics of those who had signed the petition, we saw a strong trend amongst signers’ first names – not only were most popular names those of women (unsurprising), but they tended to be names of young women. These trends were later confirmed using Facebook’s audience metrics.

We decided to use this finding to identify an audience of additional GetUp users who could be targeted for the campaign. We identified all members with a first name that was in the top 100 names amongst petition-signers (excluding some gender-neutral names).

We then separated members who fit these criteria between those who had taken any action on the GetUp system in the last year, and those who hadn’t. Those who had taken action were contacted for the campaign, but were not part of our experiment.

This left us with a list of about 110,000 users who were part of this experiment.

Experiment design

This list of 113,636 was split into three parts. The first two groups were sent an email about the campaign. The second group (which had received the email) and the third group (which had not received the email) both received Facebook advertising over the course of a week, following the sending of the email.

Experiment results

These results were as of Monday 25 May 2015, ten days after the start of the experiment.

Since this time, more members of these groups have signed the petition, but these results are not included in this experiment since there has been other campaigning from GetUp on this issue that would have affected this audience.

The cost-per-conversion on Facebook was substantially lower for the email and Facebook group.

Analysis

Sending Facebook advertisements and emails to a single group clearly results in substantially more actions than either emails or Facebook advertisements on their own.

More than this, it appears that the combined effects of these two treatments are stronger together than either of them on their own – the impact of Facebook on its own was 73 signatures, but the impact of Facebook on people who have already received an email was worth 158 more signatures than email alone.

It should be noted that we have not seen any long-term impact on these groups – the number of people in each group who have taken an action since the experiment is almost exactly the same, and there is no meaningful variation in subsequent donation rates.

Conclusion

This experiment attempted to do two different things:

• Experiment on effectiveness of methods to reactivate inactive members
• Experiment on value of combining Facebook advertisements and emails.

Following this experiment, we have come to realise that these are two different goals, which may overlap.

There is evidence that the combination of Facebook ads and emails produces better results than either activity on its own.

Having said that, the number of responses was quite low, because the campaign was sent to members who have not been active recently. The relative value of Facebook ads and email could be tested better with a more active campaign list.

We also don’t know what the is the ‘baseline’ level of reactivation that takes place every time we send a campaign – it’s easy to imagine that a certain number of inactive members become reactivated without any special activity, so any attempts to improve reactivation should be judged against such a baseline.

This could have been attempted in part by including a group who received no active promotion of the campaign.

Next steps

There are a number of next steps.

We are planning to run more tests on more active campaign lists to test the relative value of Facebook advertisements against emails for the same group, but with groups likelier to produce larger volumes of activity. This is likely to include fundraisers, which will allow us to put a dollar value of sending Facebook advertisements in addition to emails.

There will be opportunities for us to also experiment with shuffling the order, possibly sending Facebook ads before emails are sent.

In terms of reactivation, there are many other potential experiments to try. These should include an option for a ‘status quo’ activity to know how many inactive members would return to activity without any targeted push.

We would also like to know more about long-term impacts of reactivation – do these activities only reactivate people for a single action, or can they change their long-term trajectory of activism?