Post Incorporation Email Experiment
What’s the context?
Around sixty thousand Canadian business owners file for incorporation each year. This enables them to receive many potential benefits, such as expanding their business, lowering their tax rates, and borrowing money at lower rates. Following incorporation, new business owners receive an email from Corporations Canada, which contains their business number from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), as well as important links directing them towards “Next Steps” to support their entrepreneurial journey. This includes information on how to access GoC funding, apply for permits and licenses, and keep their corporation in good standing.
What’s the problem?
A significant portion of the target audience (i.e., new business owners) do not click on the links provided in the email. Without attending to the enclosed information, clients risk missing many important funding and programing opportunities. There may also be an increased risk of involuntary dissolution (if annual returns are not filed, or public records are not updated).
What’s the experiment?
To prompt new business owners to click on the links provided, we conducted a literature review on relevant email nudges (i.e., language derived from research in behavioral economics that can gently influence someone’s behavior without forbidding any options), and designed an experiment to test which nudge was associated with the highest click-through rates. As part of the email redesign, we also decided to update the visual look and feel of the email to cohere with current design trends. Given the many new design elements, we ran a pretest with GC employees and an expert panel consisting of Registered Intermediaries, and representatives from the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, to test which is the most effective combination.
We conducted the experiment in two phases:
1. Pretest
Given the parameters set by Corporations Canada, we could not change the number of hyperlinks within the post-incorporation email (i.e., approximately eight). Traditional nudge trials tend to have a few links, which appear near the nudge sentence (i.e., the one line of text that is meant to influence the reader’s behavior). This is usually the case as the effectiveness of the nudge tends to decrease as the number of links increases. Several reasons can explain this. First, the nudge sentence may be lost in excessive text. In those cases, information overload could prevent email recipients from attending to the nudge. Second, if email recipients do see the nudge, then it is likely that the nudge will only increase the click-through of the first few links. For this reason, we organized all the links in a checklist format. This not only reduced the amount of text, but equally tied all the links together as a group, and connected it to the nudge.
Overall, we found two main problems with the look and feel of the original email. It was (1) visually unappealing, and (2) it suffered from disorganized content. To address the first problem, we consulted a visual designer to develop four email designs. These mock-ups featured improved graphics, such as a checkmark beside the ‘Congratulations, you’re incorporated!’ message within the top banner. The aim of this checkmark was to prompt recipients into thinking that the momentum in completing the post-incorporation steps had already begun. We expected this checkmark to encourage recipients to continue crossing off the remaining items on the checklist. To address the suboptimal content architecture (2), we replaced the unnecessary language with more direct instructions, and arranged the content in a checklist format as mentioned above.
In the pretest, we measured the impact of the visual and content changes using an online survey platform. This survey was sent to the expert panel (as described above) and participants from the EW experiment cohort. Respondents evaluated the four different email designs on persuasiveness, trustworthiness, clarity, and visual appeal. After scoring each email on these attributes, we used the highest-scoring design for the nudge experiment.
2. Nudge experiment
As of this date, we will be using the highest rated email from the pretest, and we will use three different nudges from the behavioral insights literature for the experiment. We will also compare their performance to the original email, as well as a control email. The five different email versions will be:
A five week schedule will be used to administer each of the emails to newly incorporated business owners, so that each version would have a chance to be sent on each work day. We will repeat this for another five weeks, and measure the click-through rates of all the links in the email.
What do we expect to find?
We expect that emails presented in our checklist format will elicit higher click-through rates than the original email. We also expect that the emails containing a nudge will outperform the control and original email. Given various contextual factors, it is difficult to predict which nudge or visual design will perform the best.
What could the takeaway be?
This trial might help businesses gain access to funding opportunities, as well as licensing and permits that they may not know of. Furthermore, they may be more inclined to sign up for a My Business account with CRA via the portal provided in the post-incorporation email. The target audience (i.e., new business owners) may also become aware of the requirements for keeping their corporation in good standing earlier (and avoid potential involuntary dissolution).
What’s next?
Stay tuned for our second blog post depicting the results!
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Post by: Centre of Expertise on Experimentation (DTSS, ISED). To contact us, click here. This is a part of an ongoing project between the Centre of Expertise on Experimentation (DTSS, ISED), Corporation Canada (SBMS, ISED), and Experiment Works (TBS).
Article également disponible en français ici: Expérience de courriel après la constitution en société
