The larger the percentage discount, the more interest and action? Yes and no.

We’ve shared stats about whether a percentage discount gets more engagement than a dollar amount or whether a dollar discount is more interesting than a dollar price, but what about the size of a discount? Do more people act at the prospect of saving 50% compared to 25%? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 500 campaigns sent by 50 brands to over 6,000,000 recipients. These emails included some variation of “save __% on” but did not include a dollar amount or other reference to the price. We grouped them by the size of their discount and found the average open rate of each.

As you’d expect, the open rate rises as the size of the discount grows. Looking closer at click rate, however revealed an interesting trend.

Clicks on these email rose at first for this sample, but they dropped when discounts were highest.

What This Means
Notice how small the change is in open rate between discount sizes. Doubling or tripling the savings percentage only increased open rates by 1-2 percentage points.

On the clicks side of things, we’re not totally sure what’s causing the drop in performance for larger discounts. Perhaps it’s an “up to __%” claim where most products are actually 20-25% or an extremely limited range of days or times the offer is available. Whatever the reason, it appears that a solid 30-40% discount can be just as effective as a 60% version at this stage of your marketing communications.

Next Week, More
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