The only way you can truly know what is going to work best with your audience when it comes marketing strategies is through A/B testing. If implemented well, A/B testing can make a big difference in the efficacy of your marketing efforts. When you discover the most effective elements of a website or marketing campaign, you can use the information to your advantage and gain more profit.
A/B testing
A/B testing, also referred to as split testing, is the process of running an experiment between two different versions of a web page, email, ad or app with a single varying element. Once you have run the experiment, you can analyze which version is more successful. For example, if you were testing an email subject line, you would create two versions of the same email with just the subject line changed. Once you have your variations, you send each version to half of your subscribers.
By emailing one version of your subject line to half of your subscribers and another version to the other half of your subscribers, you can gather evidence before you commit to changing the style of your subject lines. Statistical analysis is used to figure out which variation works better for your specific conversion goal.
A/B testing process
When you decide that you want to do A/B testing, the first thing you should do is collect data. You can work start working with pages you find have high bounce rates or low conversion rates. Then, you must figure out your goals. Your goals can be anything from having users subscribe to your email list to having users purchase a product.
Once you have set your goals, you can come up with hypotheses – guesses as to why your testing idea would be better than the current version. Afterwards, you can create the variations, run the A/B experiment and examine the results. If your variation works better, see if you can apply what you learned from the experiment to other pages, emails or ads.
Common mistakes with A/B testing
Some common mistakes when it comes to A/B testing: testing for a duration that is too short or too long before making changes, examining too many metrics, testing unbalanced traffic, testing too many elements at the same time, not doing enough retesting, not considering external factors like holidays, using faulty measuring tools and ignoring statistically significant data.
Why A/B testing is important
A/B testing lets individuals, teams and businesses make prudent changes while gathering data on the results. The results can help them form hypotheses and better understand why certain elements impact user behaviour. On the other hand, their assumptions could be proven wrong by an A/B test. A/B testing can be used frequently to better a given experience, which would improve the conversion rate over time.
A/B testing can help you solve the pain points (specific problems) of website visitors, reduce your bounce rate, make small and low-risk changes, favourably redesign your website and get a higher return on investment (ROI). With A/B testing, you can also achieve notable improvements on your click-through rate (CTR) and on the time visitors spend on your website.
