Optimization is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity that every website owner has to realize in order to create a high-performance business website. You are just leaving money on the table if you are not investing in running A/B tests on different elements of your site.
A/B testing is the best way to evaluate your marketing and Conversion Rate Optimisation campaigns because these are directly related to your target audience. But, to run a successful A/B test, you will have to get into the nitty-gritty of this highly effective online marketing tactic.
If you are looking to run A/B tests for your website, you have landed just in the right place. We are going to dive into the world of A/B testing to understand its basics and how you can implement it in different parts of your marketing campaigns. So, let's cut to the chase and dive right into the content!
What is A/B Testing?
A/B testing or split testing is the process where two or more versions of any element on a webpage, email or content are compared and tested for performance. The results from the variations are stacked together to see which variation performs the best. This helps marketers to keep their online assets in their best shape. A/B testing can also be understood as a competition where two versions of the same element are put to test to see which one comes out on top. This is a marketing tactic that is used often in the development process of any web page, email newsletter or a marketing campaign.
How Does A/B Testing Work?
It is quite easy to understand how this popular marketing tactic works. A/B testing can be understood with a simple example. Let's say we are in the developmental stage of designing a landing page for your website.
In the process, you finally shortlist two different designs for the landing page and now you are confused between the two. You need to know which landing page you should go forward with. This is exactly the situation where an A/B test can help you get your answers.
You create two groups. The first group is where you keep one of the landing page designs and the second group is where you keep the other. Now, you make both the landing pages live to see how each of them performs in metrics such as traffic, clicks, retention, and conversions.
With the help of analytics tools, you will be able to dig into why a certain landing page design isn’t performing the way the other one does. You can implement the actionable insights to get from the analytics tools and improve the performance metrics of your landing page.
Important Elements You Should A/B Test:
Now that we understand what A/B tests are and how you can use them for your online marketing campaigns, let's look at the different A/B testing elements and discuss them in detail.
Headlines
What's the first thing that people see when they arrive on a webpage? The headline! the content that you put on the headline should be able to grab your visitors’ attention. Otherwise, the retention rate on your site will plummet. The headline should have a perfect balance of emotions, influence, and practicality.
Calls-to-Action
When online users land on a website, they are clueless as to what their next step should be on the site. This is where the role of a perfectly designed call-to-action comes into play. When they are done reading the high-quality content on your website, the call to action can help influence them to take a certain desired action. While running the A/B test on your call to action, you will want to test the text, color, shape, and size of the CTA button.
Media
Elements like images, audio, and video are important to boost conversion on your website. It is also important that you know the ‘right’ media content to use and also their placement on a certain web page. You can even A/B test between different types of content like podcasts, videos, infographics, testimonials, stock images, and so on.
Subject Lines
If you are running an email marketing campaign, one of the most important elements that you should definitely A/B test is the email subject line. This is because it directly impacts the open rate of your email marketing campaign. Your subject lines should be tested for power words, questions, statements, and the use of emojis.
Content Length
Content depth is another major element that you must A/B test. This will help you better understand the consumer behaviour of your target audience. It will show you whether they like just a basic overview of a topic or they want to dive deeper. Running A/B tests will help you find the right balance and make your landing pages much more impactful than before.
Product Description
There are so many things that you can test while writing a product description for your line of products. First of all, you will want to test the length of the product description. Secondly, you will want to see what works best - bulleted points or a paragraphed copy.
Wrapping Up
There you have it. We have everything that you need to know to run successful A/B tests for your marketing campaigns. While this piece of content will help you take the initial steps into running effective A/B tests, we highly recommend you take the help of marketing and CRO experts that can set up things perfectly for your online business. Have questions? feel free to put them down in the comments section. We would love to hear from you!