In today’s world, marketing and advertising have taken a paradigm shift. Traditional medium is still working, but now, the prospects and buyers usually spend their time on different channels.
Today, many prospects might be surfing social media feed while stuck in traffic instead of seeing hoardings and pamphlets. They might be searching in Google whenever they need help instead of going to the phone directory.
This use behaviour of digital age indicates that marketers also need to leverage the opportunity and scale the sales for their business using different marketing platforms.
A/B testing is also one of the options that marketers can try to bring more online conversions for their business.
Whether it is your social media ads, email copy, or webpage designs, A/B testing can go everywhere.
That’s why we are going to discuss everything you need to know — what is A/B testing, benefits of A/B testing, how to use it to grow your business.
What is A/B Testing?
A/B testing is the process of testing two versions of the same entity and determining which outperforms the other. These versions are known as A and B.
Through the process, and you can know which version A or version B of the A/B testing brings more results to the users.
Here, two versions of the email copy, webpage or social media ad or social media creative would be shown at the same time to the users to know which works the best.
User behaviour and statistical analysis would also be done to assess the best version of both. Through the A/B testing, you can get real-time results and numbers to make confirmed decisions.
Moreover, you can compare another version of your product or advertisement with the existing one without interfering the latter at any cost.
Why You Should Run A/B Testing
After knowing what A/B testing is, comes another important question of “why.”
Here are the answers to why do you need to run the A/B test for your business?
1. Ensure Better User Experience
User experience is the ultimate objective of any business to thrive online. The success and failure of your product come down to a simple conclusion of how your customers felt after using your product.
Based on the buyer’s journey, the user must be randomly browsing your website, checking out your products and services to know more about the same, or deciding to purchase the products for personal use.
Whatever it might be, your website, social media ad, or mobile app design has to be apt in to serve the user appropriately.
So, if you try two versions of your product, you would know how users respond, which copy got the most reactions. And what they want to know based on the metrics and user behaviour you would get after deploying both the options.
Hence, you can ensure the desirable user experience for your prospects and know that you are using the right kind of business for the same.
2. Clear Confusions Through Results
As a website owner, you would have second thoughts and want to execute the things differently than the current scenario.
A/B testing allows you to do the same. You can execute different variations of your product and determine which works best for you.
A/B testing gives you the independence of experiment thoughts that evolve your product into the best version of itself.
Now you no longer have to keep your thoughts in a bubble. You no longer have to doubt your decisions like you should have written the copy differently or must have tried something else in your design, or anything else.
Now, you can deploy different versions and learn what works for your business based on your niche and targeted audience.
3. Get More Results from Existing Users
Through A/B testing, you can get more ROI from your existing consumers. You can try different versions of your product and test the same against the existing one and on the same audience.
If that works, you will start getting results, and you don’t have to find new users and prospects to target for the results.
This way, you would get instant ROI for your experiments and create the highest performing option through A/B testing.
4. Reduce Bounce Rate of Your Website
Through A/B testing, you can decide which design people like the most by verifying the website’s bounce rate.
For example, if you are testing a new design where the bounce rate of your pages is lower, that means users are engaging with the layout, and they have found the design more appealing than the existing one.
So, this way, you can make the new design your primary layout and ensure that the overall bounce rate of your website become lower in the long run.
Furthermore, you can also improve the overall time spent by the users on your webpages and increase the number of total sessions created by the users.
5. Make Changes that Work
Through A/B testing, you would realise what part of your ad or layout works and brings more results. However, redesigning your whole product would jeopardise your entire system.
Instead, you can determine which segments and parts of your current system works. If you have positive results, you can incorporate the portions into an existing system; otherwise, you can discard and move on.
This way, you get the best of both worlds and making low-risk adjustments in your primary design.
Moreover, editing smaller parts instead of revamping the whole product will also save you time and cost. So, you would be ensuring maximum success with minimum adjustments through A/B testing.
6. Get Clarity
A/B testing gives you clarity and provides a reality check of the current design, copy, or creative.
Without A/B testing, you would have a layout that would be giving you consistent results, so your perspective about your business and customers is limited thanks to the current results of the existing system.
However, through the A/B test, you would get to know what works and what does not thanks to a different set of experiments with various parameters and versions.
A/B testing destroys the hypothesis and forecast of the “best practice” arguments and provides completely transparent and clear results backed by metrics and outcomes.
You would not get the idea of how bad or good your existing design unless you start A/B testing.
How to Use A/B Testing to Grow Your Business?
After understanding what A/B testing and its benefits are, there comes a next part of how to use it to elevate your business.
Set Clear Goals
Before beginning A/B testing for your product, determine the precise set of goals for your campaigns so that you can develop proper versions of the test.
It would be best if you had a clear understanding of what do you want to achieve at the end of the test.
- Do you want to determine how many new subscribers you got?
- Do you want to check how many times people clicked on your CTA button?
- Do you want to know how many people visited your website?
- Do you want to know which layout brought more phone calls to your store?
- Do you want to know how many purchases are made through design?
Your goals and objectives will make everything falls in place.
You can decide where you can place some aspects of your page to ensure maximum conversions from your design.
Focus on One Aspect at a Time
When you are thinking of running a test for your designs, there are many areas that you want to know more about. It could be traffic, button clicks, video views, sign-ups, purchases, session time, and so on.
You can, and you should run an A/B test for each of them.
In fact, you must run A/B test as much as possible to get a more refined and clear idea about what works for your product.
However, focus on only one aspect at a time while running an A/B test. For example, if your focus is to improve session time on your website, focus on integrating only those elements which make people stay and engage with your content.
In this example, you could embed a video in one version, write a case study for another, and compare the results of both.
If you find some insights, then shift to a new objective and test accordingly. However, try to focus on one thing at a time.
If you don’t concentrate on a single goal at a time, you would try to create a perfect design at a time to fulfil all the goals and cannot determine what version was actually the most successful.
Let the Test Run for Sometime
As soon as you make your layouts live, keep them as it is for long enough to get the data to determine which is the winner.
Now you may have a legitimate question is how much “long enough” is enough.
Well, it depends on your company size and the campaign. In some cases, enough data can be gathered in a few hours, weeks, or months. However, everything depends on what you are testing for what purpose.
For example, you are testing which description brings more sales on the Black Friday Sale, which lasts for a day; you cannot run that test for a few weeks. You can let it run for a few days and get the idea.
Based on your goals, time, and products; observe the traffic and people’s reaction for some time to conclude which works the best.
Use Heatmaps
Heatmaps are colourful representation to determine where do the users spend most of their time, how many times they scrolled a screen or page or which areas they focus the most.
Although you can integrate Google Analytics or other website tracking tools to know which web pages users visit, which links they click, how much time they spend, and so on.
However, such tools lack to showcase how users are actually behaving while they are on the web page.
Heatmaps give you comprehensive and practical insights about user behaviour, and you can understand visitors mindset and expectations through the same. Through heatmaps’ results, you can redesign and develop a more profound design.
Leverage the Power Surveys
Accept that fact that you are building your website to satisfy the visitors and make them leads and happy customers. So, what could be the best resource for your business to learn about what they like?
Surveys are a great way to connect with your audience and listen to what they want to say about their experience with your product.
Involve surveys in your website where visitors can share the feedback that would help you serve them better.
Now, you might need to work on making your visitors stick to your website and take out some time from their busy routine to participate in the survey and give their valuable inputs.
You can offer giveaways or freebies in return for the survey. Trust me, and if you get the real inputs from the genuine visitors, you will have invaluable insights that can dramatically improve the overall user experience of your design.
Integrate Trackers to Record Everything
Whenever you are A/B testing layouts for your website, texts of social media captions, or copies of social media creatives, ensure that you are recording every interaction from the users from each option.
You can use advanced Google Analytics techniques to have profound A/B testing experience.
You can create UTM codes for your A/B tests and track how people are behaving and reacting to your A/B tests.
Conclusion
A/B testing requires time and experience from your end to get the maximum benefit after the experiments.
You will observe a paradigm shift to your sales and online conversions if you sincerely do A/B test and give your best efforts every time.
Do let us know what do you think about the A/B testing and if you have already tried, share your experience in the comments.
