Remember back in school when you were given a chance to choose your selective subject and were given a demo class, so you could understand what you would be getting yourself into and if the subject was the right fit? A/B testing is the real-world equivalent of your demo class, where you test out slight variations in your campaigns and determine which performs better.
A/B testing helps compare two versions of a web page, email newsletter, subject lines, ads, content piece, and more to see which is more successful among your audience. A/B testing takes the guesswork out of how your digital marketing should look, operate, and be distributed.
As much as one would like to depend on their intuition, the marketers who have been in the field long enough know to expect the unexpected. So, instead of relying on your intuition, you are better off running an A/B test and making decisions supported by data, so you are not shooting arrows in the dark.
Why is A/B testing important?
A/B testing has many benefits to a marketing team, for example, you can test a limitless list of items to determine the overall effectiveness and impact on your bottom line.
How does A/B testing work?
To run an A/B test you need to create two different versions of the same content piece with changes to a single variable. The next step is to show these two versions of content to audiences of similar size and analyze which one performed better. Keep in mind that the testing period should be long enough to make accurate conclusions.
How do you plan an A/B Test?
First things first decide which element of your campaign you want to test. Are you running an onsite test or an off-site test?
You might test
Headlines
Calls to action
Placement of CTA buttons
Pop-ups
Copy
The No. of fields in a form
With off-site tests, you are probably testing an ad or a sales page and figuring out which version converts the most. Testing ad copy to see which ad drives more conversions helps with focused advertising efforts. The same goes for emails, send two versions of emails with a slightly different call to action, or a subject line, or play with placements for CTA buttons, whatever you are looking for in the A/B test.
Knowing what your audience best reacts to helps create more effective content in the long run, thus, ensuring you stay relevant within your audience.
A/B testing checklist to get you started
Before you start split testing, it is important to know what results you are already getting. You want to test options A and B against each other, and with the results you are already getting. This test should also tell you if the results are better than the results you are already getting.
Alternatively, you can keep one of your options say ‘A’ unchanged meaning what you are currently doing or using, and experiment with ‘B’.
Here’s what you need before you start A/B testing
Decide what feature you want to test
Create two versions of the same content piece
Decide how long the test will run
Launch
After a couple of weeks, look at the results. Which version works better?
Keep testing, to see more effective results.
Take a look at some examples to inspire your next A/b testing
Personalized Emails with names vs generalized ones
An e-commerce company selling gaming equipment tested its cart abandonment email sequence by addressing the shoppers by their name vs a generalized one. The test results showed that the emails that addressed shoppers resulted in more conversions and open rates as compared to those that didn’t.
Emoji 😀vs no ❌ emojis in the subject line
Some people are super into emojis vs some avoid them like a plague. So to take the matters into their own hands a digital marketing agency ran a test. The results weren’t super impressive, but the ones with the emojis had a bit more open rate than the latter (can you blame them🤪)
Longer vs shorter subject lines
Is brevity the soul of the wit or do people prefer longer subject lines? To test this a life coach played with the length of the subject lines and as it turns out, people like short, sweet, concise, and to-the-point subject lines better than long ones(unlike this one😉).
So to conclude, A/B testing allows you to tailor your content according to your target audience. You no longer have to depend on the whims and fancies of your mind or market trends and do as the customer data tells you for a more customer-centric approach.