When you invest in a stock with the intention of extracting the maximum profit with the lowest possible expense, you need concrete data that indicates which problem to solve — or which optimization to apply — to achieve your desired goal!
Digital Marketing is seen as the Holy Grail of strategies aimed at increasing sales on the Internet because, while it places your company in the top positions of Google, for example, it also collects invaluable data on how your customers interact with your brand.
This information feeds the next Marketing actions with a snowball effect in which, the more you understand your audience and the role of your business in their lives, the more tools you have to sell your offers to them!
All this with less waste, fewer errors, and with potential for exponential growth!
And A/B tests are one of the best ways to understand your audience ‘s preferences to extract from them exactly what you need to make much more profit on the Internet — and it’s simple to do!
My name is Gaurav Rajput, I’m the CEO here at Enjoy Minder, and I’ll teach you how to implement A/B tests to test the performance (and profitability) of your online sales strategies!
What are A/B tests?
A/B testing is a tool capable of helping your company obtain factual data about what it needs to do in order to improve the results of actions targeted at its audience!
Unlike less scientific testing modalities, A/B testing accurately evaluates the actions you are taking now to guide whether the way you are trying to do things at the moment is really better than the previous version.
Through this technology, you can clearly see what the preferences of the statistical population of your ideal customers are — who are the customers most willing to pay for what you offer!
One of the most obvious examples is using A/B testing to decide which image, video, or text to display on a page or in an ad.
Speaking of ads, A/B tests are essential for comparing changes between two similar ads (but with only one element changed at a time, such as the CTA or the title used) with the aim of choosing the best one.
And by “best”, I mean the one that gets the most clicks and converts the most people!
Benefits of implementing A/B testing
By deciphering which element is capable of arousing a stronger emotion in the audience, the chances of these people clicking on the message increase considerably!
If you also A/B test the sales page you use as the destination for the link clicked in your ad, your chances of converting curious people (and closing more deals) will increase proportionally, leading to an increasingly refined sales funnel and a highly predictable buying journey.
The sales funnel is the route you create through Digital Marketing to guide your potential customers on their purchasing journey: from the moment they come across your brand in search engine results, for example, until the moment they they decide to buy from you!
In other words, the sales funnel:
- Increases the capture rate of curious people;
- And it increases the number of conversions from those curious to buyers!
These are the most obvious benefits of implementing A/B testing — more qualified clicks (more likely to accept your offer) and more conversions.
By presenting two similar versions of the same content, but with just one different element between them (and repeating this A/B testing pattern for each version of the content with the most “votes”, which is how the clicks and conversions for that version will be interpreted), you will gain a clearer perspective on:
- What makes your audience react towards your company’s goals;
- How to predict people’s behavior based on their preferences and the presentation of their content;
- And the types of products or services on which your team should work most diligently to extract the maximum positive results in the shortest possible time — and with the least expenditure of resources!
In addition to the obvious, the ease of putting this constant optimization of A/B testing into practice eliminates:
- Doubts about what works and what doesn’t work in all of your company’s processes that create dilemmas;
- Waste of time, money and productivity with ideas, campaigns, media and actions that do not generate the necessary results;
- And the distractions that prevent you from injecting resources into strategies that are truly capable of taking your business to the next level!
So many benefits can be enjoyed by making a simple comparison between element A and element B — to the point where it surprises me to see how so many companies ignore this tool and resort to guesswork, instead of trusting the concrete data that comes directly from the public!
To help you avoid making this mistake, I will explain below step by step how to do A/B testing without any major complications. It’s as easy as it sounds!
How to do A/B testing: a quick guide
Let’s say you want to solve a problem — but what problem is that? What specifically bothers you or prevents your business from growing?
- Is it your conversion rate?
- Is it a question of whether to use a more incisive text or a softer text?
- Or maybe this text will be accompanied by a video or image?
To get accurate results from A/B testing, you need to test two versions of a problem or idea at a time — but you need to know exactly what that problem or idea is!
That’s why the first step in testing the elements of your campaign, your website, or the implementation of a new product or service, is to define:
- Clear objectives;
- And measurable metrics.
The clearer the objective, the closer you will be to asking the right question, which, in practice, will be represented by A/B testing. By asking the right question, you will find the ideal answer.
Measurable metrics take this ideal response and contrast it with reality: based on the current state of affairs (and possibly past versions), does this response help me get closer to my goal?
An example would be finding out the right position to insert a CTA: before or after the form on your website page through which a visitor has the opportunity to download rich material and become a lead!
With this question in mind, the objective becomes clear: to know the position of the CTA that generates the highest number of conversions on that specific page!
But how will you know if the CTA above or below the form is bringing in more or fewer leads?
This is where a measurable metric — like your visitor-to-lead conversion rate, in this case — can help you understand whether version A of your page (with the CTA above the form) performs better than version B (with the CTA below).
If the conversion rate of version A is higher than that of version B, it means that version A has a greater chance of bringing your business closer to the clear objective you defined for the test: finding out the best position to convert more people into potential customers!
In practice, A/B testing of a website is done using a Digital Marketing automation tool like RD Station, but you can also create two different versions of your website pages and track them using a tracking tool like Google Analytics.
In the Digital Marketing tool, you can create an alternative version of a current page (or new versions of a page, but with a single element that differentiates them for the test to be run) and release access to this content to a reasonable portion of your visitors as a sample.
The user will not know that the test is being done and will only see one of the versions being served as if it were the official version — actually belonging to your site!
This detail is important because the A/B test’s mission is to extract scientific data (without pre-established concepts or guidelines) to validate the most impartial answer to an important question!
In the case of advertisements, paid media platforms such as Google Adwords and Meta Ads (formerly Facebook Ads) allow the implementation of A/B testing in a modality similar to the one I described above: serving versions A and B to a part of your audience, who will only see one of the versions without knowing that a test is being carried out!
It is important to keep the test running for a generous period of time, precisely to get as many people right as possible and extract the most correct answer from them among the possibilities.
At the same time, collecting user data to feed metrics (an automated process, but one that needs to be continuously monitored) is the key component to optimizing your next tests and, as a result, your future Digital Marketing campaigns !
You can repeat this type of sampling with:
- The tone of your communications and messages;
- The entire page architecture of a website;
- The position of elements and content on the pages;
- The value promises of your products or services;
- Two different publications for social networks;
- And whatever else is relevant to impact the public!
Below I have listed the most useful tests that, when they eliminate doubts, leave only the most optimized results — which, in turn, can be tested with new alternatives for you to achieve maximum rates of return on your investments!
The limit is your thirst for success!
In titles
Titles are the most important parts of ads, landing pages (the pages where you capture your leads), blog articles, social media posts and email subject lines.
This is because the title is the first thing a person sees and what defines whether or not they will open the rest of the material or offer!
By optimizing this element through A/B testing, you will be able to reap the greatest benefits with the least effort, since titles are mandatory when creating content in any type of media and play such a decisive role in rates such as:
- The email opening rate;
- The click rate on your posts, links and ads;
- In addition to the rate at which visitors stay on your content (since an explicit but charming title makes people open your material and continue reading it until the end because you made a promise that you were able to keep)!
When testing your titles, make sure they:
- Capture attention immediately;
- Arouse an emotion or strong curiosity;
- Be relevant to the visitors’ purchasing journey;
- And that they are clear about the subject they are dealing with, but still maintain an air of mystery to make someone click on them (but without misleading the public)!
In images and videos
A picture really is worth a thousand words.
The million dollar question then is: which image to use? Maybe a video wouldn’t yield better results if used instead of an image?
But an image or video of what?
An infographic or technical data showing in detail the most important information about the subject being discussed in the content or advertisement?
Or perhaps a clip or photograph of a person to awaken the more human side of the audience and hook them through the heart rather than the analytical brain?
Every visual element directly impacts the public’s perception of what is being presented to them, which is why listing a series of possibilities and testing them through A/B versions (remember to only do one test at a time before moving on to other options) can help you identify the best type of media for each of your content categories and communication with the right audience!
In call-to-actions (CTAs)
Also called “call-to-actions” in English, calls to action (or CTA) remind a person who has just consumed your content to act in accordance with your company’s objectives!
A CTA can be as simple as reminding a visitor to follow your brand on social media, or it can be complex and intimate to the point of inviting a lead to complete a purchase in your online store.
The theme will depend on the context in which the CTA is presented and at what point in the purchasing journey your potential customer is.
Use A/B tests to decide on the best positioning of a CTA on the page, the tone of voice used in that sentence, the color or formatting of the text or image in which it appears, the level of assertiveness applied to convince someone, and Even if the CTA is really necessary in some content, it is the most guaranteed way to get the most attention from your followers — and thus sell a lot more!
Let’s test your Digital Marketing performance?
A/B tests are simple tools, but with absurd conversion power!
All you need is to access your Digital Marketing or paid media automation platform and create a version B for your version A.
Then, just show this material to a portion of your visitors for a few weeks or months and monitor the results!
With the data you collect from your audience and the knowledge you gain from their engagement with your A/B test, you can reap benefits that go far beyond optimizing your sales tactics.
Your company also:
- It will attract more leads;
- You will understand how their purchasing journey works;
- It will make your audience feel heard;
- And you can predict your profitability cycles by perfecting your sales funnel to reflect the stage of proximity of your potential customers to your business!
If you don’t have your Digital Marketing automation platform or if you don’t even have a bullet point strategy for running your own A/B tests, talk to our team here at Enjoy Minder so we can set up a time and discuss the best sales tactics to increase the profitability of your business, offering you all our expertise!
With such a sure-fire way to bring more customers (and money) to your company by investing so little resources, there are no excuses for not reaping the rewards of A/B testing today!
We are waiting for you on the other side!
