You can determine the effectiveness of your marketing strategies with A/B Testing. This is a split testing method that allows you to create two versions of a page in order to understand which version is better or more effective. E-commerce websites can also maximize sales by determining the effectiveness of their marketing and promotional strategies with this method. A/B Testing can help e-commerce businesses in a myriad of ways, such as:
- Promoting content for increasing the number of subscribers
- Promoting sales by determining the behavior of visitors
- Increasing the number of leads by improving web design based on effective marketing strategies
- Decreasing bounce rates by improving the quality of landing pages
Understanding A/B testing
A/B Testing method can be used to evaluate the best promotional and marketing strategies. This testing method can be effectively used to test each section of your website, including text copies, search ads, promotional emails, subscription calls, etc.
Understanding the basics of A/B testing is important to maximize its usefulness for improving e-commerce gains. A/B Testing is a way of comparing two versions of the same webpage. For example, there are two routes to reach your home. To evaluate the fastest route, you will conduct a test to measure the time it takes for you to reach home via both the routes. Similarly, A/B Testing allows you to assess two versions of a webpage to identify which version is preferred by visitors.
A/B Testing is often compared with multivariate testing, which is an extension or advanced form of A/B Testing. Multivariate testing provides more detailed results compared to A/B Testing.
The right way to use A/B Testing for measuring visitor flow is to start by considering the web pages that you want to test. Most often, marketers start by testing their landing pages. Create an alternative for your control pages and run an A/B Test. Then, consider the data report and mark the high performer as the new controller webpage. Repeat the same process with other pages on your e-commerce site.
How to use A/B testing for boosted e-commerce growth
A/B Testing is not as simple as it sounds. You need to dig deeper into its details and understand how you can use its results to improve your overall marketing strategy.
Things to test
As mentioned above, you can test anything using the A/B Testing technique, including your calls-to-action, images, headlines, sales copies, etc. However, testing everything on your website may require you to hire additional resource or outsource the entire testing process. You can simplify the process by testing only high-impacting elements on your website. These include the headlines, sales copies, calls to action and graphics used for product descriptions.
You can also test your offers and products using the A/B Testing method. For example, if you offer twenty percent discounts to group A and buy-one-get-one free offers to group B, then you may want to estimate the impact of your offers on both the groups. Similarly, if you have integrated a subscription offer on the landing page and a newsletter on the inner page, you can assess which offer has a better impact on visitors.
Time to test
The number of visitors on your website keeps changing, which is why you should run regular A/B Tests. It may take a few days to properly test your website with this technique, as shorter tests do not provide reliable results. In contrast, if you test the website for too long, variables affecting the website’s conversion rate may interfere with the test results, leading to inaccurate results. Run the test for a sufficient amount of time and review the results carefully. If you doubt the accuracy of results, then you can always run a second A/B Test.
Testing components
A/B Testing uses the split-and-compare testing technique, making it ideal for testing only one component with two variables at a time. If you want to test a graphic section of the website that receives traffic from multiple sources/variables, then it is advised to split visitor sources and run separate tests for different variants. If you want to test more than one variable at a time, then the multivariate testing method might be more suitable. However, if you are a beginner, then you should always start from basic A/B testing.
To properly utilize results from A/B Tests, you need to:
- Carefully study the data generated in A/B test reports
- Observe the behavioral patterns of visitors from the data
- Construct an insightful hypothesis based on the comparison of variables
- Analyze the results of your comparison and draw conclusions
- Make changes in your e-commerce marketing strategy based on the conclusion
A/B Testing is an effective method for determining visitor data and using it to improve your e-commerce marketing strategies.