Home / A/B Testing: What Is It and Why Is It So Important?
Whether you’re trying to get your business noticed and build a customer base or you’re determined to grow and reach a new audience, you need to understand your customers. It doesn’t matter how small or large your business is or what you do: knowing what your customers want and how they prefer to shop is a crucial part of achieving online success.
There are a number of different ways to do this. First, customer surveys; you can ask shoppers for their opinions, but unless you have a particularly large sample size, a survey can often leave you with more questions than answers. People aren’t always consciously aware of what they want and why they want it, either – some may prefer one website over another without being able to articulate why.
You could always resort to trial and error, changing up the look and feel of your website every so often and checking whether sales rise or fall. But this approach is risky and inefficient.
So, what’s the solution? For eCommerce businesses, A/B testing is the way forward, and we’re going to tell you everything you need to know about it right here.
Let’s start with the basics: what exactly is A/B testing? Otherwise known as split testing, it involves testing at least two variations of the same thing (with real customers) to see how they perform. A/B testing can be used on everything from ad copy to email marketing content or even entire landing pages.
Think of it as the marketing equivalent of a science experiment. You have your ‘control’ – a web page or piece of content that’s familiar to your customers – and a revised version that has a different look, layout or tone.
The ‘A’, or control, acts as a baseline. If the revised ‘B’ version generates more clicks or conversions than the original ‘control’ version, you know you’re onto something. You can then implement the changes onto your website or marketing material, safe in the knowledge that your customers prefer it to what went before.
In essence, the purpose of A/B testing is to eliminate guesswork. When you make changes to your site without testing them beforehand, you’re taking a risk – a stab in the dark. Your customers could love it or hate it, and you might lose sales if they react negatively. A/B testing mitigates this risk, allowing you to test the water without diving in head first.
A/B testing falls under the wider umbrella of conversion rate optimisation, or CRO for short.
We’ve touched on the plus points of A/B testing a little bit already, but if you’re still not convinced, here’s a more detailed breakdown.
As we mentioned above, A/B testing is a much less risky way of implementing changes on your website. It gives you the opportunity to assess the impact of doing things differently without having to fully commit to it. The thing is, not every tweak to your site will please your customers – sometimes, things are better left alone. If you’re thinking about going in a different direction, A/B testing can validate your decision (or send you back to the drawing board).
A/B testing isn’t just useful for web design tweaks. You can apply it to virtually anything, including email marketing content and layouts, ad copy and creative, landing page content and so much more. Basically, if you can create two versions of something and find a way to track users’ interactions with it, you can use A/B testing to your advantage.
It’s hard to know exactly what customers want – how they want landing pages to be structured, how they want email campaigns to look, what tone of voice they prefer. A/B testing allows you to experiment with different options and get concrete data on what your customers actually prefer.
As well as informing your next decision on design or content, A/B testing can help you build a ‘big picture’ view of your customers and their preferences. Let’s say you A/B test an email marketing campaign and one design emerges as the clear winner. You can then use that information to help guide your next design project, like social media graphics for instance. Every time you A/B test, you learn a little more about your customers – and that information is so valuable in the fiercely competitive world of eCommerce.
In terms of ROI, A/B testing (and CRO as a whole) is one of the best marketing investments you can make as a business. It can generate significant uplifts in conversions and revenue by tackling customers’ pain points, helping you create a smooth, frictionless flow from awareness to conversion.
So, the benefits of A/B testing are significant – but how do you tap into them? Learning how to A/B test and interpret the results correctly can be easier said than done, so here are some pointers to help.
First you’ve got to decide what to test. Start by identifying an area of your website or marketing strategy that you feel is lacking, and create an alternate ‘B’ version that you feel addresses the current version’s shortcomings. It could be as simple as re-structuring an email campaign, changing the title and headings of a landing page or using a different image – the options are endless.
Then, you’ve got to work out how to track the performance of both pages or pieces of content. Make sure you implement robust tracking that keeps tabs on all of the most crucial metrics, like bounce rate, conversion rate, conversion value and open rate (in the case of emails). You may also want to use a heatmap tool like Hotjar to study users’ movements in greater detail.
This one’s self explanatory. Set both versions live at the same time and see what happens. Now, all you have to do is wait for the data to come flooding in.
After a week or two has passed and you have plenty of data to work with, you can dive into the results and see what effect your changes have had. Has the ‘B’ version performed better, or did your customers prefer the original? Perhaps there are elements of both that customers like or dislike – a heatmap tool could help you determine this.
Want to reap all the benefits A/B testing has to offer? The team at Brave Agency is here to help you do just that.
With more than 25 years of experience working with eCommerce brands large and small, A/B testing is our bread and butter – it’s just one of the many CRO services we offer. Check out our full range of CRO services and learn more about how we can help your brand grow today.
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