Get Better Conversion Rates with A/B Testing

Using what is known as A/B testing is a powerful way for digital marketing agencies to increase their clients’ conversion rates – that is, their ability to turn visitors into customers – and given that many of the Internet’s most significant entities, including Amazon and Google, utilize this technique, it should almost go without saying that every marketer should be taking advantage of it as well. Here, we’re going to talk about increasing conversion rates using A/B testing methods for the purpose of aiding digital marketing agencies with their own efforts to grow their clients’ businesses.

What Does A/B Testing Do?

In the marketing and business intelligence sectors, A/B testing refers to a randomized experiment boasting two variants, A and B, which are the “control” and “treatment” in the controlled experiment. In online environments such as email, the goal is to identify changes to email campaigns that increase or maximize, an outcome of interest such as a click-through rate for a banner advertisement. As its namesake implies, two versions – A and B – are compared, which are identical save for one variation that might affect a user’s behavior; version A may be the currently used version (control) while version B is modified in some way (treatment).

An e-commerce company’s “purchase funnel” through an email campaign is a good candidate for A/B testing because even marginal improvements in drop-off rates can represent a significant gain in sales; significant improvements, meanwhile, can sometimes be seen through testing elements like copy text, layouts, images and colors, but not always.

Bringing Conversion Rate Optimization Into the Picture

As any marketing expert will tell you, increasing a conversion rate is absolutely critical, as boasting a good conversion rate is a foundation for high sales volume. In the world of real estate, it’s about LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION… but in the world of conversion optimization, it’s all about TESTING, TESTING, TESTING.

A/B testing can be used as a technique to increase a business’ conversion rate. How? Well, for example, let’s say a marketing agency is drawing up two possible headlines for an email campaign and can’t decide which one to use. The marketer, or marketers, could run an A/B test to determine which one works better for the client, creating two alternative versions of the email (campaign “A” and campaign “B”) each with a different headline. By utilizing specialized A/B testing software, marketers can direct 50 percent of the incoming interest to campaign A and 50 percent to campaign B, with both campaigns including a call-to-action; the email campaign with the most conversions – more people taking action – “wins.”

There’s no such thing as “perfect” when it comes to marketing sites, but the only way marketers can learn about what works and what doesn’t for their clients is to continuously test.