A/B testing in digital marketing is the method of comparing the two versions of webpages, email, landing page and analyzing the variation in their performance. This is done by providing a separate version of the email or webpage to one group and the other version to a different group and analyzing each variation performance.
It is like a competition putting two different versions of matrices against one another to see which gives the best output.
How Does A/B Testing Work in Digital marketing?
To know how A/B testing in digital marketing works, let’s have a look at an example.
Suppose you have two different email designs and content and you want to know which will work best for your next campaign.
You may send one email to a certain number of subscribers, say 50, and another email to another 50 subscribers. Now whichever email campaign performs better sends that to the rest of your subscribers.
Analyze the email performance in terms of open rate and click rate or whatever metrics you would like to choose. This is how a/b testing works
If among the two campaigns the one that performs better than the other, implement that particular campaign to the whole industry.
Elements to A/B Test in Digital Marketing?
Headlines
The headline is the first thing visitors notice when they click on your web page. If it doesn’t grab your visitors’ attention, they won’t stick around. Test different paragraph lengths, fonts, and eye-catchy design and content. And go with one that performs well.
Call To Action
A/B testing allows the user to select the best CTA by allowing to test different copies, placement, colors, and sizes. After the testing, you may select the design which works well for you.
Subject lines
Email subject lines directly impact the open rates. If a subscriber doesn’t see anything he or she likes, the email will likely end up in the trash bin. A/B testing subject lines can increase the chances of getting subscribers to click. Try different techniques such as questions versus statements, use strong words against one another, use of emoji in the subject line, etc.
Email marketing
You just send version X to the first 50% of your subscribers and version Y to the remaining ones. Let’s say you run an A/B test for a month and version X outperforms Version Y by 69.5%, you’ve found an element that impacts conversions.
Landing pages
A/B test will also help you in analyzing the landing page, test different designs of the landing page, and analyze the results which work better.
How to run the A/B test in Digital Marketing
Choose what you want to test
Start with the element which you want to test. Make sure it’s important to whatever metric you want to improve.
For example, if you’re trying to generate more organic traffic, focus on an element that impacts SEO, like a blog post. For conversion rate optimization, you may start with the headline, landing page design, or a CTA.
Set goals
Focus on a single metric at first. If you concentrate on one thing at a time, you’ll get good results. Run the test for other matrices that are less important.
Select the page for testing
Begin with the most important page. It might be your homepage or a landing page.
Create a variant
Create a variant of the matric that you want to run. Change only the element you decided on in the previous step and make only one change to it.
If you are testing the CTA, change the background color, font color, or button size.
Analyze data
Use tools like Google Analytics to analyze the traffic on your website, email analysis to have a look at open rates, click rates, and other metrics.
