Introduction

Every marketer wants to achieve a sky-touching campaign performance!

You too yearn to experience success with your campaigns, don’t you?

All of you marketers or demand generation managers devise strategies or systems expecting it to fetch unmatched intended results. You expect success! But, how do you double-check whether those strategies are going to work or not?

Would these get your brand 100s of eyeballs or go straight down the floor, wasting all your efforts and money?

Assumptions do work magic sometimes. But, basing the outcomes of your marketing campaigns, ones you spent days and a lot of energy and focus devising, on assumptions, isn’t going to get you anywhere near your revenue goal.

What method would work then?

It’s A/B testing!

Source: Youtube

To earn your trust on why this methodology actually works, know that Dell experienced a 300% increase in the conversion rate by adopting the A/B testing method!

Remember the latest blockbuster Netflix series “Squid Game”? 

The level where the players had to walk on glass slabs and had to select which ones to put their feet on and which ones to avoid. To ensure the slabs they are jumping onto, are not brittle, one of the players who worked with a glass manufacturing factory came up with an idea of throwing stones at each of the slabs one by one. 

If the slab made a specific sound, it meant that the slab was brittle. Putting your feet onto it would mean definite failure. End of the game!

You must be wondering, how exactly is this relevant to our discussion?

It is to note that the players here adopted an A/B testing methodology to test the slabs and the potential outcome before jumping on it based on total guesswork. Doing that resulted in them not falling down and dying and successfully treading forward to the next slab.

Similarly, in business, if you create multiple variants of your plan and test them out for the expected performance, you can avoid potential failures and work on improvements based on the results of the test.

Not enough motivation to explore A/B testing?

70% of businesses saw increased sales from A/B testing their landing pages before launching them!

Motivated now?

Let’s unravel the concept of A/B testing a bit more in detail!

What is A/B testing and how it’s done?

You begin by creating two variants of any marketing communication that you are working on.

For example- it’s a product emailer that is under development.

Go ahead and create 2 versions of the subject line, 2 versions of the email preview text, headline, email body, CTAs, etc. Create 2 subsets out of your entire contact list (subscriber list).

Send version A to subset 1 and version B to subset 2. 

The performance of each of these versions would clearly indicate the winning version. Send out the winning version to the rest of the database for a positive campaign outcome.

Otherwise, if none of the variants performed well, that is a red alert which means you need to work upon your campaign strategy once more to avoid failures and wastage of efforts.

Source: Unbounce

If you are a demand generation manager and struggling with the “why” of A/B testing, here’s answering your question with the benefits of systematic A/B testing for business success.

Benefits of systematic A/B testing for demand generation managers

A systematic A/B testing procedure helps you understand not just the element which is providing positive results but also lets you zero in on the way forward and priorities in designing future campaigns.

Let’s make the benefits crisper to consume!

Your content quality improves

As you consistently create content for marketing purposes, you focus a lot on the novelty of ideas as well as the content piece being clear and concise, attractive, and value-adding for the reader.

You know it is not easy, but while you are at it, at your creative best, how about creating versions of the entire collateral or its individual elements and testing the versions with different sets of audiences?

Once you are done with creating and testing versions of the content collateral, there are chances that you uncover a lot of improvements needed in the content, and once you implement those improvements, your content turns out to be better performing.

You get an increased user engagement rate

A/B testing is not limited to the content variants that include different ad copies, different CTA button texts, or different email subject lines; it can also be performed on different landing pages, font style or size, and even the font color.

Source: Pinterest

By doing this, you get to know which variant or style the target audience prefers to have a look at, what makes them wanna click and engage with those elements. 

Ultimately, you get an improved user engagement rate and your bounce rate decreases significantly. Your users do not bounce off of the webpage you spent hours and days designing, without performing the intended action that you desire.

Your conversion rate spikes

While you are in the process of creating content and you include the A/B testing strategy in it, you create 2 versions of the same end story. Once you launch a systematic A/B test on different subsets of your database, you get to know your audiences’ behavior interacting with each of those versions.

With that knowledge, you can run campaigns that perform better and can help you convert your visitors to leads!

You get to know the chances of a variants’ success and thus, lessen your risks

Implementing changes to your website or any landing page based on pure assumptions or guesswork doesn’t always yield results and can make you incur heavy costs!

Ensuring A/B testing individual versions of the website changes let you understand which version would perform better or if none of the versions would actually perform. That way, you can save up a lot of costs and reduce the risks of failure.

Your sales soar

Once you finalize the version to be used for communicating with the target audience and push it out to them, your customer engagement increases as the users find your messaging relevant and trustworthy.

Hence, they purchase from you which increases your sales. These customers go ahead and become loyal customers for a long time period.

Your cart doesn’t feel abandoned anymore

If you are a demand generation manager for an eCommerce business, you might find yourself struggling with cart abandonment issues. This means that your target prospect added products to the cart but didn’t check out and buy from you.

What might be the reason for it?

Probably the content on the checkout page was a big turn-off for the users!

In this case, A/B testing your checkout page with different versions of the elements helps understand which version would make your user complete their ordering process and purchase from you. In short, which version makes purchasing from your business a pleasant experience for the user!

You get easy-to-analyze information handy

After you perform an A/B test on different variants of an element, the performance results give you solid information. With the help of this information, you can analyze the way forward through readily available and easy-to-understand metrics.

You can gauge the impact to increase high-value sales

The moment you are done with A/B testing and understanding which template or the way of writing yields incremental results, you can enhance the quality of the pages serving expensive products/services. This can lead to increased sales for these higher valued offerings by finding the right customers for them. 

The picture is not rosy all the time! Even in a seemingly perfect A/B testing strategy, there are a few potential roadblocks that you might encounter along the way.

Let’s understand those obstacles!

Hindrances along the path to successful A/B testing

Like we spoke about in the earlier paragraphs, a successful A/B test can help you generate more conversions out of your marketing campaigns, ultimately increasing your revenue.

There can be downfalls too if testing is done improperly!

With a carefully crafted A/B testing strategy, you can still end up facing challenges, especially if you are a small business!

Here are some of the potential obstacles you might face:

You ought to have patience until you get a statistical weight for each occurrence

Say you roll a die and decide that if it comes as a 6, you will consider eating in ice cream at midnight to be a healthy habit, and if otherwise, you will stop eating at that time.

Imagine it comes up to be a 6 the first time, the second time, and even after the          3rd time!

You end up eating ice cream every day at the same time considering it to be a healthy affair!

Source: Unbounce

Is this a correct understanding of how the results should be interpreted? No!

Similarly, when you A/B test your content or landing page, ensure you test your collaterals with a significant number of target audiences before you finalize the variant to use in your campaigns and implement the outcomes of the test as a way forward. 

Getting sufficient traffic is a hassle

For small businesses, getting enough traffic on your landing page can be a trouble. It won’t be fruitful if you have to wait a year to gauge the impact of a minute change that you made on your page. 

In a nutshell, you can’t perform an A/B test if you do not have a good amount of traffic on your website. Say, for instance, you are running a time-driven campaign, in that case, waiting for an A/B test to deliver results with less traffic would not be beneficial.

A/B testing neglects the losing variant’s conversion chances

You have a winning variant and a losing variant in an A/B test. 

Based on that, you mostly would take up the winning variant considering that the entire audience prefers that version. This process often neglects the fact that the losing variant might be useful to a small set of your audience, and probably, that audience is a high-paying set as compared to the other set of the audience.

Parting Words

If you are a demand generation manager and are looking to increase demand for your business offerings, A/B testing your messaging is the way to go. It helps you gather user behaviour insights so as to understand what makes your prospect feel delightful about their experience with your brand.

Once you know that, you can make changes to your outreach content, design, etc., to earn your customers’ loyalty and a fair share of their business.

Want to skyrocket your revenue with A/B testing?

Get in touch with us at Fractional CMO today!

Get, Set, A/B Test!