Utilize A/B testing and get to know your audience

A/B testing provides brands with valuable insight regarding what leads and customers want to see from your website. It provides brands with an excellent means of maximizing the the clicks and engagement they get with their content.

There are a wide variety of factors that influence whether or not someone is going to click on a particular piece of content. Seemingly simple criteria, such as the placement of a call-to-action, the phrasing used in the lead magnet, or even the image selected to go along with a gated item request form can all impact the likelihood of someone completing the call-to-action and being a lead or customer.

A/B testing provides brands with a means of testing the arrangements and criteria that matter the most to their customers. You can see what your particular customers respond to best and use that insight to build your leads and fuel your growth.

Building an effective A/B test can help you across your marketing campaigns, including creating better ads, improved landing pages, building email engagement, and even boosting purchase rates.

• Know what you want to test
• Identify a particular goal you want to achieve
• Determine what your sample size or test duration will be
• Interpret your results and take action

1. Know what you want to test. One important first step in creating an effective A/B test lies in picking a single variable to test. If you try to run an A/B test on two versions of the content that have enormous differences between them, it will be harder to know exactly why a particular piece of content performed better than another. Instead, you want to pick a single feature to test. This might be the placement of a CTA button or the image paired with a download form, for example.

As you prepare to run your A/B test, you should have a firm control and variable. Your control will be how the landing page, ad, or other test piece of content looks now. The variable is the adjusted version that you want to compare to the original.

2. Identify a particular goal you want to achieve. Next, you want to identify your goal with running this test. Do you want to boost click through rates or conversions? What will be a significant enough difference in the results for the two pieces of content to warrant making a change?

3. Determine what your sample size or test duration will be. Now, you want to determine exactly how big you want your test to be. For example, you might want to show two different versions of an ad to 1000 customers. If you test a landing page, it can be harder to determine the number of people who see each version, so you want to consider how long you want to run the test.

Make sure that the people who receive both versions of the content come from similar enough populations to warrant comparison. If you are testing two versions of an email message, for example, you do not want to have one version go to your segmented list for medium-sized businesses while the other goes to the large businesses.

4. Interpret your results and take action. After the test has been run for enough time to collect relevant data, you now need to collect and interpret your results. Look back on your goals with the A/B test and see how the results turned out. See what the test results indicated about the preferences of your customers.

Use this insight to make a decision regarding the version of the content you should move forward with. If you did not get statistically significant results, then consider modifying another area of the test and creating a second A/B test to boost the content’s performance.

A/B tests provide valuable insight regarding what customers want to see from organizations and what they respond to when online. Use the insight from these data-driven tests to make the best decisions for your content.