It’s possible to do everything right for your business— build a user-friendly website, send relevant information to your email subscribers, have a social media presence and an ad campaign up and running— and still not have the conversion rate that you want for your website. In that case, the best way to improve your conversion rate is by figuring out what your audience does and does not respond well to through A/B testing.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing involves showing two variations of marketing material to your audience. It could be an email, ad, social media post, or landing page. The key thing is that only one change will be made at a time.

For instance, if you are doing an A/B test for a landing page, they would be identical except for the one aspect that you want to change – this could be the main photograph on the page, the copy, the call to action (CTA), or the color of the button the user would click to add an item to their cart.

By testing only one aspect of your material at a time, you’ll have a very good idea of what your visitors respond to— and what they don’t.

How to Put A/B Testing into Action

Let’s say you aren’t getting as many email subscribers clicking through to your website as you would like. You first need to make an accurate guess to determine why that is. It could be that the link is not obvious, because they must scroll down through the email to see it. Or perhaps the call to action isn’t strong enough. Choose one aspect of your email to experiment with changing.

For example, if you decide to change your CTA for this email, your next step is segmenting your email subscriber list so that you have two similar groups of people. You’ll send the first group your “A” version of the email, and your second group will receive version “B.”

If one group has a higher click-through rate (CTR) than the other, then you’ll have a good idea of which CTA our audience responds to. On the other hand, your test may be inconclusive. This doesn’t mean that the A/B test has failed. Rather, it means that you need to choose a different variable to test. You may need to go through several iterations of testing to find out what you need to change to increase your conversion rate.

What About Multivariate Testing?

It can be very tempting to make several changes to your marketing material in hopes of finding a solution quickly. When you make multiple changes like that at once, you’re no longer conducting an A/B test. You’re doing what’s known as multivariate testing.

These tests can be appealing because they have the opportunity of being faster. However, multivariate testing does have its downsides. Take our email marketing example above. Changing the call to action, the buttons readers click to visit your site, and the images in the email might lead to an increase in conversions. Unfortunately, you won’t know which aspect of your email changes achieved that response.

This means that in the future, you’ll be guessing instead of finding out what works so you can consistently incorporate it into your future marketing strategies.

A/B testing can require a lot of time and data to be successful. At Zephyr Digital Design, we’re happy to help you analyze your website data and find the best solutions for A/B testing in order to optimize your conversion rate. Contact us today; we’d love to help your business succeed!