What is A/B testing?

A/B testing (also known as split testing) is a process of showing two variants of the same web page to different segments of website visitors at the same time and comparing which variant drives more conversions. A/B testing allows you to only test one variable at a time. It’s used to pick the better out of two variables. For instance, if you are testing the background color of your landing pages to determine which one helps you generate the most conversions, you might test red vs. blue. You can also test on the page level, which means that you are looking at the entire page as the variable.

Why is A/B testing important?

In the online world, the number of visitors on your website equals the number of opportunities you have to expand your business by acquiring new customers and build relationships by catering to existing ones. It is your conversion funnel that decides whether your website gets good traffic and converts more visitors.

A/B testing offers a very systematic way of finding out what works and what doesn’t work in any given marketing campaign. Most marketing efforts are geared toward driving more traffic. As traffic acquisition becomes more difficult and expensive, it becomes paramount to offer your users the best experience who comes to your website. This will help them achieve their goals and convert in the fastest and most efficient manner possible. A/B testing in marketing allows you to make the most out of your existing traffic.

Marketers use Advanced A/B Testing to optimize your messaging efficacy and find the winning combination. You can test multiple variations of the same element (A/B/n testing), or test multiple variables at the same time (multivariate testing). With so many elements to choose from, it’s easy to optimize your strategy in a fraction of the time.

Using Dengage A/B Testing Experience

We at Dengage, are incorporating A/B testing into the core push notification experience. Now, you can easily add an A/B test in the same workflow where you create your message content and quickly build and toggle between variants.

The metrics for conversion are unique to each website. For eCommerce, it may be the sale of the products by testing variations of their promotions to see which drives the most sales, while for B2B, it may be the generation of qualified leads. Media companies can uncover the most appealing headlines to drive traffic to their websites. Gaming companies can discover how to improve their messaging to get more players back in the game.

A/B testing is one of the components of the overarching process of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). You can gather qualitative and quantitative user insights and use them to understand your potential customers and optimize your conversion funnel based on that data.

For example, in one campaign, we can run 2 variants with varying Subject like below:

Variant A: Black Friday Sale! Get 20% off

Variant B: Finish your holiday shopping early: Black Friday Sale

You can personalize your emails also on Dengage to create a human touch and appeal to your subscribers in a better way. With attention span of people falling down to 3-4 seconds, you do not have much time to grab their eyeballs.

You can test different tricks of personalization by including the first name of the subscriber in the email copy or applying the principles of artificial intelligence. Personalize your campaigns on the basis of past purchases, products searched for, resources downloaded, etc. and note the metrics to understand how it works for your target audience.