Customers demand impeccable, simple, and customizable user experiences these days. It doesn't matter if it's on the customer service side, interacting with a website or email, or attending a face-to-face sales appointments. To be a successful business in a competitive industry, and to sustain any success achieved, you have to respond to customer demand and supply to expectations well. One of the best ways to narrow down what your customers want most is by using A/B testing to best determine how to market to potential clients in your industry.
How to Use A/B Testing in Your Digital Marketing Strategy
A/B testing is simply testing two different digital marketing approaches. One may have a different design or different content. Sometimes a slight tweak of a color or even placement of content, buttons, or call-to-actions on a website or email marketing campaign can be the difference in a sale or no sale. A/B testing can be done on a variety of devices to help you know where your customers operate, such as desktop, tablets, or smartphones.
Why A/B Testing is Important
If you never collect data on what your customers prefer, how do you know the best way to market to your client base? A/B testing can reveal a lot about your customers and what resonates with them. Maybe they prefer minimalistic approaches because visual representations of your products or services work better to pique their interest. Or, perhaps you have clients that want more written content with specifications and details. A/B testing enables a business to really hone in on what's most important to those seeking your products in an often competitive market.
How A/B Testing is Executed
If you have the budget and resources to run multiple tests for email marketing campaigns or website user experiences, A/B testing can be executed internally in conjunction with your regular business operations. However, if you are running on a tight budget and don't really know where to start, it's a smart investment, with a great potential for return, to hire a digital marketing agency to give you invaluable data and insight into what attracts your customers and hopefully induces them to convert to a paying and even repeat customer. A digital marketing agency can storyboard a campaign with two different tracks to test and measure for business. Data needs to be monitored and the marketing potentially adjusted during the campaign. Email marketing and websites go hand in hand because email campaigns will have a call-to-action that drives the recipient to a website landing page to take an action. Identifying the best response times, design elements, and specific content can help businesses create better experiences for clients.
Ongoing A/B Testing
Typically businesses do more than one round of A/B testing as products, services, marketing, and technologies change. Capturing data over a series of tests can yield valuable data in order to market more effectively to different client groups. You will discover more about your audience and what converts them to a customer better than a single marketing campaign.
Innovating A/B Testing
What worked 10, five, or two years ago may not work in today's customer-demand world of e-commerce with competitors offering transactional experiences any time of the day from multiple devices, on different digital platforms, all at the client's preference. Stay competitive and relevant in your industry by incorporating A/B testing into your digital marketing plan. The data you will earn can help sustain business over time as well as customize great experiences for consumers who want to know that you know exactly who you're targeting. Consumers want to be heard and understood, and A/B testing can help you do just that.
