What Should You A/B Test?

Following inbound marketing best practices is the first step to successfully reaching your audience through email campaigns and landing pages. However, how should you go about finding out what’s most effective for each element of your inbound marketing campaign?

A/B testing can help you achieve your goal and increase conversion rate to make sure that what you’re doing is working for your brand.

What is A/B testing, you might ask? An A/B test is an experiment in which you create two versions of one piece of content – for example, an email – and send the two versions to two groups of people that are similar in size. Then, you can analyze metrics and see which version performed better. A/B tests can give you insight into what your audience prefers, and therefore help direct your future content production.

Ready to dive in? The first step for an effective A/B test is to choose a category to test. Your options include:

• Headline
• Content
• Images
• Calls-To-Action
• Forms

For emails, you might also want to add more specific categories:

• Subject line
• Body text
• Personalization (example: “Mr. Smith” vs. “Joe”)

Within each category, you might have to run different experiments to make sure your test is giving you all the answers.

Here are some types of A/B tests that you can run:

Headline

Test the length – is a longer version more or less effective than a shorter one?

Content

For content and body text, you can test the length of the copy, the layout of the message and its placement around other elements on the page.

Subject lines

Generally, the ideal length for email subject lines is 50 characters or fewer. Dollar signs, exclamation marks and calls-to-action should be avoided, as well as SPAM trigger words like “free” and “buy.” Test the length or the utilization of different verbiage to see what entices your readers to open your email.

Personalization

Whether you are using it in the subject line or the email itself, personalization has proven to be extremely effective, as people respond positively when hearing/reading their own name. A test to include here could be adding the person’s first name or their company name into the subject line. Similarly, you could test personalization within the email copy – try “Hi [First Name]” instead of the generic “Hello” or use their actual company name throughout the email instead of saying “your company.”

Calls-To-Action

A recent study by Content Verbe determined that simply changing a CTA from “Order Information” to “Get Information” can significantly increase conversion rates.

Likewise, other elements that might seem irrelevant, such as CTA button color, placement and size actually generate a big impact when it comes to conversion rates.

Forms

Patience is an important virtue. It is crucial to remember that the way you ask for a contact’s information in a form, and how much you ask for, can determine if they actually stay to fill it out.

When running your A/B test, estimate how long the client is willing to spend filling out a form and how likely they are to give truthful information according to the way you ask the questions. You might also want to test the amount of information you ask for in relation to the value of the offer.

Multimedia

Using videos and images is a great way to catch your readers’ attention. It is important to A/B test your multimedia elements to verify that they go along with your content and are impacting your potential customer in a positive manner. Try testing two different images to go along with the same content. Which resonates better with your audience? You can also test video placement – do more people watch the video if it is higher up on your page?

Contact Pyxl

Now that you know where to start, there is no need to second-guess what works best when it comes to content. A/B testing every element will give you the tools you need to increase conversion rate and reach your audience in the most effective way possible. Interested in learning more? Let’s talk!

Updated: Nov 15, 2024