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How To Increase your Sales Conversions with A/B Testing

A/B Testing 101

A/B testing, otherwise known as split testing is one of the most effective ways you can increase your salesconversions and social media sharing numbers. In an A/B test, people are split at random into two groups, in thisexample lets say we split them into two equal groups 50/50.

Without being told, the users in both groups are presented with a stimulus: the original condition (the control), or avariation (what you’re testing). Then you compare the performance of the variation against the performance of thecontrol.

To put this in simpler terms, lets take a web page as an example. One group might be shown the original sales page,the other group would be shown the original but with a slight modification, such as a different title or a different colourvariation on the page. With this you can track which page performs better and subsequently use the best page topermenantly increase your sales.

Let's take a look at a real world example by Comscore. They ran an A/B test on their products page to discover whatwould happen if they altered the way in which their quoted recommendation appeared.

Running the original as the control they split their groups such that they could test three different variations, somechanging the position, others the colour:

Of these it was discovered that Variation 1 increased conversions by an incredible 69%!

Benefits of A/B Testing:

1. It gives you data to back up what you think might be successful.

2. It’s one of the cheapest ways in which you can improve your sales conversions.

A/B testing should be part of your strategy when making any changes that you hope will drive sales.

Here is what happens when you don't AB Test

You make a change to your website that you think will have an impact. Happily your sales conversions go up, so youthink the improvement must be the catalyst for this. What you didn't know was that this spike in interest was causedby an outside event such as a sales conference or trade show and the page actually performs worse than the original!The only way to avoid this is to make sure you have a control to measure it against.

Start your very own A/B test

1. Decide what you are going to test

The great thing about A/B testing is that you have two pieces of content to test and you can make these elements aslarge or small as you like. You can test something as small as a different colour button, a differently placed quote, alarger picture or something as large as a page redesign.

The important thing to remember is that if you go ahead and make several changes to your webpage in one go and itdoes better than the original you must attribute that to ALL of the changes, not individual differences. As an example Ifyou changed the button colour, form length and added a larger picture you cannot attribute the success to a largerpicture, but to all three elements.

2. Decide your goal and then how to test it

Did you know that certain colours can seriously affect how customers behave? A good start might be to measure howthe colour of a button affects how many people click on it. A more complex test might be that you compare the colourto the quality of leads that your receive. For example you might find a blue button produces less leads compared to ared one.

3. Set your control

Keep your original unchanged page and build variations from that. If you are wondering if you should includetestimonials on your landing page or perhaps a noticeable image highlighting the price, set up the control pageunchanged, then create two other variations, once with the tesimonial the other with price. Split your groups evenlyso each page is recieved by the same proportion of people and wait and see your results!

4. Promote your test

You need enough traffic to ensure that your results are significant since too small a sample could give misleadingresults. So go crazy promoting your page, check out our articles on increasing sales using facebook and linkedin,maybe even use pay per click to drive traffic. Just be sure that if a Twitter audience is one that your are interested inyou promote it only through Twitter and not other sources.

5. Investigate your marketing funnel

You've driven people to your new page, got a ton of results and find the test was a success, now what? Look deeperinto your customer data! Maybe you found that the blue button resulted in less sales conversions but on closerinspection you realise that those that do spend twice as much as those of any other colour. Maybe focusing yoursales efforts on those leads would be a good strategy going forward.

I hope you have found this post informative, look out for my followups on the most effective changes you can make toyour pages to increase sales and some real life case studies.

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