How to Effectively Increase Sales with A/B Testing?

Today, many e-commerce business owners understand the importance of optimizing content to increase conversions. The e-commerce world is evolving fast. Ranking, routing, and ranking of leads often rely on your ability to convert visitors to your e-commerce store into potential customers.

A/B testing helps optimize the checkout experience to create a more enjoyable shopping experience for your customers. You will also get new insights to inform your long-term business decisions.

What is A/B testing? How can you effectively implement these techniques for your e-commerce store? We will answer these questions in this article by sharing tips to get you started. Let’s get right to it!

What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing, also called split testing, is a randomized experiment to compare multiple versions of something to check for functionality. This experiment involves showing different versions of a variable (e.g., page element, email, web page, etc.) to different sections of website visitors simultaneously.

This way, you can determine the version that has the most impact on your business and drive crucial business metrics. With A/B testing, you can gather quantitative and qualitative user insights. Collected data will help you understand user behavior, pain points, engagement rates, conversions, and more.

A brief overview of the process is:

• Define your conversion objective;
• Create the A/B test;
• Collect the necessary data;
• Analyze the results.

After completing the A/B test, you can implement winning variations without jeopardizing business conversions.

Why Should You A/B Test Your E-Commerce Store?

High cart abandonment rates are a significant burden for e-commerce stores. Other major issues e-commerce business owners face are low viewer engagement and low email open rates. Problems like payment page drop-offs, conversion funnel leaks, etc., affect these core metrics for conversion. A/B testing helps to improve this.

Here are some reasons why you should A/B test your online store:

1. Solve the Pain Points of Visitors

People visit your website for different reasons. It could be buying specific products, understanding your services, or learning about certain topics. Some common pain points may hinder achieving these goals. A/B testing gives you enough data about visitor behaviors to help solve their pain points.

2. Convert Existing Traffic to Better ROI

Getting quality traffic on your website is massive. A/B testing helps you make the most of this traffic. That way, you can increase conversions and get a better ROI without additional spending on new traffic.

3. Make Low-Risk Custom Modifications

Results from an A/B test will give you enough information to make minimal changes to your web page. You don’t have to redesign the entire page, thus reducing the risk of jeopardizing existing conversion rates. With A/B testing, you can target your resources for minor, incremental modifications to get maximum results.

4. Reduce Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is a crucial metric for effectively tracking a website’s performance. A/B testing allows you to analyze the different aspects of your website and get the best version possible. You can easily reduce bounce rates by removing unnecessary options, making navigation clearer, and eliminating technical jargon. Overall, potential customers tend to spend more time on your website.

5. Increase Future Business Profits

Data-driven decisions on whether to choose one version of your website over another should be made. This is why A/B testing is crucial. As a new version of your e-commerce website goes live, your overall business gains tend to increase.

What Aspects of Your E-Commerce Website Can You A/B Test?

You must optimize every part of your content to reach your target audience’s maximum potential. The following site elements should be vital optimization considerations:

• Website copy: This includes headlines and subheadings, main textual content, writing style, subject lines, etc.;
• Design & layout: Write straightforward content, provide clear information, and create a sense of urgency.
• Navigation: Make a user-friendly website that is fluid and easy to navigate.
• Forms;
• CTA (Call to Action);
• Social proof;
• Content depth.

How to Perform A/B Testing Effectively

A/B testing is a continuous activity and should be part of a defined conversion rate optimization process. It broadly involves the following steps:

Step 1: Research

Before building an A/B test plan, thorough research on your current website's performance is crucial. You need to collect page traffic, conversion goals, etc. The tools in this stage include quantitative analytics tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Omniture.

These tools will help you identify your most visited pages, pages with the highest bounce rates, and pages with more time spent. Heatmap tools also help you determine user scrolling behaviors. Finally, session recording tools can also give you qualitative insights on visitor behaviors and user journeys. These will help you prepare for the next step.

Step 2: Analyze & Formulate Hypothesis

Observations from your research will help you formulate a data-backed hypothesis to increase conversions. This will guide your test campaign after analyzing and making sense of the data.

Step 3: Create Variations Based on the Hypothesis

Variations are other versions of your current website, including the changes you wish to test. You can try multiple variations against the current one to check the best one. For example, you may want to reduce the fields in your forms if enough people are not filling them.

Step 4: Run the A/B Test

you can kickstart the test once you have your variations and know the type of approach to use. Then, wait for the required time to get statistically significant results. You have to always keep the timing of the test on point. Regardless of your approach, statistical accuracy plays a crucial role in the results.

Step 5: Analyze Results & Make Changes

A/B testing without result analysis is useless. Continuous data collection and analysis is a crucial aspect of this testing, and this is where the whole journey unravels. Upon the test's conclusion, analyze the results. Ensure you consider metrics like confidence levels, percentage increase, impacts on other metrics, etc.

Once the test succeeds, go on to deploy the winning version. However, the test may remain inconclusive. In that case, draw some insights and implement them in subsequent tests.

Conclusion

If you’re trying to understand the perfect design for your e-commerce store, A/B testing is for you. It keeps you closer to optimizing your website for potential customers. So, whenever in doubt, run an A/B test!

(Contributed by Ayotomiwa Omotosho & Hermes Fang)