What is A/B Split Testing and How You Can Use it to Improve Your E-Commerce?

How A/B Split Testing Helps Your E-Commerce Website and Business

Identifying Changes in Web Pages and Effect on Customer Experience – How do we measure customer experience, and how do we know what is effective in our e-commerce design and implementation? These are questions that can be answered with statistics produced from A/B split testing experiments. For example, if you currently have a web page design and see high bounce rates and low click-through rates, you may want to identify why users are either not staying on your site or are not buying from your product or service selection. By changing everything in your design, you’ll never know what works and what doesn’t work – what is attracting users and what is shunning them away. Therefore, A/B split testing expresses statistical evidence created from incremental changes in your design or website’s effectiveness.

Understanding Your Purchase Funnel – With e-commerce website checkout pages, many internet marketers will look at the purchase funnel effectiveness using A/B split testing for different designs and routing patterns. The highest conversions will result in the implementation of either scenario A or B. The beauty of A/B split testing is that you are able to see what the change in design style or buying experience does to your click-through rates, overall sales, and bounce rates over the course of a couple of weeks. Design two different versions of your purchasing experience, make incremental changes along the way and measure the results of the action taken. Over the course of three to six months, you will fully understand the best strategy that creates the most interest.

Split Test Your Email Marketing Campaign – Many business owners are sceptical about the impact of email marketing campaigns but often don’t understand A/B split testing and the power it provides to campaigning as a measure of effectiveness. Answer some of these questions, and you’ll see an exponential difference in your email opening rates and sale or subscription conversions.

What day or time works best for your weekly newsletter? Test each day in the week while leaving everything else constant and measuring the results.

What subject lines work the best? Using different selling techniques, find out what subject line styles yield the most opening rates based on a few options or samples.

What time of each day yields the best opening rates for promotional offers or newsletter subscription requests? Measure different times throughout a single day and compare volumes.

Continuous Improvement – When you A/B split test as an e-commerce website, you are able continuously to improve different aspects of your business interface and marketing efforts, from email marketing and social media to purchasing experiences and product layout on the site. All of these factors contribute to behavioural economic principles that work well for both large and small companies. Start with one component or campaign and measure using A/B testing as you go until you reach a level of satisfaction and move on to the next order of business. Remember, you do not need to fix things that aren’t broken.