Why Is A/B Split Testing Crucial To Success? — Part 1

Published in

Inside Revenue

7 min readNov 26, 2018

The Beginner’s Guide

If you’re in the sales and marketing space, a term you would have come across frequently is Conversion Optimization. A/B Split Testing is a process associated with Conversion Optimization and general optimization efforts. It is a fantastic method for figuring out the best strategies for your business. It can be used to test everything from website copy to sales emails to search ads and more. And the advantages A/B Split Testing provide are enough to offset the additional time it takes, and the results you’ll see from allocating time and resources from this process will inevitably aid you in achieving a higher Return On Investment — and to be honest, what brand isn’t in the business of maximizing profit?

Well-planned A/B Split Testing can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts. Narrowing down the most effective elements of a promotion, website, or communications strategy, and then combining them, can obviously make your efforts much more profitable and successful.

In this article series, I will briefly run through the basics and benefits of A/B Split Testing, the processes adopted by the most successful brands out there to see increased success, as well as what the most common mistakes that brands have made in this field before you.

I hope you enjoy this series, and that it helps get you get excited to implement A/B Split Testing in your own efforts to help your brand hit its revenue targets.

“Let’s change the way we look at what happens to us.” — Art Sobczak (30 years of sales prospecting experience) @ArtSobczak

In this article, I will cover…

#1 What Is A/B Split Testing?

#2 Why Should You Care About A/B Split Testing?

#3 How Can A/B Split Testing Help You Hit Your Company’s Revenue Targets?

#4 What Should You Watch Out For When Implementing A/B Split Testing?

Let’s dive in…

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#1 What Is A/B Split Testing?

Most commonly used in Landing Page implementation ad design, and communications optimization, A/B Split Testing allows you to easily compare two or more variations of an element in your experiment to see which version your audience better responds to. This process not only allows you to experiment with different variations of your strategy, but it helps you gain valuable insights into how you can optimize your efforts to achieve maximum results. A/B Split Testing allows you to make informed decisions based on real data, rather than simply moving forward based on your gut instinct. And as we all know — data is king in the world of sales and marketing!

A/B Split Testing is essentially an experiment where two or more variants of a communications delivery are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.

Running an A/B Split Test that directly compares a variation against a current experience lets you ask focused questions about changes to your strategy, and then collect data about the impact of that change, taking the guesswork out of optimization and enables data-informed decisions that shift business conversations from “we think” to “we know.” By measuring the impact that changes have on your metrics, you can ensure that every change produces positive results.

This process can be implemented on more than just a landing page. For instance, you can use this process to gain actionable insights into your ad creatives, sales outreach processes, messaging strategies, and more.

#2 Why Should You Care About A/B Split Testing?

A/B Split Testing allows individuals, teams, and companies to make careful changes to their user experiences while collecting data on the results. This allows them to construct hypotheses, and to learn better why certain elements of their experiences impact user behavior. In another way, they can be proven wrong — their opinion about the best experience for a given goal can be proven wrong through an A/B test.

More than just answering a one-off question or settling a disagreement, A/B Split Testing can be used consistently to continually improve a given experience, improving a single goal like conversion rate over time.

For instance, a B2B technology company may want to improve their sales lead quality and volume from campaign landing pages. In order to achieve that goal, the team would try A/B testing changes to the headline, visual imagery, form fields, call to action, and overall layout of the page.

Testing one change at a time helps them pinpoint which changes had an effect on their visitors’ behavior, and which ones did not. Over time, they can combine the effect of multiple winning changes from experiments to demonstrate the measurable improvement of the new experience over the old one.

This method of introducing changes to a user experience also allows the experience to be optimized for a desired outcome, and can make crucial steps in a marketing campaign more effective.

By testing ad copy for example, marketers can learn which version attracts more clicks. By testing the subsequent landing page, they can learn which layout converts visitors to customers best. The overall spend on a marketing campaign can actually be decreased if the elements of each step work as efficiently as possible to acquire new customers.

A/B Split Testing can also be used by product developers and designers to demonstrate the impact of new features or changes to a user experience. Product onboarding, user engagement, models, and in-product experiences can all be optimized with A/B Split Testing, so long as the goals are clearly defined and you have a clear hypothesis.

In our article, “Neuromarketing Techniques For Landing Pages — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, lays out over 50 conversion rate and general optimization hypothesis that your brand can implement in its A/B Split Testing efforts to help you see a better chance of success, while giving you some practical examples of how these can be implemented in different areas of your sales and marketing efforts.

A/B Split Testing can many benefits for your brand, as there are near limitless use cases for them. By making decisions based on data rather than on your gut feeling, you will not only gain valuable and actionable insights into your efforts, but will allow you to more accurately measure your efforts for increased success.

See Wordstream’s blog about the 24 most surprising A/B split tests of all time here.

#3 How Can A/B Split Testing Help You Hit Your Company’s Revenue Targets?

So now that you’re familiar with what A/B Split Testing is and how it can benefit your brand’s efforts, do you know how to implement the various processes and techniques to ensure increased testing success? Or if you’re already using this process in your sales and marketing efforts, how do you know if you’re doing it correctly?

You’re in luck. My next article, “Why Is A/B Split Testing Crucial To Success? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, takes you through the most common processes for testing success. So if you’re interested in finding out how your brand can use this process to achieve maximum results, take a look at this article.

“Instead of one way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.” — David Meerman Scott ( Marketing and Sales Strategist) @dmscott

#4 What Should You Watch Out For When Implementing A/B Split Testing?

In order to maximize the results you see from your A/B Split Testing efforts, you should

Be aware of the various mistakes that other brands have made over the years that have lead to reduced success.

To help you get off on the right foot with your testing, I have compiled an article that takes you through the most common mistakes that brands have made in this field. If you’d like to find out if your making one of these common mistakes, read my article titled “Why Is A/B Split Testing Crucial To Success? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)” here.

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While A/B Split Testing has been the cornerstone of successful optimization for years, whether in ad creation, messaging, outreach, website design or other, it continues to be one of the key areas of sales and marketing efforts that most brands neglect. In my next article, I will take you through A/B Split Testing in more detail and help guide you through effective testing processes to help your company hit its revenue targets. You can read “Why Is A/B Split Testing Crucial To Success? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)” here.

I will be taking you through the following topics: