How to Accelerate Your Sales Funnel with A/B Testing

How to Accelerate Your Sales Funnel with A/B Testing?

A majority of modern marketers give top priority to optimize their content for getting sales conversions, thereby speeding up their sales funnel. It is specifically relevant for the demand generation marketers whose routing, ranking, and scoring of leads depend only on the ability of the marketer to convert their online visitors into prospects. In case such a marketer is a mind-reader, optimization of sales conversion is quite simple. However, for the rest of marketers, there is a tool called A/B testing.

Basics and terminologies used in A/B Testing

Prior to diving into details, you need to first understand a few basic terminologies associated with A/B Testing. It is a kind of CRO or conversion rate optimization, which draws a comparison of 2 different versions of any online asset in order to ascertain which version has the best performance. Some other key terminologies that are typically used for describing this technique include “bucket testing” and “split testing.” However, remember that the former can include even multiple variants (more than two).

The aim of A/B Testing is to ascertain whether when a minor change is made to a webpage, it could maximize or minimize the desired result.

Following are the definitions and terms you should know:

• CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization is a technique which involves using user feedback and analytics to improve the performance of your website’s conversion rates.
• Conversion: It is a behavior you want your online visitors to show, which you can measure, as well as, optimize toward.
• CTA: Call-to-Action is a user interface element or the primary button, which prompts an online user to act in a manner leading to a conversion.
• A/B Testing: It is a form of Customer Rate Optimization wherein 2 versions of the same webpage is compared to know which version has a better performance.
• CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost is the total of marketing and overhead cost within a certain time period divided by the total number of new customers that were acquired within the same time period.

Reasons for performing A/B Testing

When done correctly, A/B Testing can actually help in your profit maximization. Irrespective of how data-driven a marketing or sales strategy is, the areas of improvement always exist in your sales process pertaining to prospect conversion.  If it is performed properly, A/B Testing can do away with the friction element from the process of conversion, thereby offering improved financial results for your business. Plus, A/B testing is useful for converting the right sets of people resulting in a lower Customer Acquisition Cost, as well as, a higher margin of profits. Your business profitability is directly proportional to conversion rates. When your profit margins are higher, you can spend more to acquire new customers. Additionally, when the content is perfectly optimized, you are aware of acquiring the right customers. The next question is how to perform the A/B test correctly? It is also imperative to know the kind of tests to perform.

Establish goal (s) and form hypothesis

It is important to note at the outset that A/B Testing is a highly goal-oriented technique. Prior to beginning an A/B Test, a business has to determine the kind of results they aspire to attain. For instance, the goals could be something like the following:

• Improve open rates for the welcome email
• Drive extra clicks on any paid advertisement
• Free trial signups on a website to be increased

Usually, goal-setting is an easy exercise. Rather, it can be trickier to form a hypothesis. For instance, you could hypothesize a distinct Call-to-Action button on a free trial page can increase the number of signups. Luckily though, this hypothesis can be easily traceable unlike others that might not be so simple. Here are some such goals, which are tough to measure using A/B Testing:

• Make the branding of business more contemporary
• Alter customer sentiment
• Improve brand awareness

The important takeaway is to establish clear goals, which are easily measurable and quantifiable.

What should you test and ways of testing

1. i) Image

The picture chosen by you is the most important feature of any news feed update. You can test:

• Photography versus illustration
• Text present within your images versus no text
• Availability of a Call-to-Action button versus no CTA button

1. ii) Newsfeed text

It is your content’s snippet, which a majority of online visitors read initially when they come across your update in a newsfeed. You can test:

• Making a particular statement versus asking a question
• An informative and professional tone versus a conversational and casual tome
• Availability of headline versus no headline
• Asking a question vs. making a statement

iii) Headline & link description

It can function as a sales pitch for a content. In order to stand out visually, you can test:

• Thought to provoke versus action-oriented
• Title case versus sentence case
• Short copy versus long copy

It may initially appear a bit overwhelming to get started with the A/B Testing but would be definitely worth the value. In the best case scenario, it is possible to improve the conversion rates while in the worst case, a business can learn more about their audience.