We have heard so many times that small changes can have a big impact on your bottom line. Well this is also the case with A/B Tests, because you can test different scenarios online and see which tests perform better.

A/B Testing Explained

A/B Testing involves testing two scenarios against each other in it’s most simplest form. In more advanced forms you could use multi-variate testing for more than two tests. So lets provide some examples to understand the power of A/B testing.

Some examples of where you may want to try out A/B testing is in your email, on your website and landing pages.

a) Email A/B testing could involve sending two emails with two different subject lines to half of your newsletter list. Just to see which subject lines performs better and generates more opens and clicks.

b) Website A/B testing could involve displaying one offer on your home page to some of your visitors and another offer to other visitors. Put another way, half of your visitors would see either offer 1 or offer 2.

The key takeaway from A/B Test Splits is making sure you maintain a controlled test to ensure what you are testing is really the two variables. Testing on different days of the week, or different times of the day can have an impact on your end results. And it may have nothing to do with the variables you are testing in the A/B test. Otherwise you could misread the test results and come to the wrong conclusions since the test was changed because of other factors.

What do you try and test?

You really need to decide what you want to test and try to keep it simple at first. Creating two offers or two emails can seem like doing more work at first. But if you don’t test you may not know what you are missing out on. Which could include higher clicks, more orders,  be more work upfront but can also have a big impact even for small changes.

What colors you choose and where you put your call to action buttons makes a difference in getting noticed.

For ideas on where you might get the best improvements look at what others are doing.

Online Resource for learning about A/B results – ABTests.com

ABTests.com is a great place to learn and share what A/B testing has done for others.  ABTests is providing an online directory highlighting success stories using A/B Testing.
A recent such case study highlights a Driving School that was able to achieve a 15% improvement on their home page.

To perform the home page testing they used Google’s Web Optimizer which is a free tool that you can use on your own website.

Big Takeaway

Increasing the visual weight of the primary call-to-action improved conversion.

Read the details

More Resources:

A/B Testing – Wikipedia

ABCs of A/B Testing from Google

Photo Credit: mil8 on Flickr

Possibly Related Posts:

• Defining Advertising Objectives for Small Business
• Small Businesses Raise Search Spend in 2009
• Great Call To Action Buttons
• Ways to Generate More Leads from Your Sub-Pages
• Effective Web Persuasion for Landing Page Conversion

All of your marketing efforts may be wasted if the call to action is not obvious. On your website, and landing pages call to action buttons are key to your marketing success.

1. Choose your words with care

We are talking about action buttons. So you should use verbs to indicate buttons are actions to take. Examples include “Download”, “Order Now”,”Buy Now”,etc.

What is your user trying to do? If you are used to hearing your customers say “give me a quote”, your call to action would be? “Request Quote”, for that type of request. Using this type of thought pattern will help you to create effective call to action buttons. Use the same words your customers use, and not industry terms or wording that is overkill. Simple is better.

2. Emphasis (color, size and positioning)

Make sure you emphasize the action items. What is it that you want your customer do on your website or order page. It goes without saying but don’t make me think about what I need to do. You want your action buttons to be big, and use high contrast to stand out. Some readers just scan pages and you want them to zero in on the call to action.

All three points should really be separate topics.

a) Which colors you use will have a dramatic effect even if the wording and positioning are the same. Some people have emotional responses to color like red or black. And color can help cut through the clutter.

b) Size will help to stand out too. If you create a large button it will be easy to see. Even if you are not reading the visual queues, and written instructions on the page.

c) Positioning the action button on the bottom left can help. Remember people read from left to right. Of course if you want you can also move the button to the right of the marketing text and keep it surrounded by a white background.

3) Too many Action Buttons

If you have one or two action buttons that is plenty. Keep your landing page simple with as few distractions as possible. You may have noticed when clicking on a search engine ad that you are directed to a landing page and not a company’s website. This is because in order to make sure you get the desired action you need to focus on leading the reader to the next step.

Real Examples:

PBWorks.com

Things

For more information on Landing Page marketing we have an earlier post titled:

Effective Web Persuasion for Landing Page Conversion

Possibly Related Posts:

• Defining Advertising Objectives for Small Business
• Small Businesses Raise Search Spend in 2009
• A/B Test Splits and How to use them
• Ways to Generate More Leads from Your Sub-Pages
• Effective Web Persuasion for Landing Page Conversion