While traffic may be a nuisance for your morning commute, it’s one of the key ingredients needed to effectively grow your business.
But once you get visitors to your website, how do you convert them? How do you ensure that you are getting the most value out of all of your traffic? That’s where A/B testing comes in.
The best A/B test give meaningful feedback to improve your website’s messaging and experience to better funnel users into conversion actions, such as demo requests, sign ups, or contact form fill outs. Running the right A/B test is important because A/B testing without strategic direction can often lead to misleading or insignificant results.
In this post, we’ve outlined the top 10 mind-blowing examples of A/B testing that you should try out ASAP.
What We’ll Cover:
- A/B Testing Explained
- Top A/B Testing Tools and Resources
- 10 Best A/B Test Examples
- Benefits of A/B Testing
A/B Testing Explained
A/B testing is a randomized experiment that allows you to compare marketing assets side-by-side and see which one performs better.
For example, let’s say you’re starting a new campaign from scratch and are unsure of which direction to take.
You might be speculating that your copy isn’t as effective as you’d like to be.
To resolve this, you can utilize A/B split testing to create multiple versions of your website with either minor or significant details changed, and then distribute your site visitors to each version in accordance with a predetermined ratio. Typically, A/B tests will split traffic 50/50, but you can choose any ratio.
Keep in mind—you can test everything from headings, subheadings, call to action buttons, page copy, page structure, images and graphics, and the various other features that influence the user’s decision-making. You can also test other marketing assets, like emails, videos, and ads.
An A/B test that’s properly set up, with the right controls, and with an adequate sample size that can give you statistically significant data can help you determine which elements are most persuasive to the visitor. The end result being higher conversion rates.
It’s never enough to settle for one A/B test. Doing so will give you limited data to work with and the elements you’re testing.
The more you test, the more you’ll be able to learn about your target audience and uncover new ways to convert more visitors into leads, and more leads into loyal customers.
Top A/B Testing Tools and Resources
Now that you know what your procedure should look like, it’s time to implement these tests.
Not everyone who runs a company has a computer engineering or programming background.
The good news is you don’t need either to conduct an A/B test.
Here are a few tools and resources to help you get started:
Google Analytics
From redirect tests to server-side experiments, Google Analytics offers plenty of data collecting and A/B testing solutions for free.
Optimizely
Optimizely is a leading conversion rate optimization platform, offering a comprehensive suite of tools, ranging from multi-page testing, advanced targeting and segmentation, and a visual editor that makes it easy to build variations code-free.
VWO
While similar to Optimizely, VWO is far more budget-friendly. Another feature that VWO brings to the table is behavioral segmentation, which enables users to target audiences in a way that many of the expensive tools do not.
Convertize
One of the best A/B test tools around, Convertize is an affordable personalization and A/B testing platform that delivers a drag-and-drop visual editor, as well as lightning mode, which loads pages faster during tests.
Unbounce
If you’re looking to maximize conversions on your landing page, Unbounce is a great option. Plus, it also features a visual builder, popups and sticky bars, as well as extensive integrations.
10 Best A/B Test Examples
It may be helpful to examine some real-life cases so you can perfect your own technique.
Below, we’ve listed some of the top ways brands have leveraged A/B testing to their advantage:
1. Humana—Web Banner
Humana is a popular health insurance site that hired a marketing agency to run a series of A/B tests in which two different banners were tested on their homepage.
Their first banner was cluttered with copy and lacked an easily identifiable call to action. With the control, they streamlined the design and introduced a bolder, more attention-grabbing call to action button. This led to a colossal 433% increase in click-throughs on their site, representing one of the best A/B testing examples on this list.
They also replaced the background photos and the text on the button to read “Shop Medicare Plans” instead of “Get started now,” which received an additional 192% increase in clicks.
Image Courtesy: Design For Founders
2. Rasmussen College—Mobile
Websites that aren’t optimized for mobile don’t load quickly on mobile devices, which is a recipe for a higher bounce rate. Given the fact that 37% of Americans access the internet using their smartphones, Rasmussen College took this into account when designing their landing page.
Their goal was to create a new mobile-friendly site that featured a better click-through menu that didn’t constantly need to be zoomed-in.
Following the launch of their new mobile-only website, conversion rates increased by 256%.
3. Olympic Store—Checkout
Whenever we shop online, we’re likely to encounter a sign-up or log-in form when we’re looking to make a purchase. However, this can lead to people abandoning the checkout process halfway through.
Wanting to avoid missing out on potential sales opportunities, the Olympic Store decided to take a different approach. Instead of having their customers register prior to checking out, they decided to give their customers the option to opt in towards the end of the process.
By implementing this method, completed purchases grew by more than 20%.
This isn’t surprising as making this procedure more straightforward and reducing the number of steps needed to checkout will always improve conversion rates. It gives users exactly what they want without having to jump through too many hoops.
Image Courtesy: Design For Founders
4. Yuppiechief—Navigation
While navigation bars, footers, and sidebars may seem useful in many instances, it can be distracting to your visitors.
Removing it can lead to an increase in conversions as evident with this example from Yuppiechief, a popular Cape Town-based online retailer of kitchen products.
As part of their A/B testing efforts, Yuppiechef got rid of its navigation and saw a staggering 100% increase in conversion rate.
Image Courtesy: Design For Founders
5. Performable—Call to Action Buttons
It would be an understatement to say that your call to action is important in determining how customers engage with your site. You want the message to be clear, but you also want to consider its surrounding elements and color scheme.
Testing different colors is a simple way to create contrast with your call to action.
For Performable, the company found that when “Get Started Now!’ was set against a red background, it received a 21% higher conversion rate than the green background in the split test.
Color makes a difference, but there’s no single color that converts across industries. It all depends on your audience.
6. Highrise—Subheading
A CRM tool called Highrise demonstrated that something as simple as A/B testing subheadings can drastically affect your conversion rates. By changing the subheading to inform visitors that signing up is quick and easy, clicks increased by 30%.
What’s great about this example is it shows that while making small-scale changes isn’t time-consuming, it can lead to much better results for your business.
Image Courtesy: Design For Founders
7. RummyCircle—Facebook Ad
India’s premiere rummy gaming site decided to test how different content on Facebook ads affected their sign-ups. They found that in previous testing with desktop users, the more engaged users were far more likely to click through to the gaming site.
The more they commented, the more lead generation they received for the site.
But when testing for their mobile site, they noticed that asking for comments actually lead to a decrease in conversions to the email list.
Image Courtesy: Design For Founders
8. NuFACE—Incentive
NuFACE is an anti-aging skin company that was seeking to enhance their online presence and ultimately boost sales. Although many of their potential customers expressed interest in their products, they weren’t taking the final step and completing their purchase.
They came up with the best A/B test for their business, offering a free shipping incentive to all orders exceeding $75.
This incentive ended up increasing orders by 90% and the average order value by 7.32%.
Offering potential customers an incentive to buy increases the likelihood of them buying now.
It’s estimated that the average ecommerce store loses more than 75% of its sales because of cart abandonment.
Offering free shipping will not only increase the likelihood of someone buying from you, but the average order value will climb as well.
9. ContentVerve—Placement
ContentVerve is a content marketing blog created by Michael Aagaard, an experienced conversion rate optimization expert.
Michael wanted to showcase some of the top customer testimonials on his downloads page and see if conversions would improve by altering the placement of the testimonials.
Dividing the testimonials into sections (two above and two below the call to action) ended up increasing conversions by nearly 65%.
In the control, visitors needed to scroll down to see the testimonials and in the test, they were much easier to see.
10. Underwater Audio—Messaging
Underwater Audio, a manufacturer of waterproof swimming accessories, was looking to experiment with both copy and design elements of their website to see if sales would increase.
Redesigning the information resulted in a 40.81% boost in sales.
In the initial version, they stated that headphones could be worm for “most activities.” In the second version, they made a concerted effort to list out the specific types of activities customers can enjoy.
Benefits of A/B Testing
In addition to proving how A/B testing can impact your strategy in the short-term, it can also help you prioritize how to proceed in the future.
According to Kyle Rush, VP of Engineering at Casper, “With A/B testing, you have so much more knowledge for what to roll out 3-to-4 years out.”
Here’s a high-level overview of some of the benefits you can expect with testing:
- Improved user experience
- Higher conversion rates
- Lower bounce rates
- Reduced risks
- Increased revenue
- Actionable results
Wrapping Up
In today’s cutthroat market, if you want your marketing campaign to be successful, testing your work frequently is critical.
Optimizing even the smallest details can put you light years ahead of your competitors, and A/B testing makes it easy to gain insights into what components need to be tweaked.
Let these A/B testing examples serve as sources of inspiration to motivate you to start experimenting with your own deliverables and find out what your customers really want and expect from your brand.
