A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the method of splitting your audience in two, and showcasing them two different campaigns or marketing material you have created. The aim is to see how your audience reacts to the piece of content. The way each group reacts, their feedback, and the metrics you gather can all be used to predict which campaign will be more successful. For example, you’ve created two separate landing pages, but aren’t too sure which one to put live. An A/B test will help you to gather in-depth insight into the two different web pages you have created and make a choice depending on the results. 

Benefits of A/B testing:

• It’s free!: Need I say more? While there are paid tools available that can help you with A/B testing, most of it can be done without a fancy platform or an expensive tool. For example, let’s say you’ve created an email campaign, and you have options between two subject lines. You’ve gathered your team together to decide which one packs a punch. However, after countless debates, and multiple sighs, you and your team are still yet to come up with a decision. Who knew something as little as a subject line could cause so much tension in the office? Your only hope is to see how your audience replies. But what if they like both? What if they don’t like any? Well there’s only one way to find out – A/B testing! You’ve split your audience in half and sent out both emails, each with their own subject line. You continue with your daily tasks, and log back into MailChimp (or whatever platform you use) at the end of the day to see that the results are in. There’s a clear winner as you sigh a sigh of relief. All that tension in the office for nothing! You send out the email to the rest of your audience, and the campaign is a success. And you didn’t even need to send a single penny!
• Make better decisions: Did the above story not teach you anything? With A/B testing you can make much clearer and informed decisions based on actual results and metrics, completely eliminating the guesswork. You’ll not only feel more confident about the decision you’re making, but also know that the decision you choose is the correct one. It is the one that is centred around your audience and their preferences. 
• Continuous improvement: Sometimes A/B testing isn’t always about finding the end result. When A/B testing is carried out properly, you’ll find gathering feedback and data that can be used to improve and refine your campaign. Even if one campaign outperforms the other, the data you gather from the other campaign doesn’t have to go to waste. This data can still be used to enhance and improve the overall campaign. For example if you’ve sent out two different versions of a landing page, you may find yourself receiving the same feedback over and over again. This could be about the images used, layout of the page or even the headlines. Regardless of the type of feedback you receive, applying it can help you to amplify the overall quality of your work.
• Learn more about your audience: One of the most important aspects of marketing is forever learning about your audience. You may feel like you know it all, but your audience isn’t just one person that you can analyse and know everything. It’s a group of individual people who have a couple things in common and are interested in your product, service, or brand. Continuously expanding the knowledge you have about your target audience helps you to create content based around their needs, wants, pain points, preferences, and much much more. By carrying out A/B testing, you’ll figure out what your audience values in a campaign, which can be used in the future to introduce and implement certain elements that you know your audience will love.

Here are a list of things you can A/B test:

1. Design: 

A/B testing can help you choose between two designs you may have, and choose the one that your customers are more drawn to create a seamless user experience.

2. Subject line

Subject lines are one of the most important aspects of email marketing. And regardless of how good your email campaign is, if the subject isn’t click-worthy, no one is going to see all that hard work you put in. A/B testing can help you decide which subject is better, simply based on the open rate.

3. Copy:

We’ve all heard the saying ‘copy is king’. (I much prefer ‘copy is queen’, but I guess it doesn’t have the same ring to it). And regardless of how much you try and deny that, the copy you put out will really represent your brand and business, which is why it is key to find the copy that make readers wanna take action. 

4. Pricing and offers:

Some offers just sounds better than other. Buy one get one free seems so much more enticing than 50% off, even though it’s near enough the same thing. So experiment with different pricing strategies and promotional offers, and see what your customers respond to more and which one has a higher conversion rate.

5. Content length:

Many businesses are still under the assumption that writing lengthy content is always better. However, depending factors such as your industry, target demographic, and type of content, shorter-form content may just be the winner. Test out different content length to determine the ideal length. Some metrics you need to look out are bounce rates, conversion rates, and time spent on page.

6. Social media posting:

A social media hack that social media gurus have been banging on about is posting at the right time. However, each platform has it’s own best time to post. And even though, you can search up the best time to post, your followers may not even be awake to engage with your posts. With A/B testing you can try out different posting times and frequencies of posts to find the optimal schedule to suit your business. This will help to maximise engagement and get your posts seen by a larger majority of your followers.