What on Earth Is A/B Testing All About?

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Imagine that you’re in a new city, your phone’s dead and you need information to get to a location. You stop the first person you see (let’s call them A) and ask for directions. A responds with a lot of “I think” and “I’m not too sure”, leaving you more confused than before.

So you stop another person (we’ll call this person B). Now B gives you very clear and precise directions; landmarks included as well and even draws out a map. It’s quite obvious whose opinion we’d place faith in because information backed with proof saves time and effort.

As a decision maker, you’d want to rely on marketing initiatives backed by concrete data. When you know that a certain method works better than its alternative, you’d obviously opt for it because it gives you better result.

As a decision maker, you want to rely on marketing initiatives backed by concrete data.

Fortunately, thanks to a component of digital marketing known as A/B testing, your marketing team can conduct experiments to get insightful data as to what your potential or existing customer respond better to.

In a nutshell, say your marketing team has created an email about your product. To conduct an A/B test they will create a variation of the original email with one* change made to it. The change could be made to the title of the email, length of content, call to action, tone of content, visuals or the content type itself (video, infographic, article etc).
*Marketers are discouraged from making changes to more than one element because it’ll be difficult to identify which element triggered the change in response compared to the original email.

Once your team gets the data analytics of the difference in response between the original and variation email, they can find out what works  or what doesn’t. The result of an A/B test is usually determined based on the difference in click through rates, open rates, response to call to action etc.

So does your marketing team need carry it out? Yes and no. While insight gathered through A/B tests can help your team create content or marketing campaigns in the future that would produce better results, it shouldn’t be treated as the only method metric.

Interested in A/B tests or other digital marketing methods? Get in touch with us!

 

About Lava Protocols

Lava Protocols is a Malaysian digital solutions provider and has experience consulting, designing and implementing digital marketing solutions.  

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