Ready To Start A/B Testing Your Website? Fuel Your Strategy With These 7 A/B Testing Ideas

Designing a website for an online retail business involves many difficult decisions. Every headline, call to action, and link requires a choice between multiple options that can ultimately impact what visitors do on the page. It’s impossible to determine how each and every choice will impact customer interactions on the site. Thankfully, you can analyze the situation and fine-tune your webpages by conducting split (or A/B) tests on the influential elements of your site.

A/B testing has long been an integral component of conversion rate optimization. You want users to have a great experience and patronize your business. You can use trusted methods to make sure every aspect of your site is fine-tuned and helping visitors become customers.

If you’re interested in a breakdown of A/B testing tools, check out our guide to the Best A/B Testing Tools for your Conversion Optimization Toolkit.

How A/B Testing Can Benefit an Ecommerce Site

Just like a physical retailer needs an inviting storefront, excellent signage, and a store that is easy to navigate, online retailers need a website that increases the likelihood of visitors making a purchase. Running A/B tests will bring confidence that the content, imagery, and design choices you are making are helping - not hurting - in helping customers in their journey. Benefits of A/B testing include:

• Incremental improvement to the user experience
• Increased visitor engagement across the site experience
• Data-driven decisions about the customer experience
• Increased order conversion rates on the site
• Increased basket size (or Average Order Value)

Base Your A/B Testing On Your Unique Customers

When determining the best way to complete a project, people often use generalizations or heuristics to make decisions. When data isn’t available, it makes sense to use generalizations - but with digital experiences, we have the data at our fingertips to make better and more specific decisions.

A/B testing offers a more refined approach.The test results will provide data specific to your site and your particular customers. Rather than relying on an assumption that what works somewhere else will work for your customers, you can measure and determine what is actually effective for your unique customers.

7 Website Elements To Test On Visitors

It’s always a good idea to test a wide variety of elements on your site. That way, you can make sure you’re optimizing your experience across your site. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to run additional tests beyond your initial goals, consider these elements for tests.

Headlines

An effective headline should inform readers while effectively grabbing their attention. You can run tests to determine which of several headlines encourages the most sales for an online business. Each industry and specialization has its own dynamics, and testing can help bring clarity to your message and better connect you with your audience.

Copy

For general overviews and descriptions, you should test which blurbs drive the most conversions. You’ll find that phrasing and word choice can have a surprisingly significant effect on conversions. Copy is everywhere on our sites, and we often don’t have visitors full attention, so it’s important to be precise and clear.

Testimonials

It’s hard to estimate which testimonials will be most relatable for visitors. You might think the most glowing reviews are more influential, but a more subtle tone could prove beneficial. A few tests will allow you to make this determination. We also find that the placement of these testimonials are influential, so make sure to test where to put this information.

Call To Action Text

The calls to action (CTA) are the most important pieces of text on your entire site. A visitor’s encounter with a CTA represents the make-or-break moment when they decide to move further down the funnel or not. That’s why it’s so important to A/B test your CTA in order to optimize your site for conversions. You should also consider where the CTAs appear. Visitors need to have clear, visible guidance through the site, and well-placed CTAs can highlight the recommended journey for customers.

Links

Getting visitors to click on the links that take them to other pages in your site is also important. These are the smaller events that eventually lead customers down the path of making their final purchase. You need to test the location and wording of your links to make sure they’re as effective as possible.

Placing Items Above Or Below The Fold

Some content will be immediately visible upon entering your website or a particular page. This information is said to be “above the fold.” Anything that can only be seen after scrolling downward is considered “below the fold.”

You need to determine how different information performs when they’re located above or below the fold. You can’t make everything immediately visible on your site without overcrowding the screen and overwhelming visitors. That’s why it’s so important to A/B test and find out what elements really need a prominent position on each page to strengthen the focus of your site in order to be successful.

An Entire Landing Page

You might have different purposes for each landing page.In order to determine the efficacy of a number of elements at once, you could consider running tests on an entire landing page. While focusing on individual components is standard practice, this comprehensive approach gives you an opportunity to test divergent concepts or offerings.

Start Planning Tests To Improve Your Site’s User Experience

Without A/B testing, you’ll only be guessing at what works and what doesn’t on your site. A/B Testing is the only way to methodically improve user experience, increase your conversions, and boost your overall sales.

Consider filling out the Conversion Report Card today to start your CRO journey. This report card graded personally by the Experiment Zone team will give you three actionable and personalized insights, including testing ideas, to improve your website’s conversion rate.

Ready to get serious about testing? Talk with the experts from Experiment Zone to get A/B tests up and running on your site to lock in a higher ROI on your website and boost your conversion rates today.