Experimenting is a great way to improve your business – and we’re not talking about the exploding volcano experiments from your high school science fairs. One of the best forms of experimentation is A/B testing or split testing. Even if you’ve heard of this term you may be wondering “What is a split test?”, “What does ecommerce A/B testing look like?”, and probably most importantly “How do I run an A/B test?”. We’ll cover all of these topics and more in this post so let’s dive right in. What is A/B testing? A/B testing, or split testing, is a tool that marketers use to test the performance of a certain variable with their audience. It’s a great way to get real-time insights and feedback from your audience. “A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a marketing experiment wherein you split your audience to test a number of variations of a campaign and determine which performs better. In other words, you can show version A of a piece of marketing content to one half of your audience, and version B to another.” Hubspot Let’s look at a very basic example – if we wanted to see which blog post title would lead to more visitors on this page we might test the 2 following titles: What is A/B Testing with Practical Ecommerce Examples A/B Testing for Ecommerce: A Beginner’s Guide We would create two versions of this post, one with title A and one with title B, leaving the rest of the post completely the same. We would then set our test so that half our audience was exposed to the first version and half got the second version. We could then analyze which version got more reads, click-throughs on CTAs, and engagement. Then we would know which title to permanently leave on this post. This is just one example, but there are hundreds of variables you can A/B test (but more on that later). Why is A/B testing important? We know what you’re thinking – why would I do twice the work and make two versions of my campaigns? I don’t have enough time as it is! Here’s the thing – effective A/B testing can actually save you time and money in the long run. And the best part is, you don’t have to (and definitely shouldn’t) A/B test every part of your business. Effectively testing only the key elements of your business will help you to effectively spend less resources to gain more traction with your customers. Some of the biggest benefits you can experience from strategic A/B testing are: Increased conversion rates and higher return on investment (ROI) Improved user experience (UX) through leveraging live customer feedback Reduced customer acquisition costs (CAC) Increased purchase frequency rate Reduced churn rate and cart abandonment rates Increased email open rate Allows data-driven decision making Can prevent expensive and time-consuming relaunch or redesign projects Customer trends change daily so launching a website and logging off won’t cut it these days. Consistently testing and challenging your business’ standards helps to ensure you’re always set for success. How to effectively run an A/B test? Running an A/B test does not need to be complicated. Breaking it down into five key steps like A/B testing company VWO has done in their infographic makes it manageable for even the smallest of brands with limited time and resources. Let’s take a look at each step in more detail here. A/B testing checklist Step 1: Research The first step in any good experiment is research, research, research. Studying your brand’s current performance is key to determining what elements you should be testing. You will want to analyze your current performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). This can include checking your website performance with tools like Google Analytics, your social media performance with Facebook or Instagram Analytics, or even your email marketing results with your preferred customer relationship management software like Hubspot or Mailchimp. No matter what metrics you are looking at, ensure that you are comparing them to your previo...