Having an eCommerce website is tougher now than it ever was. While every visitor counts, just having traffic does not mean sales. Online retailers can spend huge amounts of money on advertisements, but then lose out on customers due to little things such as confusing product pages, ineffective call to actions, or difficult checkouts.
What is exciting about the whole situation is that to optimize your online store, you actually do not have to operate from mere assumptions. By doing A/B testing, you are able to get a true picture of customers’ reactions through the data and not just your personal guesses. You don’t have to be lost on which one between a design or a message will turn out to be the winner; just test your versions and you’ll find out from the data.
Through this blog, we’ll guide you on how it is to run a small business using the principle of testing two versions at a time (a.k.a. A/B testing), the tests that you can try first, and how certain tools like CRO Forge assist businesses to make more sales, without any doubt.
Why Online Businesses Rely on A/B Testing
Minor enhancements can result in a big uplift of turnover. Let’s consider that your virtual shop has 20, 000 visits per month and the average number of sales you can expect is 2% i.e., 400 customers. With the introduction of A/B testing which boosts your conversion rate of your shop from 2% to 2.5%, you will be able to get an extra approximate 100 orders a month, no need to spend more on advertising. This is exactly what major players do, they continuously analyze and optimize all aspects of the shoppers’ experience.
Advantages of Online Stores to Use A/B Testing
Conversion Rates can increase
It happens on so many occasions that modifying only one element (e.g. your text banner, photo or CFA) will cause more clients to complete your form and be a buyer. You need not redo everything about your shop; it is simply the targeted changes that will create the difference and the positive results will be clearly visible.
User Experience Gets a Lift
Shopping becomes such a breeze for them and of course, customers are happier when this is the case. Testing the difference between versions of a site, or part of it, allows you to find out which is more pleasing for your potential clients, which layout they will find easier to navigate, and so on. Satisfied customers are also those who are more apt to keep coming back to your shop.
Reduce Cart Abandonment
Numerous customers will add goods to their shopping cart but not be able to complete their order. Change the way the payment page works, how the form is completed, whether payment choices appear, whether the shopping messages are shown, or if a trusted logo is displayed. All of these changes should boost completed orders and minimize shopper friction.
Improve Conversion Rates from Existing Traffic
Creating traffic with SEO or Google Ad campaigns is not cheap. Rather than focusing your energy solely on drawing more people to your site, you should consider A/B testing to see what you can do with your existing traffic to convert them more effectively. That is, you can achieve higher profits without adding money to your advertising.
Make Decisions Based on Evidence
People will give their thoughts on how a site should be designed. With A/B testing, decisions are based on results obtained through testing rather than personal preferences of individuals. The winning design becomes evident when there are clear results from the tests showing which one was more effective. Based on the information, the company can decide whether to make changes that are already available.
Common A/B Testing Errors
Dissatisfaction is not uncommon for some companies conducting experiments. One reason for this is that they are missing some essential methods that can make them obtain meaningful information.
Doing multiple tests at the same time
Sometimes, you change your headline, new pictures, call-to-act buttons, design your layout and even offer lower price all at once. In these cases, you probably can’t figure out exactly what element(s) caused the change in performance to you. To better understand your test results, you can limit your changes to one big component only for each test.
Finishing a test too early.
You are quite keen to end a test once you’ve seen a few numbers on the chart, which is quite right. You know this, though, early gains may come with great uncertainty. So, the best strategy would be to give your page enough time with new visitors to accumulate the data that would be statistically significant.
Overlooking mobile users
As most of the visitors from eCommerce are smartphones users, one variation that shows well on desktop computers may be of little help to users on mobile phones. Be careful and always check the results for different devices before drawing any conclusions.
Going only for big changes
As many business owners saw it, nothing less than a total redesign of the website was going to give them what they wanted. In reality, however, it is usually the tiny changes that yield huge results. Even now, you can expect conversion gains without expending much effort for little changes like fine-tuning your headlines or modifying your button text.
How CRO Forge Makes A/B Testing Simple
A lot of business operators are reluctant to perform A/B testing as they believe that it is too technological or that it demands a major team work. That’s why CRO Forge is there to help. CRO Forge is an ideal tool aimed to simplify your experimentation processes for a wide variety of users who may be from freelance to agencies and the growing businesses and even the startups as well. Thanks to its simple and interactive interface, you will be able to come up with the tests, check the variation of your ideas, see the performance at a glance, and based on the data make decisions that are not too burdensome technically.
Whatever pages you choose for the test, be it product, landing page, checkout flow or even marketing campaigns, CRO Forge will provide you with deep insights into what aspects are actually responsible for bringing in more conversions. Relying on the customer data instead of your gut can be a very valuable strategy. So your website will only get better over the years of using customer data.
Best Practices for Successful A/B Testing
These are the best approaches in case you want to get the most out of your tests:
- Decide on a main goal for your test at one time only.
- Make changes in the main aspect of your page that your version will focus on as well.
- Do not shorten the experiment too early, wait until the data is statistically significant.
- Target the most visited pages and test them first.
- Write down all you have tested and the results of the test.
- Find out the reasons for the losing tests by the winners and losers.
- Constantly improve your website rather the test as a singular event.
Leading online retail companies are always testing because customer behavior changes over time.
Final Thoughts
A/B testing used to be a privilege of big companies with big marketing departments and big budgets. But now, thanks to modern technologies, small businesses can also do it. This way they can rely on statistics rather on guesswork for changing their websites and launching new features.
Testing the effectiveness of your webpage features using A/B tests will lead to significant changes in both conversion and revenue. In many cases, a minor tweaking of your main pages like product descriptions or shopping cart, or even of the placement of the ‘buy now’ button, will make a huge difference. CRO Forge can help you do all the tests, analysis and optimization based on customer behavior instead of your own subjective preferences for your e-commerce venture. It only takes one test to realize how much more you could have been making online.
