In an e-commerce business, you don’t perceive your customers in real life to understand customer psychology and take the crucial steps to improve your business customer satisfaction. It’s all about keeping a tap on your user behaviour on your website to know about the customer journey. If you want to improve your business revenue by increasing sales and conversion you need to constantly try to improve the User-Experience (UX), Buyer’s Journey and Customer Satisfaction to the greatest possible extent.
But how can we come to know the best practices we can implement to improve the website functionality for a hassle-free buyer’s journey?
With Experience and far-fetched vision alongside best testing practices, it’s possible to attain our goal. Testing is a crucial step because it proves that the strategy we are planning is not just a mere vision or a wild instinct but a well-tested plan based on user response.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing, also known as a split test, is a method of examination to check which variation of two different functionalities of the webpage we have planned is useful to improve the desired goals (conversion, click-through rate) based on user participation.
A/B testing is a scientific method where the result is based on the traffic active participation and not just self-experimentation because the end user is your audience and they know better what their requirements are.
How is A/B Testing different from Multivariate Tests?
A/B testing is limited in finding out the best of two different variations of sample web pages, meanwhile, multivariate testing has multiple versions of sample web pages that can be identical with small differences. Both are used for the same purpose to test and find out the best results to serve a better user experience.
Now that we know what A/B testing is, let’s know what are the best practices to improve conversion by using A/B testing.
The very first step is to know the pain point of your buyer, at what step they are facing difficulty, what are the high bounce rate pages, what are the high-performance pages, etc by inspecting your buyer behaviour in Google Analytics.
To know, the facts in detail you can ask your buyer through surveys, reviews and feedback forms for some advice for a better user experience.
Different Ways to use A/B testing
Better navigation of the site
As we know, less complicated and easy-to-find navigation is preferred by any customer. For an e-commerce website, user-friendly navigation can reduce the bounce rate and increase the engagement rate. We can test which type of navigation gives better results. For example,
First: A homepage with Breadcrumbs navigation showing the hierarchy of the different categories and subcategories on the top of the menu. or
Second: A vertical navigation system where the categories are aligned in a vertical alignment where each category has sliding options to navigate.
To test which type of landing page gives a better return
A landing page is the first page that is displayed in front of your audience after clicking the link. A/B testing can help to determine which of the two types of landing pages is preferable to the customers and gives better conversion and returns.
The description of product features
We can test how we can improve the conversion by adjusting the Product Page based on the information about the product, and the Call-to-action button, like the Add-To-Cart 🛒 OR Buy Now button to decrease the Abandoned Cart Rate of the product.
We can test by
First: Displaying the benefits they will incur by shopping such as discounts, offers, EMI options etc increases the chances of an add-to-cart option or even further conversion. Or
Second: Showing the product features and specifications will increase the chance of conversion.
The Call-to-action button and the email submission form
The call-to-action buttons like Buy now, add to cart, sign in, log in, Premium Membership, etc with the format and timings of the form pop-ups also impact the conversion rate.
You can test the placement of the Call-to-action button above the product, on the side of the product, or bottom of the product, the creative variation of action buttons the colour, font size, etc you can examine which version is getting more Clicks and more conversions to carry out for real.
On the other hand, you can test the subscription form pop-ups by examining at which stage people like to submit a form, should you immediately give pop-ups after clicking on the landing page link or should you give the form after a certain action like clicking on the product link to analyse which version is better to have a better conversion rate.
✉️ Email Marketing Campaign
Emails are a good medium to attract, engage and maintain customer relations. But you can’t simply send e-mails to your audiences, A/B testing should be used to analyse which template gets more clicks, which subject line grabs more attention, etc and use the one with greater response.
Product Images
Product images imprint a strong impression on conversion rate. Find out which type of images does affect the transition of converting a visitor into a buyer.
For example, you can test whether showing a 360-degree spin image with a large size has greater clicks and more conversions or whether infographic images give more clicks.
Highlighting the reviews
We are well aware that reviewers consider reviews social proof for increasing conversions but the thing is where to display it and how to highlight it so that it is conspicuous enough to see at first sight.
For example, you can check whether placing reviews and comments just after the product has a greater purchasing rate or at the bottom of the page just before the Call-to-action button.
Payment Procedure & Shipment 🚚
“Free Home Delivery” and “ Free Installation” are the common criteria that attract and motivate a buyer to purchase a product. If delivery charges or payment procedures might be the case of a high bounce rate or low conversion you should analyse what improvements you can make from your end to encourage the customers to engage and take crucial steps till the very end.
Conclusion
A/B testing is a crucial component for Conversion Rate Optimisation. But it does require adhered experience and knowledge to make hypotheses and experiments based on the experience and knowledge one has.
