 For A.B. testing, you need to follow good scientific best practices. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody, welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, alongside my co-host, Beth Poptyglov, and we are excited about today's show. We're going to be talking about five things that you should be A.B. testing right now. We're going to be bringing you some ideas, some things that we're seeing in the marketplace that are going to help you be more effective in your marketing. It's going to be an awesome show. Zach, I'm really excited to talk about A.B. testing because we've been talking a ton this year about how to break through the ceiling of the marketing results that you have been able to achieve in the past. And one of the best ways to do that is experimenting and trying a new thing. It's the old saying, if you do what you've always done, you're going to get what you've always gotten. And A.B. testing is an excellent way to stick your toe into the waters of trying something new that's not going to just totally blow up in your face or may not get you the exact results that you are expecting. So if you are in a proven channel and looking for ways to expand the results that you're getting, A.B. testing is an excellent way to see how you can get increased results in a place that you already feel really solid from a strategy and tactics standpoint. Just for perspective for listeners, you hear A.B. testing, you're like, okay, like, is this really applicable to me? If you can A.B. test the conversion rate of your website, you know, your average website converts it, you know, one to 2%. If you can increase it to 3%, I mean, you're literally increasing the number of leads that you're getting by 50%. And one of the best ways that we've seen that work and how we do that is through continual improvement of traffic sources, content, calls to action, everything, a part of the entire digital journey. And oh, by the way, the benefit of all that is you get to learn more about what actually moves your customer, what moves them to the point of action. So let's dive in, Beth. For listeners, why don't you just give a 3000 foot view for those who don't know what in the world is A.B. testing, and then what do you need to have in place to do that? A.B. testing, just to get the definition out there and make sure that we're all meaning the same thing or understanding the same thing about when we say A.B. testing is creating two versions of the same thing that are identical in almost always, except for one very specific element that is going to vary on one of the pieces. So as an example, this could be something like the subject line on an email. The email copy is going to be the same. The subject line would change. Or on an ad, the copy for the ad could be the same, but the image would be different or the image is the same and the headline is different. So you're changing one variable, but sharing those two pieces to the same audience and then measuring and comparing the results to see what gets you the best results for what you want to achieve. One important plug I would put here before we move on is that for A.B. testing, you need to follow good scientific best practices. And what that means is it's really tempting to change everything. If a landing page isn't converting, you just throw the whole thing out. But if you're going to do a true A.B. test, you need to have a one variable change so that you know what's actually moving the needle. And that's why really A.B. testing can't fail because if you think your messaging is wrong and you change it on one ad or one landing page and not the other. And then you see that a different messaging actually performs worse. You haven't failed what you've done is learned. You've learned that no, our messaging is dialed in. Maybe my form is too long. Maybe the offer isn't interesting or the images aren't hitting or it's SEO, or you're able to start with the process of elimination in order to get increased results. The other thing here too that's important to think about is making sure you have a large enough data set, which is, which is just a fancy way of saying are there enough eyeballs on the asset or the test that you're viewing. So for example, if you launched a new page on your site or you launched a new ad and you want to A.B. test something, well, you can't have five people to view that because it's not a large enough data set to understand is that, is that test that you're running conclusive enough to know that it's actually true or it's just an outlier. So for example, if we're doing an A.B. test on let's say an ad set that we're creating for a client, we want to make sure that there's hundreds if not thousands of different eyeballs on that ad to ensure that we can feel very confident that conclusively the change or the A or B test or whatever it is actually performs better. And it's not just an outlier group of a data set that's not large enough to be conclusive. So that's one little caveat is like, don't go in and like, hey, let's A.B. test everything that you don't have enough data. You want to make sure you have enough people actually viewing it. Here's one other things that I would say that I think marketers can sometimes get wrong just from the potential of A.B. testing is so excited that we can hit the ground running without being really thoughtful before getting started. And the number one thing I would say you need when you're going to start A.B. testing is you have to know what you're trying to learn or what are you trying to achieve. So that means that what are you, what's the goal that you are either not achieving or that you've hit and you want to see if you can increase and make sure that you have those metrics and those KPIs to measure against before you determine what you want to test and how you want to test it. You hear us talk a lot on the show about if it matters, then you have to measure it or what's measured is managed and what's managed is measured. If you don't have KPIs goals, specific things in place that you're trying to achieve, it'll be very difficult to one agree on what should be tested and why to create the right type of test to incrementally go after those increased results. And then three to know whether or not it was successful and to be able to put that same effort into an additional A.B. test on and another to be able to put that same effort that goes into creating the A.B. test on another digital piece of collateral in the future. So Beth, why don't you kick us off and share one of the first things that you think people should be A.B. testing. So one of the easiest places to start, if you want to start A.B. testing right now is headlines or email subject lines. So you can test the headlines on your blog articles. You can test it on your case studies. This is even something that you could test on the introduction of sales outreach. So if your sales team does cold email outreach or is trying to reengage cold customers who used to buy from you and or may be buying less, that headline or hook is a great thing to test or email subject lines. If you are looking to get more opens on your newsletter or on the emails that you send, try testing different ways of going after subject lines. And importantly here, you want to make it significantly different. I wouldn't bother trying to test, you know, saying it versus it is or something that's very incremental. Have significant changes. Take a big swing when it comes to testing headlines and subject lines, because you're trying to really figure out what grabs your audience's attention or try starting with something that's very controversial or a significant hard perspective that you think people would have a really strong reaction to instead of leading in with just a product name or something like update. So for example, here, Beth, one thing that we do is we'll maybe test our email subject line to our list, which has 20, 30,000 people on it. And for listeners, we'll test things like let's do the same exact subject line, but let's throw an emoji at the front of it, which sounds, you say it loud. When you say that, it sounds ridiculous. It's interesting to see in certain scenarios, it performs better or worse. And then what we do is we'll actually send a thousand with an emoji, a thousand without, without, and then we'll figure out, okay, which one performs the best we then send it to the other 18,000 people on our list. So there's different ways to apply that across the board because you get long-term learnings and short-term, which is the best way to approach it. Another AB test that you should be thinking about is CTAs. When I think about CTAs, I mainly think about Amazon because I don't know if you'll remember this. There used to be this really strange add to cart button on Amazon. You've got corners on the left and on the top left and bottom left of the, of the button, but the right side of it, and we'll try to include this in the show notes. The right side of it is like a circle. So it's like, left side, like top left, bottom left is, is like a hard 90 degree angle. And the entire right side of the button had like an arrow that was, you know, a half semi circle. So it was an actual corner on the button. Years ago, I read an article about that, how that was actually an AB test that came out from them, figuring out which button would produce the highest conversion rate. And at that moment in time and culture, like that performed the best. Now, if you go there now, it's like a normal yellow button, but it's because they're always testing that to go, okay, is our, is our standard, is it improving or is it, or is it, you know, declining? Uh, Google did the same exact thing. Again, don't quote me on this, but I think they tested something like 30 or 40 shades of blue to figure out which shade of blue converted the best in certain scenarios and they're like, well, this is the blue we're going to use for our entire brand because it performed the best online. Simple CTA alterations from both copy as well as design can have a pretty big impact. The other thing we recommend from a CTA standpoint is testing location on a page. So the higher up on a page, for example, versus low on a page, does it perform better? Um, do you put sub copy with that CTA or not? Do you create urgency or put an arrow next to it? All of these little things add up and compound to improve conversion rate, which ultimately improves dollars in the bank because you are getting more leads into your pipeline. Here's a great way if you want to test your CTAs, this is an easy audit that you could do to start to put an A B test for CTAs in place. CTAs will perform significantly better if a user or person on your website knows exactly what is going to happen on the other end of that CTA. So as an example, a lot of the times there's general CTA buttons that say things like contact us, learn more. Those aren't bad, but they're not necessarily directly related to an action. And sometimes it really is learn more. It's going to take me to a product page. But if you're using learn more from a conversion point, not just a take me to another page point, you're likely losing people who don't know that that would get them to download a brochure or something like that. So just simply changing those general vague CTA buttons to download now or get started or something that's very action oriented and very clearly tied to an outcome. You'll likely see an increase in conversions. And since it's A B testing and you'll be measuring it, if I'm wrong, you can change it back and you'll, but you'll still have learned whether or not you need to look to make those types of changes throughout your site. Another thing to look at is actually the layout of an individual page or a landing page. Now, this is a bit of a bigger lift than a CTA A B test or an email subject line test. But if you're seeing that you have a landing page that's entirely dedicated to downloading a case study or downloading a brochure or something like that, which is honestly a great idea. And it's not getting the conversions that you want. It may not be that people aren't interested in what you have to offer. It might actually be that the layout is either stopping people from scrolling or just not keeping them engaged or spoiler alert likely has tons and tons of text. So you actually can incorporate some of the other suggestions that we've talked about in the A B testing into landing pages. So that would be creating really clear sections that's going to give very bite sized, clear information. Consider moving CTAs up higher on that landing page or just throwing the whole thing out, looking for really great landing page examples and then applying that to your site. There's no need to reinvent the wheel here for basically all of digital marketing. There's proven examples and proven formats for so much of what we do. If what you're doing is underperforming, go and see what people are doing that's working really well and figure out a way to incorporate that into your own strategy. You don't have to come up with a net new idea, figure out what's already working and then bring that into what you want to do, which leads us to our fourth potential A V test, Beth, which I'm glad we structured them. The layout of this episode this way because you go from landing pages but also thinking about your ad copy, making sure that your ad copy, you're testing that to also perform alongside of the landing page or wherever you're driving traffic to is really important. So not just simply testing different value propositions, but testing things like how are you addressing the person or the viewer? So for example, if you're targeting contractors and you're running a Facebook campaign, test the test leading with the value prop or test actually addressing the contractor directly. So attention plumbers, like you're actually getting people to stop and think versus, hey, do you have an issue with your plumbing equipment or your plumbing business? You're trying to think of different ways to catch people's attention and you're testing an ad copy to understand what resonates the most, which does relate back to your landing page because whatever performance best in that ad, you could then test that on your landing page. Yeah, that's actually a really great pro tip, which is if you're trying to figure out what message resonates the best with your audience, even to incorporate into your sales conversations, as are the fastest way to get multiple different types of messages in front of a high volume of eyeballs and give you statistically relevant data on what type of messaging is going to resonate the best. And importantly, like I said, it's not just about getting your digital presence to perform better, but it's about learning what you're doing online and then bringing that into what you do offline to get your sales conversations to convert better as well. The final thing is images or visuals. So this is kind of like an, of course, yes, absolutely should do it. But I would I would look at this a little bit differently. You know, when we think about A.B. testing a page, for example, one of the first things if you look at Amazon, for example, Amazon people that own stores there, the first things that they test are the headline specifically in the in the images alongside of it, those two things combined tend to improve the convert conversion rate of a page or the number of sales or leads that you generate. So thinking through how can we improve just even the overall quality, like maybe it's the right image, but the quality of it is not at the standard that you want, you know, working with some sort of 3D visualization expert or working with whoever actually films or produces the content on your products or even in the field, small changes can have a huge impact. Like I remember talking to manufacturer Beth years ago who I believe they had like a railing product and they went from like a really great photograph to then getting a 3D version of it, but you don't know it's 3D and it's like literally perfect. It looks like like a Nike shoe, but in like a railing. And they made a comment. They're like us moving to this higher quality railing increased our sales by like 10 or 20 percent, simply by making a small, subtle tweak. So when you think, oh, my images are okay. If the image is like, oh, it's just okay. It's probably an opportunity for improvement. Yeah. And I think another way to look at a B testing images and other visual assets is not necessarily swapping them out, which is an easy thing to consider. So if you're it's an ad and it's a single image, yeah, we want to try swapping it out. But the other thing is how can you add on to what you have. So as an example, if it's an ad going from a still image to a carousel or to a video or on your product pages, adding in additional product images has been shown time and time again to increase conversions on those product pages. And even adding videos to product pages of either how it's being installed, how it looks in the finished environment, walking through a completed project. So you can see how it looks in the installed environment, things like that, or even a quick testimonial review on your product page where people where people are used to seeing those product images can significantly increase your conversions. So it's not just about different. Sometimes it's about building on top of as well. But this has been awesome. Can I give one last bonus idea? Yeah, yeah, yeah, do it. One thing that we see right out of the gate whenever we start working in manufacturers that oftentimes we look at, you know, we're doing an analysis on a site and we're figuring out where the other the lynch points are just giving the pinpoints of an issue on a site that might be causing people to not convert. And one of the first areas we look are forms on a site. So if you go to, let's say contact form or generation form and you've got a bunch of questions listed there, I would highly encourage you to run a test to remove as many of those fields as humanly possible. What you will probably notice is that the more fields you remove, the higher lead volume you're going to generate. So I understand that we want as much information on a customer as possible, but the less you ask, the more you'll get in this scenario. So do a quick audit of your site, check out the forms. I highly encourage you to try that as well as the other ideas we've presented. Beth, anything else you want to share before we wrap up? That's my favorite one. I got to be honest. Just do it. And I know like I can hear marketers being like my sales team is going to absolutely revolt and we understand that there's concerns about sharing over unqualified leads or only marketing qualified leads and not sales qualified leads. Totally understand that we don't want to waste your sales team's time. Couple of things just to build on in case you need any additional armor to make this happen, because it will totally blow up your conversion rate and you'll be so excited. Number one, this is where the lead nurture campaigns come in from an email standpoint. Number two, you can look at introducing things like lead scoring on your website so that when someone fills out a form when it gets shorter and they want to now fill it out because you're not asking for their blood type and social security number, you'll have a history of the type of content that they've been interacting with, which will help to further give you the information that you were probably asking anyway and looking for what's the highest and best in the MVP and then how can I get them to the right person to have an initial conversation? Because you're right. Maybe they aren't qualified to talk to somebody right this very second, but you're going to start to build a relationship so that you can get in on their next project, which is which we all know we have long lead times on our sales cycles. And so getting a conversation started sooner rather than later significantly increases the opportunities for actually landing a sale. If we're only trying to talk to people at the very bottom of the funnel, we're really shrinking down our ability to bring in the best types of leads to give us exponential growth over longer periods of time. Beth, great episode. For listeners, if you enjoyed this, check us out at Venvio.com slash podcast to subscribe and get more. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams alongside Beth Popney Glove. Thanks everybody.