What do marketing and parallel parking have in common? You can waste a lot of time trying to make two wrongs into a right.
Your marketing may be powered by advanced analytics, knowing your customers, and years of marketing experience. Still, it’s not easy to understand the best marketing move right off the bat. Making the wrong one can cost you lost revenues, damaged customer relationships, and wasted resources.
But what’s even worse?
It’s making a marketing choice and never realizing that a tiny change could double, triple, or quadruple your conversions.
Properly taking advantage of ecommerce A/B testing ideas is critical to lowering your marketing costs while increasing the power behind your message’s punch. Through them, you can get reliable, undeniable, take-that-to-the-bank results in B2B and ecommerce, not marketing that looks like this.
Why A/B Testing Ideas Are Vital to Marketing Success
A/B testing, sometimes called split testing, is a critical marketing technique to increase conversion rates. Boosting conversions cuts costs and ultimately improves the ROI of your marketing efforts. A/B testing involves:
- Systematically testing two data-informed variations on a subset of your audience
- Determining which gets the higher conversion rate
- Expanding what you learn to your larger audience
- Rinse and repeat!
Imagine running a Google Ads campaign for days or weeks. You’re paying for clicks. But your landing page isn’t converting.
How much will you waste on clicks before you realize your landing page isn’t getting the results you thought it would?
You save on hundreds, if not thousands, of wasted clicks by split testing on a smaller audience first. Get down to the business of ecommerce selling faster.
Bottom line: Split testing helps you meet your B2B and ecommerce metrics. It’s worth the time. And only 44% of companies do any split testing at all.
So, competitive advantage? In a BIG Way.
A/B testing is essential to the performance-driven marketing you’ve been looking for.
B2B and Ecommerce A/B Testing Ideas
1. Don’t Skip Asset Type Testing
Before getting too far into this, we want to get one critical point out there. You could spend a lot of time trying to optimize the wrong asset. Don’t fall into that trap!
Let’s say you’ve created a clever little guide for B2B customers choosing between your options. It’s colorful, useful, and not too long.
Your graphic designers did great work on the layout. It focuses on the benefits.
But it’s not generating the sales you expected. So, you keep testing it and trying to improve it. You see the conversion rate go up a little. You’re encouraged, so you keep at it. But it’s still not what you expected. Why isn’t this working?
After months of frustration, you realize face-palm style… It should have been a short explainer video🤦.
Moral of the story: Don’t get too hung up on optimizing your ads with the wrong asset. Testing which asset to spend your time optimizing is inarguably more important than applying these A/B testing ideas to any one asset.
2. Use Heatmapping Technology to Its Fullest
You could test a million different elements on pages. And we will give you quite a few to consider in this short post.
So, how do you focus on the A/B testing ideas that will make a difference? It doesn’t do you much good to change things people aren’t even looking at.
Heatmapping is an indispensable tool for getting your A/B testing ideas pointed in the right direction.
Whether they hang out and leave or stay and buy, know where business buyers spend their time. Heatmapping shows you the elements on the page most likely to influence their decisions.
3. Test Landing Page CTA Button Focus
You’re good at sharing the benefits on a landing page. Your hero image communicates emotions. And you’ve incorporated social proof.
You make clicking the CTA button the natural next step for the visitor.
But they’re not clicking it.
It gets to the point as a CTA should. It says “buy now”, “order”, “try,” and so on. This is the robust CTA language you learned about in school. So, why aren’t people clicking it?
Your CTA is taking them out of the moment. You’ve been focusing on how this person benefits on the page, and what’s your grand finale?
Commanding them to take action.
Suddenly, it’s no longer about the benefits to customers. It’s about you wanting to sell something. They see right through you.
It’s time to place the CTA button’s focus where it belongs. In this case, focus on the benefit of clicking that button!
- Start saving money
- Protect your investment
- Make more money
- Reclaim your time
- Grow your business
- Stop cart abandonment
Which product benefit earns clicks? Test it!
- Create a list of benefits
- Choose two
- Test which of your A/B test ideas has a higher conversion rate
- Run with it OR compare it to another
Getting the message right is among the ecommerce CTA A/B testing ideas that will deliver the fastest and most notable difference. But other A/B test ideas for CTAs include testing call-to-action button color, brightness, placement, and text right before the button.
4. Adjust CTA Color
Color theory exists because scientists have applied the scientific method to determine how colors impact people’s feelings and actions. This can vary a little by audience, which is why we test.
Choose two colors that contrast your page while communicating the right message. Bright oranges are often the go-to CTA button color.
It stands out on most color schemes, especially in B2B marketing, and is a color of sunrise, joy, and happiness. You might test how bright that orange needs to be.
Alternatively, blue signifies trust and green growth, both appealing to B2B buyers. So, you might test blue or green vs. orange. But only if blue or green can stand out from your page.
5. Perfect Landing Page Social Proof
Nowhere does social proof matter more than on a landing page. Here, you have a concise window to share the benefits. You have to build instant trust — often with a stranger, and create a sense of urgency on top of that.
Ultimately, you must earn that click to the checkout page.
Social proof includes anything that shows that other people trust your brand:
- Testimonials
- Logos of prominent clients (with permission)
- Relevant quotes from notable industry influencers/publications
- Star rating
A/B test ideas you can apply to social proof include:
- Testing the type of social proof you show on a page. Review, testimonial, social, clients, etc.
- The specific benefit the social proof communicates.
- Where you place it
Right before the CTA button is generally a wise choice. But it must also be above the fold, because readers may not make it down the page without it.
Pro tip: Make above-the-fold social proof clickable to the more substantial proof down the page, which also happens to be by the CTA button.
6. Make Sure Landing Page Elements Aren’t Holding You Back
On a landing page, you must communicate value quickly. Any missteps, no matter how small, can lower conversions.
(For those of you keeping your website menu on your landing page, we’re looking at you.)
Use heat mapping to understand the elements that are having a positive impact. Get rid of the rest. Get to the point. Test different lengths for higher conversions.
7. When A/B Testing Ideas, Consider Page Speed
53% of abandonment happens because of page speed, according to Google — which, as we all know, we all know tracks everything we do.
Test page speed after adding elements. Make speed and value communication efficiency a top priority.
If that short explainer video slows your page, it may not be worth it. Or maybe it is. Test it.
8. Get the Checkout CTA Right
Like the landing page CTA, test this CTA’s colors, size, placement, and messaging too!
Above all, a Checkout CTA should be clear, so scratch all of the “stating the benefit” guidance that applies to a landing page.
Visitors don’t want to click a button when they don’t know what happens next. Consider testing “Place order”, “Proceed to Payment”, and another statement.
Why does this commanding language work here and not on most landing pages? It’s because you align the CTA with the customer journey. They’ve already decided to buy!
9. Is Free Shipping Worth It?
If your cart abandonment drops when you offer free shipping, this may outweigh the cost of shipping for free.
Offer free shipping at a price point where the added value of the order exceeds the cost to ship it — making giving “free” mutually beneficial.
10. Streamline Checkout Layout and Design
The layout of a page influences how a person’s eyes navigate across it, what they click, and where they proceed.
Here are some A/B test ideas for this aspect of user experience.
- One-page checkout vs. multiple pages. Which one gets more people to complete the checkout process?
- Number and placement of fields. Try different ways to communicate the order summary.
- See if changing the field labels makes a difference.
11. Compare Signup vs. Guest Checkout Benefits
When employing B2B and ecommerce A/B testing ideas, you want to know how users experience your website and, more specifically, the checkout process.
Think back to a time you stopped part-way through a checkout. Why did you do it?
Was the website asking for too much information? Maybe you didn’t want to create another account for a one-off purchase.
People only sign up for something when they perceive a value in signing up. You’ve communicated the value of your product because this person wants to buy. But you haven’t shown them why they should have to create an account.
This generates just enough internal conflict that they abandon the purchase — especially if they can buy it somewhere they already have an account.
(Amazon. They have an account on Amazon.)
Capturing someone’s contact information is critical in both B2B and ecommerce. But if it’s hindering the checkout process, it’s time to kick signups to the curb.
But this post is about “A/B testing ideas,” not best practices. Don’t scrap signups without testing.
So, what are we testing?
Does the value of someone signing up outweigh the number of conversions lost when people have to sign up?
12. Credit Card for Signup (or Not)
Here’s another signup element to test. If you’re offered a free trial but require a credit card, instant suspicion can get in the way of a conversion. Try offering some signups a free trial, no credit card required, and requiring it for others – and then see if there’s a difference in who converts, but also who keeps using their membership after the free trial ends.
In other words, if you have a paid membership, do you lose more conversions when you ask for a credit card at the trial, or when the trial is over?
13. Use Checkout Trust Signals
Trust signals are to the checkout what social proof is to a landing page. They further convey the fact that this is a trustworthy website and includes elements like:
- Trust badges (like Trust Pilot)
- SSL icon
- Prominent privacy policy
Like social proof, test the placement and type of trust signal you use.
14. Treat the Product Page Like a Landing Page
In B2B and ecommerce, the product page is very often a landing page. It’s the first and perhaps only page this visitor has seen on your website.
As a landing page, you must quickly communicate your unique value proposition, product benefits, specs and necessary details.
Get them to take the next step!
15. Other Product Page Ecommerce A/B Testing Ideas to Try
- Concise bullets vs. paragraph style descriptions
- Top view product photo vs. side view
- 5 pictures vs. 12
- Photo A or Photo B first or explainer video
- Single image vs. carousel vs. interactive 3D image… but only test 2 at a time.
- Catchy creative product heading vs. short and to the point
- A new low price vs. showing an original price with a discounted price next to it
- Color, size, and placement of your “add to cart” button
- “People Also Buy” vs. “Our Recommendations for You”
- Cross-selling in a grid vs. carousel
- Urgency messaging “Limited stock” vs. “Selling out fast” vs. “Only X left”
16. Perfect the Landing on Your Multi-Step Form
You try to keep things as simple as possible. Nothing stands between the customer and the conversion.
But sometimes, a multi-step form is the only way to capture the information you need to deliver a personalized buying experience.
First-party data collection is essential to delivering exceptional customer experiences. But you can’t gather everything you need to know from social listening.
So, where do you start?
The progress indicator is critical. It’s basic human psychology. People feel in control when they know how much longer something will take.
So, test progress indicator vs. none and progress indicator style A vs. B (percentage vs. number of steps/pages left, and so on).
17. Other B2B and Ecommerce A/B Test Ideas for Multi-step Forms
- Order of fields
- How you chunk related fields to make the form seem less overwhelming
- Number of fields your audience will tolerate before they abandon the process.
- Mix of auto-populating fields vs. manual entry
- “Next” and “Previous” placement to help people who need to go back navigate easily.
- Use of animation, images, or sounds to indicate a step is completed
18. Tell the Right Story with Your Case Study
B2B marketing is like fishing. You need the right bait, the right hook, and a whole lot of patience.
Case studies prove that you aren’t just a bunch of hot air. You’ve done the things you say! You get proven results!
But they’re also a form of storytelling.
But there’s the best way to tell a story. And you’ll know when you’ve found it because your conversion rate increases.
These A/B testing ideas for case studies will help you systematically generate those higher conversions.
One of the most vital parts of a case study is the hook (or angle). Test hook A vs. hook B – and in this case, the hook is the challenges and solutions you need to emphasize and lead with.
You’re like a gardener. You must understand what fertilizer to apply to nurture that leads and grows the relationship.
19. Other A/B Test ideas for Case Studies
- Download vs. Ungated webpage
- Title A vs. Title B
- Using a company’s name vs. industry
- Layout A vs. B. Through testing, you’ll find the most effective way to use headings, visuals, data visualization, etc., to enhance the storytelling experience.
- Chronological storytelling vs. Problem-Results-Solution
- Short version vs. more detailed
- Use of customer quotes and their placement
20. Social Media A/B Testing Ideas
Social media algorithms are like weather forecasts. You can’t trust them. But they’re entertaining!
That said, the more you use social media for business, the more you recognize the patterns and win with social media!
Your audience will respond to certain aspects of your social media personality than others.
If you’re struggling to build a following, engage your audience, or convert social media engagement into paying customers, you need some social media A/B testing ideas. You can test:
- Tone
- Emojis usage
- Number of hashtags
- Internal hashtags vs. at the end
- Image choice
- Length of posts
- Headlines
- Types of posts
- Frequency
- How often you direct people away from social media to your website
- CTAs
- Influencer collaborations
Get Help Implementing Ecommerce A/B Testing Ideas
These B2B and ecommerce split testing ideas can make or break your marketing campaigns. You only know if something is holding you back from higher conversions if you test it. This may sound time-consuming and tedious. But the higher conversion rates and revenues make it worth it. Save time and achieve faster results by contacting SevenAtoms, a seasoned paid search agency, to handle the A/B testing for you. We help B2B and ecommerce companies like yours. Attract Customers. Grow Your Business. Let’s talk!
