Your sales are declining and your followers are limited. What can you possibly do before your online business deteriorates?
Conduct an A/B test.
Perhaps the most straightforward online testing method out there is the A/B test. Now, for those of you who don’t know what this test entails, you’re about to be blown away.
The A/B test is a process through which you provide different versions of an email, website or campaign to a significant group of subscribers, and then measure their reactions to those versions in order to understand which is more effective in increasing your website’s overall conversion rate. Many tests in the past have proven that just a simple tweak of a website’s layout can increase revenue up to 20%!
In many respects, testing and experimentation should be at the core of every online business. Not only does it help you understand the impact your business is making, but it gives you a much fuller understanding about your customers’ behaviour, preferences and overall level of interest.
But does the A/B test actually work when you’re under time constraints?
SimCity 5, one of EA’s most popular video games, sold 1.1 million copies of their game in the first two weeks of launching. This was all because of a successful A/B strategy:
Pictured above, the original website (A) included a promotional banner at the top of their page to drive more sales and consumer interest. On the other hand, the variation website (B) removed the promotional offer from the page altogether.
It turns out that option B, with no offer messaging/incentive, drove 43.4% more purchases.
Essentially, by undergoing an optimization test, the EA marketing team was able to gauge which layout was the most effective in maximising revenue.
“The A/B test helped us learn a lot about our users – what’s working and what’s not – so we could make changes on our site to optimize our conversion percentages. In the end, this translated to higher revenue for us.”
-Mike Burk, Senior Online Product Manager, Maxis
therubyreport.wordpress.com 
I also wrote a blog post about this! Definitely. I think A/B testing has such immense power to revolutionize sales. Organisations that don’t use it are crazy. It may be a bit more timely to implement, but the results are often worth it!
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I noticed that! Of course time and cost are big factors when thinking about running an optimization test but I think it’s a great investment in terms of increasing sales in the long run! Thanks for your comment 🙂
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I think A/B testing is a powerful tools for businesses across multiple industries. However, one weakness I would think of is the representation of the testers. Using the sims as an example, most that would hop on to the early purchase would be either innovators (PPC curve), or fans of the game already. Maybe to them the game experience itself was more important than the discount that could be provided, thus they may not represent the general users of the game that would value the extra incentive.
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For sure Jun – but if EA games did not conduct an A/B test they wouldn’t have known that the extra incentive did not matter towards their target audience. Thanks for your comment 🙂
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