Power Tips to A/B Test Programs like a Marketo Superstars

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the process in which two variations of the same marketing campaign are tested on specific channels. The wide range of channels to test may include, but are not limited to, emails, landing pages, websites, mobile apps, social media and other digital advertisements. By testing two versions marketers can measure the effectiveness of various elements such as fonts, color, button size, call-to-action text, formatting, design, text and image placement, background, and more.

There are many other reasons why marketers need to consider A/B testing to assess the effectiveness of campaigns and what appeals most to prospects and customers.  

• A/B testing can boost customer engagement: The main objective of A/B testing is to enhance the effectiveness of a brand’s communication with its targeted buyers. A/B testing assists marketers in doing this by showing them which of two options in testing provide the favored results whether that be more email opens, clicks, a higher click-to-open ratio (CTOR) or so on. Likewise, A/B testing also helps determine what is most effective in each chanell, as you can test headlines on a landing page, images used in a social media post, and so on, to see how your audience responds to slight changes in each channel.
• A/B testing can improve your understanding of customers’ preferences: A/B testing can provide marketers with a plethora of behavioral data on their target audience. The more that A/B tests are run, the more marketers can find out about the preferences their customers have and what content or visuals they pay more attention to. Continually running A/B tests now only provides marketers with more info but also helps them to redefine messaging to make it more impactful and concise, in return ensuring prospects will convert.

A/B Testing Segmentation with Marketo

Marketo adds more power to a marketer’s A/B testing efforts by giving them the ability to test two variations of an email to two different segmentations of their target audience. Marketo Segmentation enables marketers to focus on four specific groupings of their buyers, thus allowing marketers to run tests on people with similar demographics and preferences and discover how these similar groupings respond to launched campaigns. The four main areas that buyers can be segmented by are:

1. Channel: The source by which a prospect engaged or connects with your brand such as website, social media, landing page from a related website or web ads, email link, etc.
2. Demographics: Segmentation can be made based on fields within Marketo such as gender, nationality and location, age, and other prominent qualities.
3. Behavioral Data: Marketo allows for segmentation based on how prospects use or engage on specific channels including actions they take, nature of topics they subscribe to, topics they avoid, CTAs they click on, products and offers they show interest in, etc.
4. Past Purchases/Outcomes: Another option for segmentation is to group prospects by products/services they have purchased, events they sign up for, content they frequently download, and so on. Through this type of segmentation marketers can further promote and optimize future webinar, content, offers or messages to these prospects as well as new prospects to see what keeps them coming back for more.  

To provide some context on how segmenting by these four different areas can be helpful, let’s say that we want to segment by demographic in order to find out what draws more interest from prospects who are between 18-25 years old. The goal of our test is to see what email can get the most opens. To get to our goal, a company’s marketing team could execute an A/B test on two groups that consist of people within the 18-25 year old range and who also have similar interests (in order to control the test results drawn from running tests on both groups). From here, the marketing team would create an email, however for the A/B testing, each email would have a different subject line to see which subject intrigues our target audience enough to actually open the email. After running the test, and reviewing the results, our marketing team will be able to see how this plays out and which subject line (shorter, longer, with or without emojis, etc.) is the best for getting prospects between 18-25 to open an email.

A/B testing is very powerful and can provide you with a ton of insight regarding your current target audience or other segments you want to market to in the future. Do you find these Marketo A/B tests tips effective for your campaigns or do you need further help setting up your own Marketing A/B tests? Get first-hand assistance in setting up A/B tests by talking to our Marketo specialists. We can provide you with insight on how to set up your own test or provide strategy behind what should be tested to make current campaigns more effective. Contact us at 408.502.6765 or via email at services@MarrinaDecisions.com to get started!