How to Use Website Testing and Marketing Automation to Increase Sales

The competitive digital marketplace requires companies to maximize profit efficiently. Fortunately, thanks to website testing and automation tools, it has become much easier to increase your sales while reducing costs.

This article discusses how you can best leverage both to meet your overall digital marketing and overall business objectives.

Leveraging A/B testing for pages, ads, and more

If you want to increase sales and boost the effectiveness of your website, you need to know how to leverage A/B testing. A/B testing is a form of website testing that compares near-identical pages or elements against one another to see which version will be best for long-term implementation.

FURTHER READING: In-depth Guide to A/B Split Testing Like a Pro

Here’s a basic example of A/B testing in action:

• You have two versions of your landing page, which customers are brought to when they click on an online advertisement.
• You publish an A/B test for the landing page, in which one version of the page has the call to action in one place, and the other version has the call to action and purchase button in another place.
• Your page’s first version is published for a couple of weeks; then the other is published for the next. You gather data from this A/B test and compare the pages’ results.
• By the end of the test, you know which version of the landing page is better for your consumers and your business.

A/B testing can significantly help your business present itself in the best way possible to your target audience. However, there are two different ways you can implement A/B tests.

Types of A/B Testing

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) testing

Conversion rate optimization testing or CRO testing focuses on maximizing how many of your leads become sales through establishing action-oriented pages. These are important for getting people to download content, make a purchase, or input contact information.

CRO testing aims to optimize all of your “point of conversion” pages. If maximized, CRO A/B testing will help turn more of your site’s visitors into either sale qualified leads or full-on customers.

ADDITIONAL READING: List of 14 Best A/B Testing Tools for Conversion Optimization Pros

Growth-driven design testing

Next is growth-driven design or GDD testing. With GDD testing, you systematically revamp your website and focus on shortening launch times to emphasize impact on your target audience. To properly implement GDD testing, you’ll constantly research and test multiple versions of your site.

In doing this, you’ll gather a wealth of data and learn about how site visitors interact with your brand. Over time, you can then implement continual improvements, though they are incremental in scale. The hope is that GDD testing, when leveraged regularly, will allow you to maximize the efficiency and attractiveness of your website or online storefront.

Both versions of A/B testing are important and can help your site be the best version of itself. In both cases, you’ll need to rely on tons of data and test frequently to make the wisest decisions for your brand.

Where to use A/B testing

A/B testing can be used in a variety of smart ways, including:

• Testing your messaging services. For example, you can test several versions of an SMS or email message to multiple customers. Send out a basic batch to a handful of customers at first, then choose the best performing version of the email message to send to the rest of your target audience. This is great for maximizing the return on investment on any messages you put out.
• Testing website or webpage design. As noted above, A/B is most commonly used to see which version of the tested web pages performs the best. But you can extend this to the rest of your website by analyzing which website layout is best, which shopping cart has the lowest abandonment rate, etc.

In both examples, A/B testing helps your website perform at its maximum capabilities. The key thing to remember is that A/B testing becomes more effective and valuable the more you do it. It is also useful for boosting your site’s value when it’s time to sell it and reap the rewards of all of your hard work!

Marketing automation tools and benefits

In addition to leveraging A/B testing to better your brand, you’ll want to take advantage of marketing automation tools. These tools, when used correctly, may lead your brand to experience many major benefits.

Social media marketing tools

Social media marketing tools are phenomenal for boosting automation in your organization. SMM requires a lot of engagement as you need to post regularly (often every day) across multiple social media channels or platforms.

Automation tools can help you post at the same time each day without having someone push a button, thus benefiting your SEO score. But this also frees up your social media manager or other employees to do other, more hands-on tasks. Social media automation tools can also gather data, respond quickly to customers, and much more.

Propelrr is a great example of a social media marketing and SEO tool suite. With Propelrr, you’ll be able to gather tons of data for A/B testing and other measures. Plus, you’ll be able to automate many of your SMM tasks, such as posting at the same time each day.

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools

CRM or customer relationship management tools are related to many other automated platforms. These are specifically designed to help you manage and streamline your sales pipelines.

CRM software can track all the potential leads who show up on your organization’s website and measure the interactions visitors make with your company. Over time, this will allow you to learn:

• What pages are visited most frequently
• Where a specific customer spends most of their time
• How many emails are opened by your leads, and more

In other words, CRM tools can automate data collection for your marketing team and help you understand your visitors or target audience better. When you use CRM tools properly, you’ll be better able to anticipate customer needs and advertise more effectively to them.

Other automation tools

There are plenty of other automated marketing tools to use, of course. For example, marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot are phenomenal for automating marketing tasks like:

• Data collection
• Sending out automatic emails
• Organizing customer data
• Collecting and sorting financial info and putting it into profit and loss statements, and more

But above all, all marketing automation tools free up man-hours for your marketing team. Rather than doing busywork or manually sending messages to prospective leads, your marketing team can spend their time creatively coming up with ad copy, analyzing gathered data, or doing other important tasks.

Key takeaways

Every brand can and should leverage website testing and automation to increase its sales and success across the board. To reiterate:

• Free your team up for more thinking tasks. With A/B testing and automation tools, you can significantly help your marketing team and improve productivity in many ways. By using these tools, they help provide insights and redirect your team’s energy from repetitive, production-related tasks, to things machines can’t substituted such as processing and collaborating with people.
• Review your tech stack frequently. New tools and updates to old ones come frequently. So once you make the investment, make sure to have a good practice of reevaluating your tech stack. So you can maintain optimum business value from these.

Do you have any marketing automation and A/B testing tools you’d like to recommend? Share them with us over on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn! We’d love to hear what you think.

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About the Author

Lee Li is a project manager and B2B copywriter with a decade of experience in the Chinese fintech startup space as a PM for TaoBao, MeitTuan, and DouYin (now TikTok).