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    Enhance your marketing with A/B testing

    Course overview
    Lesson
    3 min read

    Identify what to test

    Before diving into A/B testing, you must first build a hypothesis about what can enhance your marketing. This will become the foundation of your experiment; let’s run through how and why.

    Determine what to test in Klaviyo

    Let’s walk through the very first step of A/B testing: determining exactly what you want to test. This grounds your test with a clear goal and way to monitor success.

    Get inspired for what to test

    Below are some common customer scenarios that can help you identify a good starting point for your own tests. Try these out in your own account if you’re looking for inspiration around how to optimize your marketing strategy.

    Copy and design

    There are many elements of copy and design that you may choose to test. That said, only test 1 component at a time.

    Some of the most common elements we see tested are:

    • Email subject lines
    • Body content of messages and forms
    • Placement of your call-to-action (CTA)
    • Creative assets (e.g., different images, GIFs, emojis)
    • Design choices (e.g., fonts, colors, email template layout)
    Incentives offered

    Testing the incentives you offer across messages or in sign-up forms can inform you of what level of incentive best spurs audience engagement.

    You can then identify the right amount to discount, so you make money in the long run (e.g., is 15% off significantly more effective than 10%?). Otherwise, you may learn that a specific incentive outperforms a different type of offer (e.g., free shipping vs. limited-time sales).

    Some of the incentives you may test include:

    • Coupons (e.g., 10% vs. 15% off)
    • Free trials or limited membership
    • Limited-time or exclusive sales
    • Free shipping
    • “Buy 1, get 1” deals
    Message send times

    You can also test to find when is the best time to send specific content. In particular, you can experiment with:

    • Time of day for specific campaigns
    • Day of the week to send
    • Length of time delays between flow messages
    Channel preferences

    A/B tests can help you determine which channel is best for specific content types. The channels available to you in Klaviyo are:

    • SMS
    • Email
    • Push notifications
    Form behavior

    For forms specifically, you can test to find the optimal behavior and targeting. In other words, find which combination of form settings actually lead to the highest submissions.

    In particular, you can test:

    • Timing of when your form appears (e.g., at page load or after a set amount of time)
    • Type of form and how it appears (e.g., pop-up vs. flyout)
    • Placement of your form on-site (e.g., top of page vs. bottom)

    Want to see this in action?

    In the next few lessons, we’ll walk through exactly how to test your content and interpret test results, as well as provide you inspiration in the form of tried-and-true examples.

    Identify what to test