The Science of A/B Testing Your Prospecting Campaigns

 

• A/B testing works best when you have a specific result to test for
• Make sure to test only one change at a time for clear insights
• Test adjustments in a logical order that will help you improve faster
• Boom Demand can help you implement testing at a larger scale

  One of the most important ways that marketing and sales teams can collaborate within an organization is by testing how effective your sales copy is. This takes some coordination and requires leadership to develop a vision that both departments are fully on board with. Marketing teams mostly concern themselves with delivering high-quality material that accurately reflects brand values. Sales teams tend to focus on increasing volume and achieving targets as fast as possible. Neither of these objectives is mutually exclusive, though, and both teams can find value in each other’s work. A/B testing of marketing materials helps both sales and marketing drive toward achieving their goals faster and better.

What is A/B Testing?

In our context, A/B testing is a way to randomly experiment between the results of using two different versions of the same marketing material with the same objective. When we say that we’re using two versions of the same material, we’re talking about discovering the effects of adjustments in just one element of the copy. For example, every prospecting email that your sales team sends out should have at least a subject line, a body, a call to action, and a signature, among other characteristics. Each one of these parts can have different effects on how the potential prospect responds to them, depending on how you design and write them. To determine how to get better responses and boost sales through more effective copy, you first have to learn what copy is more effective! To do this, you can send one version of an email to one random group of leads, and a different version to another. Tracking and analytics software helps you to discover which version produces better results.

Why It’s Important to Test Copy

Doing this kind of science matters to business, because we never get anything perfect the first time we try it. Not only is there a learning curve, but the curve is always moving. We’re constantly networking, and discovering more compelling ways to write to encourage a sale. Likewise, our customers are always getting exposed to the things we write and reacting to them. Society changes, values and priorities shift, and what worked yesterday is obsolete tomorrow. Sometimes the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction, and sometimes it just keeps smashing through the wall without stopping. The point is that marketing and sales must always go to where the customers are, and reach them the way they want us to. Finding that sweet spot requires experimentation because they won’t just tell us what we have to do for them to give us their money! As anyone in sales can remind us, many times customers don’t even start out knowing that they needed our product all along. We have to help them make that discovery.

How to Apply This Kind of Science in Your Business

Firstly, it’s important to be very specific about what you want to accomplish. Sending an email can have many different results. Are you just trying to see what gets more clicks into your video presentation? Or are you hoping to discover what leads to more final sales? It’s important to be sure of what you’re looking for, because what you test might change more than one result. An adjustment might lead to fewer clicks, but many more of those clicks that still happen might convert, and actually increase revenue. Second, only test one variable at a time. If you make two changes, how will you know which one made the difference? It’s almost impossible to tell, no matter which way the data goes. Third, test your changes in a logical order. Thinking about emails, if something about your subject lines is making prospects go “meh” and hit the little trashcan button without reading further, how much value is there in first testing variants of your call-to-action? This is especially important if you’re actively trying to discover why your current copy might be underperforming. Start at the top, and work your way down. Fourth, you need to get lots of data. The more, the merrier. The more data you can find, the more likely that you will see statistically significant results. The reason for this is that every lead is different, and will respond differently to your unique copy. But in most cases, there are only two or three ways to react to any element of it. They can reject it, they can ignore it, or they can engage with it. The more data you acquire from more leads, the more likely you are to get away from individual preferences towards larger social tendencies that you can bank on in bulk.

Boom Demand: Your Sales Laboratory

That’s where we come in. Our sales development representatives, working on your behalf, can help you dramatically boost your outreach efforts. By implementing A/B testing, we can help you kill two birds with one stone. Not only will you be able to improve your marketing efforts, you’ll have a dedicated team funneling warm leads right to your top salespeople. Contact us today to get started!