What Is A/B Testing, and How Can You Use It in Jewelry Marketing?

When you graduated from school, you probably thought you were finally done with tests. We hate to break it to you, but if you’d like to develop a successful marketing strategy for your jewelry brand, then you’ll still need to do a few more tests. In this blog post, we’re going to introduce you to A/B testing and explain how you can use it in jewelry marketing.

To put it simply, A/B testing is basically an experiment that helps you better understand what is and isn’t resonating with your target audience. If you’ve never tried A/B testing, then all your marketing efforts are the result of your best guess. Wouldn’t you like to be able to make more informed decisions about where to invest your attention and marketing dollars?

A/B testing is best for testing your ecommerce website, email campaigns, and social media ads. By testing each one of these channels, you can better gauge the effectiveness of elements like copywriting, calls to action, images, video, email subject lines, and more. Below, we’re going to provide details about how you can use A/B testing for each of the specific use cases, so you can better understand why testing matters and can help you refine your approach to marketing.

A/B Testing for Ecommerce Optimization

If you run an ecommerce store for your jewelry brand, then you likely change and update it based on customer feedback and intuition. What if you could create two different versions of your homepage, important landing page, or even a product page to see which one results in more conversions? You may be surprised to discover that changing the color of a button or adjusting the text in your call to action can inspire more customers to buy products instead of abandoning their carts.

Here’s one example: Shopify jewelry store The GLD Shop was able to achieve a 300% increase in conversion rate just by adding a new welcome pop-up to their homepage. Building on some existing design elements, ecommerce technology provider Justuno created an alternative pop-up that’s larger and utilizes different fonts and colors.

However, they maintained the same discount offer on both pop-ups and used the percentage discount as the control for the experiment. When they ran the A/B test, they saw that the new pop-up outperformed the old one, and they could feel confident about implementing it.

A/B Testing for Email Campaigns

Have you been feeling disappointed by the results of your email marketing efforts? You can try A/B testing your emails by experimenting with different subject lines, calls to action, images, send time, and more. In fact, if you already use Mailchimp for your email marketing campaigns, then A/B testing is easy; it’s included in the Essentials, Standard, and Premium plans.

A/B testing works best with a list of at least 5,000 subscribers, so you may need to beef up your mailing list before you can fully take advantage of A/B testing. However, even if you haven’t reached that level, you should still be familiar with how A/B testing works.

To begin A/B testing in Mailchimp, you simply create your email, specify that you’d like to run a test, choose the variables you’d like to test (subject line, from name, content, or send time), decide how you’d like to split the recipients, and choose how to determine a winning email. For example, winners can be based on open rate, click rate, or other metrics.

We loved reading about how luxury luggage brand Away was able to use A/B testing to discover some insights about their email subject lines. They found that they get better results when they use their store name in review request subject lines and that they should also avoid using exclamation points or uppercase words.

A/B Testing for Social Media Ads

For many brands, one of the easiest ways to engage is A/B testing is to apply it to a social media advertising strategy. When running a Facebook ad campaign for their jewelry brand, many jewelry business owners aren’t sure which imagery to choose or which captions to write.

The next time you run a campaign, try A/B testing! Once you decide on your campaign objective and select your target demographic, you can start by creating an ad with one image. Then, create one or two duplicate ads with the same image and write different captions for each one. To visualize how this process might work, you can check out this guide from Adspresso, which includes a handy flowchart graphic.

Throughout the duration of your advertising campaign, you will not only know which images are the most effective, but you’ll also be able to gauge the better image/caption combo. After the campaign has ended, you can apply your insights to the next campaign.

Get Started

So how can you start with A/B testing? Let’s go back to school. You may remember from science class that one of the first steps in setting up an experiment is to form the hypothesis. If you can’t seem to remember how to do that, then you’ll definitely want to check out Craig Sullivan’s Hypothesis Kit. His simple kit includes three segments that you can modify based on your needs. They include:

1. Because we saw (data/feedback)
2. We expect that (change) will cause (impact)
3. We’ll measure this using (data metric)

Here’s one example of how it can all work together for a jewelry brand: Because we saw that Image #1 with Caption #3 copy performed the best, we expect that creating a new campaign with similar images and slight variations on the copy will result in more effective ads. We’ll measure this data using Facebook Business Manager.

Recommended Tools

Some of the best tools for A/B testing include:

Google Optimize: Did you know that Google Optimize will allow you to test variants of your web pages and see how they perform per your hypothesis? One of the best things about Optimize is that it works closely with Google Analytics. In addition, one version of Optimize is actually free!

Optimizely: If you would like to invest more money into your A/B testing, then you can consider using a tool like Optimizely, which is considered the world’s leading experimentation platform. Even someone who doesn’t have technical skills can create their first test quickly and easily.

Shopify apps: Do you run your ecommerce store on the Shopify platform? If so, you can try some of the Shopify apps for A/B testing, which include Neat A/B Testing and Products A/B Test. While the former allows you to test your pricing, copy, images, product page layouts, and homepage layout, the latter allows you to split test your product details and pricing.

Now that you know about A/B testing, you don’t have anymore reasons to keep guessing about your marketing efforts. Once you know the results of your tests, you can better reach your customers and watch your sales grow.