A/B Testing: Where Marketers Go Wrong

Because it gives you a way to determine whether your marketing audience prefers version A of something or version B, A/B testing is powerful. And increasingly it’s easy to do. Sometimes it seems so easy that we don’t even realize that we’ve completely wasted our time, missed out on golden opportunities, or—worst of all—confidently come to the wrong conclusions. The truth is that A/B testing is only powerful if you do it right and avoid the many pitfalls that can undermine your testing.

In this post, 10 of Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting’s experts share their insights and experiences on avoiding A/B testing’s many potential pitfalls

Here’s detailed advice on how to best accomplish all of that and avoid A/B testing’s many potential pitfalls by…

1. Focusing on the most impactful elements
2. Not just testing the easy things
3. Not forgetting about your target audience when testing
4. Understanding whether you’re testing to learn or testing to win
5. Understanding whether you’re testing to find a new local maximum or a new global maximum
6. Having a clear hypothesis
7. Being clear about what a victory will mean
8. Getting buy-in to make changes based on the results of your A/B tests
9. Testing one element at a time
10. Using test audience segments of similar subscribers
11. Using test audience segments of active subscribers
12. Using a large enough audience to reach statistical significance
13. Using holdout groups, when appropriate
14. Choosing a victory metric that’s aligned with the goal of your email
15. Not ignoring negative performance indicators
16. Not dismissing inconclusive tests
17. Verifying the winner of the test
18. Recording your A/B testing results
19. Creating an A/B testing calendar

For a detailed discussion of each of these pitfalls…

>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog