No matter what business approach you use, getting things right is the key to progress and growth. From Key Performance Indicators to Click-Through Rates, you need to monitor and track every metric and statistic to keep your business in line
Irrespective of the business sector, there are two things you need to consider for the success of your business model - marketing and communication. Marketing is the key to success, but implementing optimal communication strategies that suit your staff and the customers are a game-changer.
Affiliate marketing is one of the prominent areas of marketing and is worth considering the following.
- Estimation says that by 2022, the annual US affiliate marketing spend will be over 8.2 billion dollars.
- Over 90% of advertisers regard affiliate marketing to be an essential part of marketing.
- At least 20% of ad publishers use over five affiliate networks.
Affiliate marketing has gained a lot of popularity and importance in the last decade. Getting the strategy right is the crucial step to the success and growth of your affiliate business.
You can improve your affiliate programs using the A/B testing method, also known as split testing.
What is Split Testing?
Split testing is like the test-driving of a car before you finally get your hands on the best variant. You can use split testing to test different versions of the same thing to find out the best amongst them. Through split testing, you can monitor your customer engagement on various things like landing pages, images, content, and ads.
Let's say you are launching the best call center software available in the market. Before launching, you'll require to test different combinations of product ad variants. Based on the various combinations of colors, texts, images, or videos, you will be able to understand which ad performs best and works for your product.
Now imagine doing the same process for your affiliate marketing programs. Split testing would help you explore your creative side and let you analyze what your customers like more.
8 Tips on Using Split Testing
A/B testing is a researched and approved strategy to engage more customers and get more clicks. Here are a few tips that might help you with the process.
1. Analyze
You need to have a basic overview of the website before you start testing out your campaigns. You should analyze your website and have a decent understanding of the pages or content your audience engages. Understanding your audience helps the most as it makes it easier for you to run your campaigns.
You can use tools such as Google Analytics to analyze your website and get all the information you want. Google Analytics is a free tool that provides an in-depth report on your website about what the visitors are looking for and many more. It can help you prioritize pages for your testing campaigns.
2. Set Timeframes
Setting the time frame for your testing campaign is a key aspect of the split testing method. You can start testing a campaign for just seven days, track the engagement, and improve your campaign further. However, testing timeframes may vary from one project to another. It usually depends upon the project you're testing and your end goals.
To increase the conversion rate or reduce the unsubscription rate of your website, you would probably need a longer testing time frame. One to three months is the minimum time you should consider to see a change on your website.
Your time frame depends upon your website analysis, business model, approach, and the primary goal of your testing process.
3. Be patient
While testing your affiliate campaigns, patience is all you need. It may take up to a few days before you start seeing any results. You might notice a few things in the early stages of the testing process and would want to make a few changes straight away. However, it would be best to wait for your test campaign to get over before you proceed with any changes. Let your campaign work on its own for a few days.
You might miss a few significant results when you start changing your campaign while on a test run. You would not be able to figure out what elements worked and what did not work. Your results would be much less accurate.
If you still want to make any changes or feel it might slip out of your head, you can write them down on a piece of paper and wait. Once your test campaign is over, you can analyze the results and move forward with the changes.
4. Focus
Sometimes, it gets challenging to determine the problems and fix them when running multiple campaigns. Similarly, analyzing what works best with the audience is also a challenging task.
To analyze your campaigns effectively, you should not test too many major elements at the same time. The best strategy will be to focus on major elements one by one and test out the one that works the best.
You should focus on one major element at a time. This major element could either be your images, color palette, fonts, or headline formats. Once you have tested and are sure about the major elements, you can easily move on to the minor sections of your test campaign. Unlike major elements, you can group a few minor changes while testing out the campaign.
5. Never Stop Testing
A/B testing is a continuous and long-term process. You cannot just test your campaign once and believe that it will work
forever. Your products/services are constantly changing, and so are the behavior and actions of your customers. The campaign that works for your product now might not work after six months. Split testing is an ongoing process that you need to revisit once every few months.
However, when you initially test your general audience with different campaigns, you get a pretty good idea about their interests and demographics. This information is implausible to change, and you would have a general idea about your visitors' preferences. It would help you to set some major elements in place that would always work.
Now, you would only need to test your customers when you have made significant changes to your website or added a new service or product.
6. Spot Pain Points
A/B testing could also help you identify a few recurring problems on your website. These issues might be annoying your customers frequently and lead to an increased bounce rate or low conversion rate. Identifying these problems can improve the success of your affiliate program.
When you try to understand your customer's needs and demands and make changes to your existing program, you can experience a considerable improvement on your website.
You can use Google Analytics to analyze the data and identify these pain points for your customers. The pain points could be as simple as not understanding your web page's context to major issues like being unable to find your call to action button.
7. Test Affiliate Links
You can test different affiliate links with the A/B testing method. Affiliate links would drive the most traffic and revenue for your website. You should try and figure out which links perform the best for your website. You can combine different links with diverse content material to know what works the best for you.
By testing out different affiliate links, you can prioritize the ones which garner the most engagement. By studying the results of your test campaign, you can drop the links that are performing poorly. It will help save tons of money in the long run.
When testing different affiliate links, your audience responses give you a rough idea of what is working. You can use this data to analyze and make decisions about your future projects.
8. Employ Email Marketing
Email Marketing is a traditional and most beneficial way to market your products or services to date. Emails can be the key to the success of your affiliate program. You should employ the split testing method on your email marketing as well.
When you market your product or service with an email, it usually consists of different affiliate links that a reader would click. You can test out various formats, words, or phrases for your email and analyze which works best with the split testing method.
When it comes to email marketing, quite a few elements can make or break the deal. If your font size is too big, your readers might have a problem reading them on their mobiles. Similarly, if your font type is too fancy, you might sound unprofessional.
With split testing, you can test out a few email formats and see the most sales.
Focusing on the important aspects of your email also helps. The basic design or layout of your email is also an essential factor. People tend to skim through emails, and yours should catch their attention. How you express your call to action and integrate links in the email is another important aspect that would require a few trials and tests.
It would help if you also analyzed the length of your email. People tend to ignore wordy emails.
The Takeaway
Customer satisfaction is the key to success for all types of business models. You need to ensure that your website, product, or services work how your customer wants. Happy and satisfied customers aren't just one-time visitors; they are your returning customers. They might come to your website again to order a different product.
With the A/B testing method, you can test, track, and analyze all the elements that are crucial to the success of your affiliate program. Be it your landing page, product page, or website homepage. You can make changes and test them until you are happy with the result.