CTA buttons are one of the most important parts of your site, make sure they’re as appealing as possible.
A/B Testing is one of the most important steps you can take when you are perfecting your marketing strategy and site experience.
Overview
Continually testing and tweaking aspects of your site (no matter how trivial they may seem) can lead to considerable changes in your opt-in and conversion rates for everything from email subscriptions, repeat visitors, and purchases.
You can test everything from lifestyle vs. product imagery for your home page design, whether or not to use micro-commitments by including an intro screen, or test different sets of copy to see what compels your audience to convert more.
Call-to-action buttons or CTAs are some of the essential features on your site; their entire purpose is to catch the visitor’s attention, compelling them to click. Subtle changes in things such as the copy or color of the button can have a significant impact on opt-in or click-through rates.
There are lots of design aspects that you can test, such as color, shape, copy, or animation effects to see what appeals to your brand’s audience and what doesn’t. While there are quite a few features you can test, you should only alter one thing at a time. Otherwise, you can’t accurately attribute any changes in conversion or click rates.
No matter what you decide to tweak or test when it comes to CTA buttons, the most important thing to focus on is how eye-catching they are. The button’s color needs to stand out from the rest of your website’s page, the copy is compelling, and the branding consistent. While you want to play around with design aspects and make your CTAs different, you want to make sure you stay on-brand and consistent with your site messaging.
Details
Let’s check out Beach Face, an online sunglasses retailer who wanted to test the CTAs on their lead capture promotions. These were pop-ups they had trigger after a visitor had clicked past their home page into their product collections, that way the shopper had indicated a higher degree of interest in Beach Face’s sunglasses and would be more likely to interact with an email pop-up. Beach Face decided to A/B test the color of the CTA button on their lead capture, testing the efficacy of hot pink vs. blue based on how many emails were submitted.
Setup
These are the rules and A/B test set-up that Beach Face used:
- First, Beach Face created its control promotion in the design canvas. This promotion had their standard blue CTA that’s matches their button branding across their site.
- Next, they added in their rule set, where they chose a basic rule set and ‘build a basic audience.’ Beach Face opted for the pop-up to fire after a visitor traveled at least one page to ensure at a minimum they’d clicked beyond the home page.
- Next, in the ‘refine by’ section, they selected to show once per visitor session, on any page and for the pop-up to stop showing once the promotion was engaged with. That way, they were able to preserve the “new visitor” welcome aspect of the offer.
- To save time for Beach Face, they duplicated their control promotion so that both the rules and the design of the pop-up were exactly replicated. In the duplicate copy of the pop-up, the CTA layer color was changed. Beach Face made this pop-up’s CTA a neon pink to provide a high contrast design element.
- Note: Click the ellipse next to your promotion on the right in your promotions dashboard and select the duplicate option.
- Now you can set up your A/B test. Click over to the A/B Testing section of your Justuno account and in the upper right-hand corner select ‘New A/B Test.’
- Name it, select which devices you’d like to include, and the dates you want your A/B Test to run. We recommend running A/B Tests for a minimum of 30 days to get an accurate read on your audience’s behavior. Keep in mind that all times are based in PST.
- Note: Avoid running A/B Tests during seasonal highs or lows, i.e., December Holidays, BFCM, or your industry’s busiest time.
- Pick your control promotion (Beach Face’s first pop-up with their standard blue button) and then select your variant (the pop-up with the pink CTA button) to run against each other. You can choose the percentage of sessions for each promotion to run if you want to run an A/B Test but limit access to a specific incentive. Otherwise, for a true analytical A/B Test, you should split the session percentage evenly between the variants.
- Click save, and your A/B Test is set up. If you ever want to turn the test off before its end date, you can use the status toggle under the test management dashboard to turn it off.
- To check on the status of your A/B Test and look at your data, you can click the report tab to see how the promotions fared head to head.
