What is N testing? (In 100 Words or Less) During summer, my favorite time of day was when the ice cream truck would drive on our street. Usually, I didn't know what I wanted. If I had saved enough money, I'd order a push-up (am I dating myself, or is this still offered?), the rocket popsicle, and an ice cream sandwich. Little did I know, I was actually conducting an A/B/n test. I wanted to taste several flavors -- not just two. As a marketer, I've encountered the same problem with split testing. When I was working at an agency, I'd usually write four to five headlines for a landing page. To taste all the flavors, so to speak (as I did with my ice cream), we'd conduct A/B/n tests. Below, let's review what N testing is and tools to help you get started. Now, you might be wondering, "How does this differ from multivariate testing?" It's a good question. Multivariate testing is usually more comprehensive than A/B/n tests. For example, an A/B/n test will test one element of a web page, while a multivariate test will test multiple variables at once. For instance, an A/B/n test might test the color of a CTA button, while a multivariate test is testing the headline, button, and image. So, now that we understand what N testing is, let's examine why you should implement an A/B/n test in your campaigns. Why should you implement A/B/n testing? Sometimes when you're creating a...

Forms Testing: What It Is & How to Do It The other day I decided that I wanted to buy some comfortable outfits to wear around the house. As I was online shopping, I started to fill out my shipping information in the online form. However, the form had a requirement that the "City" field could only be 20 characters long. Now, the city I live in is three words, and 22 characters typed out. Having faced this problem before, I tried to shorten the city name, but my phone was autocorrecting. Ultimately, I couldn't get past this form on my phone. I had to go on my desktop to make the order so autocorrect wouldn't impact the length of the city name. Predictably, this was a frustrating user experience. As marketers, we use online forms in our campaigns all the time. To see success, it's important to test your online forms for user experience and conversion rate. Below, let's review what form testing is and how to implement it in your online form strategy. Now that we've covered what forms testing is, let's dive into the components of your online form that you should be testing. Online Form Elements to Test Once you've created an online form on your landing page, it's important that you test it for both functionality and effectiveness. Below, we've listed a few elements that you should test depending on your goal. Functionality Validation: Validation is how you'll ensure the information put on...

How to Do A/B Testing: A Checklist You'll Want to Bookmark When marketers like us create landing pages, write email copy, or design call-to-action buttons, it can be tempting to use our intuition to predict what will make people click and convert. But basing marketing decisions off of a "feeling" can be pretty detrimental to results. Rather than relying on guesses or assumptions to make these decisions, you're much better off running an A/B test — sometimes called a split test. A/B testing can be valuable because different audiences behave, well, differently. Something that works for one company may not necessarily work for another. In fact, conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts hate the term "best practices" because it may not actually be the best practice for you. But A/B tests can also be complex. If you're not careful, you could make incorrect assumptions about what people like and what makes them click — decisions that could easily misinform other parts of your strategy. Keep reading to learn how to do A/B testing before, during, and after data collection so you can make the best decisions from your results. To run an A/B test, you need to create two different versions of one piece of content, with changes to a single variable. Then, you'll show these two versions to two similarly sized audiences and analyze which one performed better over a specific period of time (long enough to make accurate conclusions about your results). Source...

Your Email Testing Playbook for 2020 (& the Tools You'll Need) A/B testing is one of those techniques that, if you have enough volume to give you significant results, is pretty much guaranteed to generate better results from your marketing. Email marketers have known this for ages, but what drives me nuts is that they waste their time on tiny little tests -- instead of tackling some of the bigger, more exciting tests that yield real insights and improvements. In fact, MarketingSherpa's email survey found that subject lines are still the most commonly tested element in email marketing. Meaning that those few words that get your subscribers to open your emails and see your wonderful offers are what marketers focus on most in their attempts to optimize their email marketing. While I'm sure this strategy can end up getting you the most tested, optimized subject line that will ever reach an inbox, the impact of these tests are minimal compared to all the other things an email marketer could be testing. So ... are you ready to run some big, exciting tests? In this blog post, we'll highlight what you should be experimenting with and which tools can help you. But, first, we'll explain the importance of A/B testing.    A/B testing is a great way to test two different newsletter formats that promote the same content or two newsletters with...