How to Improve A/B Testing by Integrating User Feedback?
When you create a product or offer a service, it may be tempting to draw on a hypothesis and predict what might work best for your customers and convert better. If you’re trying to optimize your product, the challenge with this method is that it might be too vague and have assumptions that are not in place.Instead, you’re much better off running an A/B test (also called split test) based on your user feedback. Using qualitative and quantitative feedback from your customers can make the process of optimizing your product much easier.Think of it this way. You might be offering an automated SaaS tool to your customers and you have thousands of data points and raw usage data to wade through to identify patterns and draw insights. In such scenarios, A/B testing can be valuable because different audiences behave differently with your product.What might work for one group of your customers might not necessarily work the same way for another. And to make sure you’re on the right path and making correct assumptions about what people like and what you could do better - the best way is to use real user feedback. Take opinions from your customers about your product and understand the gaps that exist.
How to run A/B Testing?
Getting quality leads might be at the top of your mind and the idea of conversion optimization is exciting. Understanding how to run A/B tests can help you power your conversion strategy and gather valuable data on what factors influence your online audience’s choices.For instance, if you have an opt-in form on your website, you see a low conversion sign-up page and you would eventually want to identify the particular element that’s driving away your potential customers.Using A/B testing allows you to run simultaneous experiments between two marketing variables such as copy, images, infographics, layout, etc to identify which one brings you a better conversion rate. It’s important to understand that A/B testing is not the same as multivariate testing, which allows you to test many variables simultaneously.Based on the results you get from your A/B testing, you can make small tweaks to your website, landing pages, emails, and/or call-to-action buttons. The best part is that even these small changes can have a significant impact on the number of leads your business generates and converts.As long as you establish a clearly defined variable and control, you can test any element of your content. During the course of your A/B testing, you will also find that not all variables are equally impactful, and so you might have to run multiple tests to conclude the ones that are more worthy of your time than others.A/B testing is great for gathering quantitative data, but it won’t always help you understand why users take certain actions over others. This is where qualitative data comes in.
How User Feedback fits in
One of the most effective ways to collect qualitative feedback is to ask for opinions from real users through a survey or poll. Using a tool to collect these user insights, like Upvoty, can help you gather your users/customers' reactions to a product, service, or website experience.
Rather than starting from scratch and coming up with a strategy that may or may not drive substantial results, using a dedicated tool will help validate your process and actually direct you to exactly what needs to be tested. It’s the best way to identify, understand, and give users what they want or need.
This is also a great way to build relationships and trust with them through meaningful conversations about their experience and requirements. For example, you might find that a lot of people clicked on a call-to-action leading to your course, but they didn’t convert once they were on that page. While you might assume that the copy of your webinar landing page isn’t the best or maybe you need a change of colors or placement of a CTA, it’s possible the real reason might be a lack of pricing information that’s stopping users from converting.Pulling in behavior analytics and product experience insights that help you empathize and understand your audience and get their feedback through tools like Upvoty will help you bring clarity to your conversion-optimization process. It’ll help bridge the gap between internal assumptions and why your users tend to take certain actions over others.Now, you’ve decided what to test based on user feedback and roll out your A/B test to drive results.
Getting close to your users’ experience is the first step towards improving it. But it doesn’t end there. Let’s suppose you’re running split tests, and you spot a recurring pattern where your users appear to be leaving a web page or are frustrated with a specific feature of your product. In such cases, it might be too soon to get started on a new sprint to release an upgrade.With a feedback portal, you can collect and manage feedback easily and work on the next features based on feature voting. Ask your users directly what they think of the change or why it is important for their business or simply ask them whether they’re happy or not with a particular feature.Working simply on numbers collected via a survey or poll can lead to fixing the wrong bugs, adding the wrong feature, or putting in work where it’s not really required. So, feedback software will not just help you collect user feedback, but take follow-ups on your user’s requests and deliver results that are valuable.
Plan of Action: Integrating User Feedback into A/B Testing
Integrating user feedback into the A/B testing process will help you save time and resources as you will know which metrics to measure, whether or not your results are significant to justify a change in your process, and take action based on both - quantitative and qualitative data.
- First things first. Identify the scope of elements that might need work based on quantitative analytics. Where does your traffic bounce? Is there a specific page where the conversion rate is lower compared to other web pages?
- Run user feedback surveys and polls to ask your users’ opinions. Add an exit-intent survey on your website that asks visitors who are deeper in your sales funnel, abandoning, for example, your checkout or pricing pages.
- Results from your quantitative analytics will help you get a sense of direction where users want you to improve or optimize further. Then, you can draw qualitative insights from these tests that will show you what should be ideally your top priority during the conversion-optimization process.
- Once you decide on the final variables you want to optimize, you can make the changes to that specific page, element, or feature being tested.
- Launch your optimized version and collect feedback from users by following up with them directly on Upvoty, or send them an email to check out the updated version. A simple tip from your users’ feedback might turn out to be a potential growth opportunity that you can tap into to further optimize your product.
A/B testing is an iterative process that helps you optimize various aspects of your business, right from your web pages to your products, in smaller, efficient sprints. With tools like Upvoty, your users can always join in the conversation, and your team can connect with these real users in real-time.
Wrap-Up
A/B testing and user feedback complement each other and are highly powerful when used together. By collecting feedback from real users, you are guaranteed to have a much deeper and better understanding of what you should prioritize in your A/B testing. Besides, when you leverage user feedback to improve your A/B testing, you save a lot of time and resources as well as build relationships and trust with your customers. In a nutshell, using these two methods, you can drive higher conversion rates and deliver a seamless user experience to your users.