Create effective website with Sitefinity ’s built-in testing

Your business is known by the websites it owns. The popularity of your websites depends on many factors like its overall layout and design, the page color, the placement of call to actions etc. You need an awesome content + an awesome design to make your website actually speak for you.

While a website is useful in keeping your audience engaged, email marketing is a highly effective way to get your audience to visit your website. 60% of marketers agree that email is a critical enabler of products and services and 20% claim that the primary revenue source of their business is directly linked to their email operations.

With both websites and email marketing being strategic to the success of a business, Sitefinity CMS’s A/B and multivariate testing features allow businesses to test and compare website designs and email formats side by side in the real world and adopt the format that brings the most advantage.

Sitefinity’s Email Campaign: Create campaigns that are guaranteed to win. A/B testing for email marketing campaigns lets you draft multiple versions of the email. Each version is sent to a beta group of customers. The tool tracks how each of the customers responded to the email. It uses several configured factors like bounce rate, click rate, conversion rate etc. to determine which of the two emails was more successful. That version is then sent to rest of the customers. The advantage here is you no longer need to rely on intuition to decide which email formats make your campaign successful. Sitefinity will collect and present you with statistics you need to make an informed decision.

Sitefinity Optimizely Widget: The Optimizely widget can be easily integrated with your CMS to run A/B testing on your web pages. Now there is no need to adopt a wait and watch approach to know whether your latest web page design has worked wonders for your business. The Optimizely widget will make it clear to you. All you need to do is simply pass a code into the web pages you need to test. Optimizely generates reports that can help you decide which web page works best for you. It can even show you what changes you need to do to optimize the page for better performance. The widget is easy to integrate and is more cost effective than using a testing tool or hiring outside testers for the job. Each section of your page has a specific purpose – to give information, to urge visitor to provide information, to download an item, make a purchase, share a page etc. Optimizely can tell you how successful each of these sections are.

75% of users admit to making judgements about a company’s credibility based on their website design. A/B testing through Sitefinity can help you design the right website for your business.

A/B and multivariate testing – how do they work?

A/B testing has, at its end, a specific goal to be achieved, for example, a conversion. Multivariate testing provides the variables that when measured and compared, tell you whether you have achieved your goal. The variables can be the page layout, position of widgets, page color etc. Pages with differing variables but containing the same information are presented to different customer segments and the variables tested for their relative effectiveness.

Sitefinity takes care of presenting the various web pages, measuring the effectiveness of variables and generating a report. It is best to use the results from A/B and multivariate testing with results from independent assessment tools like Google Analytics, customer satisfaction surveys, online polls etc. The results from these external tools provide you with further inputs to optimize your page.

It is generally fruitful to use both A/B and multivariate testing. You can go for A/B testing alone if your page is simple with very few variations. However, if your page is complex with many components which can be randomly mixed and matched to produce different page effects, then multivariate testing is a safer option. A/B testing tells you which page is successful but multivariate testing can tell you which variations made it successful. Or it might even indicate that a combination of design features from one or more pages might work well for you.

Websites need to have a strong headline to attract readers, provide clear call to action and sufficient reason for the reader to take action. Apart from having clear and precise content, your website also needs to be intuitively designed with appropriately placed widgets and links. The testing features in Sitefinity can help you present a website that works best with your customers so that you get the conversion rates you always dreamt of.