We’ve all been stuck before.        

Even now as I write this, I’m sitting at my kitchen table thinking about all the different hooks I could start with.

Well, it’s no different from your store. You spend time designing a new popup, or editing a cross-sell campaign.

But let’s face it. Until you test it, you have no idea what’s actually going to work.

Luckily for you, the days of guess and check are over.

With Privy’s A/B split testing functionality, you don’t have to worry about writing the best headline every time.

Instead, you can use a split-testing tool that takes the guessing work out of the important decisions for your ecommerce store and focus on increasing your conversion rate instead.

What is an A/B test?

An A/B test allows you to create two variations of a campaign and run them simultaneously.

Here are two I just created on Respoke Collection:

It’s the same offer (10% off) with different copy.

So now if 100 people visit the site, 50 will see one version, and 50 will see the other.

Now you can take the guesswork out of which headline is better and make your decisions based on real data.

Privy’s A/B tests let you even test things like how long someone was on your site, or which URL they are on.

Should You Run An A/B Test On Your Shopify Store?

You should think of your store like a house.

You need to first build your foundation. These are the welcome popups, cart savers, cross-sells, etc.

These are the campaigns you need to make money.

Without these campaigns in place, you are missing out on the core part of capturing customer information.

If you haven’t set up your fundamental campaigns, I’d recommend doing that before diving into the rest of this article.

Still here? Good. Next comes the 2.0 stuff.

That’s where the A/B tests come in. These experiments are the best way to take all of the campaigns on your site and iterate on them to make them even better for your online store..

One thing to note is that you should be getting at least 1,000 monthly page views on your site before implementing an A/B test. This isn’t required, but it’s an easy benchmark to make sure you are getting enough data to make an informed decision and implement optimizations to your split tests.

4 types of A/B Testing to run on your Shopify store

There are thousands of variations you can create.

And with Privy, you can completely customize your campaign down to the checkout button colors, and  font faces, product page layouts, and home page popups.

But my favorite part is how you can test the behavioral parts of a campaign for any page on your Shopify stores like landing pages or even pricing pages.

Factors like time on page or scroll percentage are recorded with Privy and are essential to improve online store conversion rate as you get more confident running Shopify A/B tests.

Here are 4 plays Privy customers are already running today:

1. Customer Info

Fun and Function has done an amazing job running A/B tests throughout their store.

They even test what information a pop-up captures.

They tested several pop-ups that asked for the subscriber's role and/or birthday.

Asking for their role negatively impacted sign-ups, as much as 74%. 

And what’s best is that there was hardly a difference between email only and asking for email + birthday. So they can still send birthday coupon codes!

Use A/B tests to help you capture as much customer information as possible, without sacrificing your conversion rate.

2. The Offer

If I offered you $100 for your email address, I bet you’d probably give it to me.

Well, while most brands can’t offer $100, they can offer something.

The question you need to ask yourself is – how much is that extra email worth to me?

We found each additional email is worth around $15.98.

Having a good offer is one of the most important parts of any good popup, and A/B testing the difference in conversion is a great way to see what works best for your business.

Pete and Pedro had a great exit intent popup.

They tested the difference between 10% and 15% off as people with items in their carts are trying to bounce.

The difference was over 50% in conversion rate!

If you’re deciding “Can I really afford the extra 5% discount?” ask yourself “How many more customers would you need to make it worth it?”

3. Behavior Test

We’ve heard before that pop-ups can be intrusive.

So once you nail the way your campaigns look, it’s time to optimize the way they appear on your site.

One Privy customer, True Citrus, wanted to test out when a popup should display on their site.

Turns out, showing the popup after 10 seconds on the site boosted conversion by 13.2%! While the 15 second version actually performed worse.

You can even do this for other indicators, too. Like scroll percentages, number of visits, or number of pages viewed.

These subtle differences can improve the conversion and customer experience on your site.

4. The Headline

Well, forget all of the other components if your headline isn’t good.

This is the most important part of any good popup.

Most people pick a plain headline – something like “Subscribe to our newsletter,” and turn it on.

You can do so much better!

You need to give customers a reason to engage with your content.

Here’s an example that we love from Marketing Examples.

If you’re not sure what the best headline would be, that’s where A/B tests can help. Write a bunch and see what converts the best.

And one last tip: If you are using photos, we recommend including a person! It’s an easy way to get people to stop and see what you have to say.

Setting up Shopify A/B testing in Privy

Getting started with these tests in Privy is easy.

Head to the A/B test navigation bar. Click on “New A/B test”

Name your experiment and select an existing campaign that you want to test.

From there, you can create your second campaign.

Name it something simple and we recommend keeping the traffic ratio 1:1 for best results.

From there, simply edit the feature you want to change!

We recommend starting with just one change at a time, that way you know exactly what it was that caused a spike or decline in conversion.

Last step – decide how long you want to run the test for.

I’d recommend getting enough traffic to make an educated decision. For some that might be 1,000 visitors. For others, 100,000 visitors will do the job.

And finally, turn it on and watch the results in real time.

Want to learn more about setting up A/B tests in Privy Convert? Check out everything from this post and more here.