12 benefits of A/B testing: Why you need to test in 2025

12 core benefits of A/B testing

Let’s dig into the core benefits marketers everywhere can gain from A/B testing. 

1. Improve conversion rates

This is the most obvious benefit of A/B testing—it helps you boost your conversion rate!

This is probably the most common use case for A/B testing. Say you have a landing page with a modest conversion rate of 2%, and you want to increase it—especially given that the median conversion rate for a page is 6.6% across all industries. 

A/B testing gives you a way to experiment with the elements of your landing page to see what works best and what will help you unlock that higher conversion rate. 

By iterating on and refining your pages, you can really get your conversion rate singing.

2. Enhance user experience

A/B testing lets you play with a ton of design elements—hero images, layouts, colors, CTA buttons, even the content you feature… it all impacts user experience (UX).

And while testing these visual elements can always contribute to a better conversion rate, that’s because you’re usually improving and enhancing user experience. 

The way a user interacts with your page shapes the action they take. Good user experience means they’re more likely to stick around and convert—bad user experience, though, could send them packing. 

Whenever you’re putting your pages together, keep these seven principles in mind to ensure optimal design: 

1. Create focus: The foundation of good design is focus. Keep your audience focused on a single goal at a time, and remove unnecessary distractions. 
2. Build structure: The placement of elements on your page influences how visitors move through it. Use visual hierarchy best practices to guide users to what you want them to see.
3. Stay consistent: If there’s any disconnect between the ad copy that sends a user to your page and the content on it, you’re going to have a bad time. Maintain consistency to ensure optimal UX. 
4. Showcase benefits: The images on your page aren’t just there for show. Choose visuals that highlight the benefits of what you’re selling.
5. Draw attention: Your design should draw attention to the things that matter most—experiment with your CTA buttons and the colors and typography you use to enhance user experience. 
6. Design for trust: Social proof (reviews, testimonials, and the like) increase confidence in what you’re offering and remove any reasons to doubt. 
7. Reduce friction: At the end of the day, A/B testing for UX is there to help you reduce friction and make it as easy as possible for users to have a seamless experience. 

3. Increase ROI on marketing campaigns

A/B testing takes the marketing campaigns you’re already running and helps you get more out of them. 

The more conversions you can generate, the better, obviously, but A/B testing lets you maximize efficiency and get more for less by enhancing your return on investment (ROI). 

Say you’re running an email campaign with a cadence of messages, and you really want to make sure the folks on your mailing list will open them up and take action. 

You could start by A/B testing a subset of your campaign’s audience to see one subject line and another group a variation. Whatever email gets the higher open rate is probably your best bet for the full campaign.

But you don’t need to stop there—maybe the body copy of one message gets users to click more often than another. Maybe this CTA beats out that one. Regardless of what you find, A/B testing is how you refine your assets to ensure you’re getting the very most out of each and every one. 

Higher conversion rates = more conversions = more ROI.

4. Inform decision making

We touched on this in our introduction, but it bears repeating:

Every team in a business is looking for effective, reliable data.

A/B testing provides hard data on what works and what doesn’t, enabling you to make decisions based on evidence rather than intuition. This reduces guesswork and leads to more reliable and effective outcomes.

5. Reduce bounce rate

By testing different versions of your landing pages—like layouts, headlines, or images—you can see what keeps visitors interested and what might be causing them to leave early. 

This is a great way to get near-instant feedback from your audience. 

Say you have a landing page with a high bounce rate—visitors are bailing almost as soon as they arrive. You can A/B test various elements of your page to tweak everything from the headline and images to the CTA button and the overall layout. 

Let’s use a hypothetical scenario for this: 

• Variant A (your control) features a basic headline about your offer—”Book your appointment.” But variant B is a bit more engaging and focuses on benefits—”Book now for peace of mind.” 
• You run your A/B test and you find that variant B, sitting above-the-fold, tends to have a better bounce rate, and that users are clicking through more often.

This insight is gold! It shows you exactly what your audience prefers, allowing you to make informed decisions about which elements to keep and which ones you should change.  

And every optimization adds up. The end result is a smoother, more engaging experience that has visitors stick around to see what you have to offer. 

6. Increase engagement

Tying in with reduced bounce rate and enhanced user experience, A/B testing is a great way to increase engagement with your content.

Say you’re publishing blogs, videos, and other assets and want to see what really resonates with your users. Enter A/B testing. You set up two landing pages, one with a supporting article, one with a video, each backing up an offer you’re promoting. 

Running these tests can help you identify what’s getting folks to stick around longer. Maybe those videos you’re producing really catch the eye of your visitors, or maybe it’s the blogs and long-form content that get them to stick around. 

Either way, A/B testing is how you figure out what gets attention, allowing you to shape and mold your publishing strategies accordingly.  

7. Improve customer satisfaction

Every touchpoint you have with a customer is an opportunity to drive further engagement and make a conversion.

• Top of funnel: At the top of the funnel, prospects are just getting to know your brand. A/B testing helps you identify which headlines, landing page designs, or lead magnets (like free ebooks or webinars) capture attention and encourage users to learn more.
• Middle of funnel: As prospects move down the funnel, they start to weigh their options. A/B testing lets you optimize product pages, pricing displays, and calls to action (CTAs). For example, you might test different ways of presenting product features or customer testimonials to see which version helps customers feel more confident in their decision-making. 
• Bottom of funnel: Small improvements can have a big impact on satisfaction and conversion rates. A/B testing the checkout process is crucial here. You could experiment with simplifying the number of steps, adding payment options, or offering last-minute incentives like discounts or free shipping. 
• Post-purchase: Customer satisfaction doesn’t end with the sale. A/B testing can also optimize post-purchase touchpoints, such as order confirmation emails, follow-up surveys, or loyalty program invitations. Think about how you can nurture ongoing relationships!

By continuously testing and refining each of these interactions, you can greatly improve overall customer satisfaction. 

8. Mitigate risks

There’s always an element of risk in any new marketing campaign. Whether you’re trying out new branding, introducing a new product, or otherwise trying something off the beaten path, you’re going to face some risks.

If only there was a way to test things out in a controlled environment to get feedback early, though… oh wait, there is:

A/B testing.

If you’re rolling out something new, A/B testing lets you release those changes to a smaller audience before a wider launch. You can provide new features, new offers, or new branding to a limited audience to gather data and refine things before everyone gets access. 

And beyond that, A/B testing gives marketers a way to make those incremental changes without dramatically changing strategies or tactics. It’s like making many small adjustments on a steering wheel instead of yanking hard in one direction and then swerving back. 

9. Guide product development

But beyond mitigating risk, A/B testing is also a great way to guide product development with insight from your users and customers. 

Product managers and marketers often use A/B testing to develop better products that really resonate with customers and audiences. The goal with all this testing is optimizing how the product works. It’s also a great way to offer early access to new features to shape them even further. 

This helps you evaluate how well the new feature performs, gather user feedback, and identify any problems well in advance. By refining features based on real user data and insights, you can improve functionality and reduce the risk of problems when the feature is fully implemented.

10. Personalize marketing strategies

More and more often, businesses are using an account-based marketing (ABM) approach to take their marketing efforts a step further and personalize things to their target audience—even their target users. 

It’s all about audience research and traffic segmentation.

Traffic segmentation is a way of splitting up landing page traffic based on user attributes, like location, device, traffic source, even gender and job title. Audience research is basically any information you’re able to glean from your audience, whether through testing, surveys, interviews, or feedback forms. 

All this information feeds back into your A/B testing efforts and helps you discover further findings to create material that really speaks to your users. 

11. Fine-tune pricing strategies

A/B testing your pricing lets you present different prices to the market in an effort to increase revenue and attract customers. There’s a ton to unpack with price testing, but to keep it brief: Test how you present value, not just the pricing structure. 

A/B testing your pricing strategy can help you figure out exactly what works best. No matter what you’re looking to accomplish, though, keep these tips in mind:

• Run your tests during stable business periods to minimize external influence, like major marketing pushes or sales.
• Transparency with your customers should be a top-of-mind concern—any changes to pricing will be passed on to them, so focus instead on how you communicate value and can pass that on to your customers for a fair price.
• Incorporate feedback loops with your customers and other stakeholders to make sure what you’re offering is hitting the mark—think surveys and feedback forms.
• Communicate your findings clearly with the people who need to know about them. Inform product marketers, sales staff, and other marketers to make sure everyone’s in the loop. 

12. Find a competitive advantage

A/B testing helps businesses stay ahead of competitors by continuously refining their online presence. 

By testing all the different elements we’ve touched on—such as website designs, ad creative, or marketing strategies—businesses can identify what works best and optimize their performance.

Put simply, they can figure out what sets them apart from the competition.

A/B testing examples from real-world marketers

Need a bit more inspiration to get started? We’ve got you covered. Here are a few real-world stories of how other marketers have put A/B testing to work. 

• Going: How a three-word A/B test led to triple-digit conversion growth
• Campaign Monitor: How Campaign Monitor Converted 10.8% of Abandoning Users
• First Midwest Bank: How One Bank Doubled ROI by Being Creative in a Conservative Industry
• Electronic Arts Using A/B testing to challenge assumptions
• HubSpot: Experimenting with email formats