To offer a great experience to their customers, every marketer needs to remember that your app performance as a whole should satisfy the customer needs. Testing data is a key factor in assessing your app performance in terms of customer experience, product features, campaigns, etc. Let us see about A/B Testing for Onboarding. 

Successful user onboarding boosts active users, and ultimately this will fetch more leads and sales for the business.

So now the question is, how can you test the effectiveness of your current app onboarding experience against other options that could be used? In this guide, we will discuss the A/B testing methods that cannot just help you validate different flows, but also boost the onboarding process and support customer retention.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing is the way towards comparing at least two variants of something to see which one performs better among customers. It is a simple experiment to determine which version among A and B brings a better outcome. In general, both these versions will have a slight variation in the features of UI experience and user interactions with the app.

In the business world, engineers, marketers, and product managers utilize this logical method to develop a better version of anything by propelling more than one variant of the product to live clients and later gathering information to analyze which version really boosts their metrics. 

In short, 50% of the users will see product version A and 50% of the user will see product version B for a certain period of time. Later, whichever product version drives more leads and sales will become the permanent experience. 

A/B testing enables marketers, developers, and product managers to gather data and serve up a higher optimized and converting experience. 

It helps app developers to achieve business goals like retention, monetization, and engagement in an effective and efficient way

Merits of A/B testing:

– Data-driven decision making based on empirical evidence.

– Boosts business KPIs by helping select the most optimized experience

– Provides productive analytics and insights

– Improves  user experiences

How to implement A/B Testing and what elements can be tested?

Marketers implement A/B testing to determine the Onboarding experience of the users like how a first-time customer engages with the app. Apart from this, A/B testing can be used to determine the performance of visual elements like text, videos, pictures, user flow, new features, and releases. 

Here are some examples:

What checkout funnels will drive more sales in the e-Commerce app?

What onboarding flow fetches more user registrations and lesser uninstalls of your app?

The kinds of messages that get most users to turn on Geo-location or push notifications 

 User Onboarding A/B Tests: Experimenting for Better Customer Retention

Test 1: Conduct a survey to understand user experience 

Conducting this survey will help you in understanding the user perspective on your app functionality, product usage, bugs, challenges, or even campaign efforts on acquiring the right new customers. 

Ultimately, this will guide you in understanding whether your user onboarding needs some additional efforts or changes required. 

Test 2: Analyze your app store 

The first impression is the crucial point for any mobile app, user onboarding starts from the listing of your app in the app store. When a user tries to download a mobile app from the store, he or she should have a good impression on your app to get them downloaded. 

If you fail to create an impressive image on the first sight, surely, they will start exploring the alternative option

Points to remember:

– Try to create a clear and informative description for your app

– Communicate the benefits of the app clearly

– Ensure your icon design, name, description, promotional text are impressive

A/B Testing Criteria

– App name, title, description, and promotional text

– Icon design

– Preview video

Test 3: Ensure attractive and clear user navigation 

Once you have succeeded in convincing the user to download your mobile, your next goal is user retention. This can be achieved by users in navigating the app and demonstrate how this would be beneficial to users. Get the test data by following the below two approaches 

A/B Testing criteria:

– Tutorial vs No Tutorial

– Typing vs text placement

– Videos Vs UI Overlays 

Test 4: Impressive features to create better customer value 

Every app offers different value to the customers, irrespective of the key action of the app, every app developer should focus on creating experiments that will help people.  

If you are unsure about any certain feature of experiments, then you can follow behavioral cohorts to analyze the activities of the most successful users in your app. 

A/B Testing Criteria:

– Hiding / Highlighting specific features in your mobile app for first-time users 

– You could also test by adding certain animations or micro-interactions that triggers the user interactions

Test 5: Streamline the registration process

One thing you should remember if you want to provide a great first-time user experience is, most of the users don’t like entering some specific information. Hence, determine whether you need the user to register first? And what are the minimum details required?

A/B Testing criteria:

– Text placement Vs no Text placement

– Social login options Vs no social login

Best practices for efficient A/B testing

While there is no actual formula for developing an ideal mobile app experience, best practices are utilized as a beginning point when considering testing. 

1. Focus on Call-to-Action(CTA)
2. Offer consistent user experience: Ensure the testing changes constantly throughout the flow. 
3. Eliminate distractions: Mobile users want to get from one point to another point quickly. Hence, keep them engaged and focused on a particular task.
4. Have a good number of users to reasonably attain statistical significance

How Mobile App Testing Tools could make the job easier

There are hosts of online service providers who offer purposeful build tools that can be used to run A/B Testing experiments 

You can leverage such tools to A/B Test your app for user onboarding and create great user experiences. The testing tools help in creating multiple versions of the page by making a few changes like font color, icon, or other UI elements using the visual editor. With A/B testing tools, you can run various A/B tests to determine which app version clicked for your visitors. These tools can also optimize your web experience by fixing any leaks in your funnel.

Making use of the testing tools is a great idea as there are several merits in using them. Starting from the hardware accessibility to automation, everything can be made simple for your onboarding A/B testing.

• Execute multiple tests simultaneously

Testing tools help you in executing multiple tests simultaneously on your page. It also runs the test by allocating certain traffic to each as there will be no interruption from each other.

• A keen focus on every focus of the test

A/B testing is done based on the user’s on-site behavior that includes time spent on every page, elements, scroll, etc.

• A powerful editor for marketers and developers

Mobile app testing tools offer a simple visual editor to run multiple quick A/B tests. You can switch to the advanced Code Editor to make more complex changes.

• Cross-platform testing

While running onboarding A/B testing through conventional methods, you should run the test on multiple devices and OS. Certainly, this is a time taking process. Whereas by using the mobile app testing tool, various scenarios over various conditions can be tested and testing time can be significantly reduced

• Analyze results with advanced reporting

Mobile app testing tools offer advanced reporting feature, that gives you intelligent insights and data from your user onboarding A/B tests. These insights can help in tracking its impact across the funnel and result in making informed business decisions.

Takeaway

The main aim of any business is to get their customers to come back to use the app. From conducting testing of your app store page to measuring the campaign efforts become an important part of keeping up the evolving customer expectations. Using the above guidelines and test data to enhance app performance is an efficient method of data-driven marketing.