LinkedIn is an effective platform for marketing your business and for B2B prospecting. LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service that enables users to connect with friends and colleagues, view and share professional profiles and industry news, and request and receive recommendations for jobs and business opportunities. Headquartered in California, United States, LinkedIn has more than 830 million members all around the globe.

LinkedIn is an easy-to-use platform, but if you want to use it smartly you have to put in some effort and you can make the best business deals out of it. To use LinkedIn like a pro you need to carry out A/B testing and here in this blog, we are going to discuss the same.

What is A/B testing?

Technically speaking, A/B testing or split testing is a method of comparing two versions of a web page or app against each other to see which one performs better. A/B tests can be used to test anything from small changes like button color or headline text, to major changes like redesigns or new features.

Daniel Foley, Director of Marketing at SEO Stack & Daniel Foley Consultancy adds “The goal of A/B testing is to help you make data-driven decisions about how to improve your product. By running tests and analyzing the results, you can figure out which changes are most likely to lead to improvements in key metrics like conversion rate, engagement, or retention. A/B testing is an essential tool for any product team that wants to continuously improve their product and make sure that they are making changes that will have a positive impact on their users.

It can be used to run different campaigns on LinkedIn with some changes in each of them and to figure out which campaign gives the best results.

How does A/B testing work?

According to Zephyr Chan, Growth Marketer & Founder of Better Marketer “A/B testing is a very important process to extract the best leads from LinkedIn. You might be having various plans to run campaigns on LinkedIn but you have to choose one of them and carry it in long term for your company’s growth.”

Using split testing, you can test different text messages, cold emails, templates, etc. The goal is to see which version performs better in terms of a specific metric, like conversion rate or click-through rate. You can run campaigns and differentiate them on the basis of the following criteria:

• Message/Email headline
• Adding different hyperlinks
• Topic of conversation
• Adding different contact links
• Call to action buttons

You can frame different messages that are to be sent to different LinkedIn users or LinkedIn groups and then you can monitor which message interests the lead, this will help you to develop the marketing strategy. Your messages can be sent by cloud telephone systems or messenger apps.

But the tricky part is running multiple campaigns and that too for thousands of prospects. You must need an automation tool like Salesrobot which is designed explicitly for LinkedIn outreach. Salesrobot is capable of running multiple campaigns at once. If you try to do things manually it would take a long time to know about effective A/B testing strategy and you may miss some deals till then. Salesrobot can make the process very easier and can help your campaigns and messages in getting a brilliant conversion rate.

A/B testing on LinkedIn

A/B testing can be done on different platforms but sales reps prefer using LinkedIn instead of Twitter, Facebook, or Quora. The reason why people use LinkedIn for split testing is that it’s a site where they can network and build relationships with ideal customers and find their target audience easily. Also, LinkedIn has a lot of features and versions to test like a LinkedIn recruiter or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Gerrid Smith, Founder & CEO of Joy Organics says “A/B testing can be easily used using outreach messaging on LinkedIn, this will help you to interact with the prospects. You can reach out to a huge audience through LinkedIn groups where you can target them using fully automated multiple campaigns and templates provided by Salesrobot.”

Steps for A/B testing

1. Plan a campaign

The first thing that you need to do in planning your campaign is to find your target audience on LinkedIn. This will give you a blueprint of how many prospects you are going to reach out to. Then you must decide whether you want to reach them through LinkedIn messages, groups or LinkedIn Inmail, or a combination of these in A/B tests.

2. The LinkedIn A/B testing

Once you have found your target audience, you need to create two different versions of your message. Let’s say you are a food provider in an area and you want to check the effectiveness of your restaurant management. To do this you should create two different content types for testing. These could be two different subject lines for your Inmail or two different messages that you send through LinkedIn groups. You need to come up with an idea for a change that you want to test. This could be anything from a new headline to a different call-to-action button. Once you have an idea, you need to create two versions of the element that you want to test.

Your goal is to find out which message resonates more with your target audience and gets a higher response rate.

To do this, you will need to send one version of your message to half of your target audience and the other version to the other half. This is where LinkedIn’s A/B testing tool comes in.

Adam Wood, co-founder of RevenueGeeks says “For LinkedIn’s A/B testing, you need to send two different versions of your message to two different groups of people. You can then track the response rate for each group and see which version performed better.”

3. Monitor the campaigns

Monitoring the campaigns and figuring out results is a complex thing to do. You can use different analytical tools to see the results. Some important metrics that you need to look at are the open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate.

• Open rate- The open rate is the number of people who opened your message divided by the total number of people who received it.
• Click-through rate- The click-through rate is the number of people who clicked on the link in your message or hyperlink in it divided by the total number of people who received it.

• Conversion rate- It is the number of people who took the desired action like signing up on your website, buying your product or service, etc. divided by the total number of people who received the message.

You can also track other secondary metrics, like the number of connections you made, the number of replies you get, or the number of sales you generated. But it is practically difficult to do the calculations and get to the results. Salesrobot is equipped with different functionalities which can help you, it has an advanced analytics feature where you can track the different campaigns. The above-said metrics will be readily available on Salesrobot’s dashboard. Further, A report of the campaigns will also be generated. You can even track the messages of different LinkedIn accounts using the smart inbox.

Few Tips for LinkedIn Outreach

Personalize the message

Kyle Basett, CEO of Altitude Control says “Sending a normal message or email may look like a cold approach, you need to bring feelings in the words that you are saying and keep the text short because no one is interested in reading long paragraphs and they won’t even get an idea of what you are trying to convey. In emails, the recipient can even send your email to the email spam folder if they’re not interested or the content in it is too long.”

Also, there is a need to add Images or GIFs to your outreach to make it more attractive. Salesrobot can hyper-personalize text messages as it can add images and GIFs to your messages when you are designing a campaign. This will make your approach look more familiar and the person may develop a keen interest in your business.

Connect First then Sell

The most important thing to remember when you are A/B testing is that your goal is not to make a sale. Your goal is to connect with potential customers and build relationships. If you try to sell too early, you will likely turn off potential customers and damage your chances of making a sale down the road.

John Stephens, Chief Editor of Total Gardener says “The best way to approach A/B testing on LinkedIn is to think of it as a way to find out which message will get you more responses from your target audience. Once you have found a message that works, you can then focus on selling to the people who respond. Even if you are using LinkedIn Inmails first ask for connecting with them and acknowledge their ideas, this will make the split testing smoother.”

Test Limited Items

Another important thing to remember is to test only a few things at a time. Don’t rush the process. If you try to test too many things at once, you will not be able to accurately track the results of your campaigns.

Jamie Penney, CEO of Shopping Foodie recommends “Choose one or two elements to test and then run your campaigns. Once you have the results, you can then start testing other elements.

The most important thing is to take your time and test different things until you find a winning formula. Still, if you want to test multiple things then create more than two campaigns, if you are using three campaigns, this would be termed as A/B/C testing and so on.”

Summing up

Alex Foster, Chief Marketing Office at Turbo Gadget Reviews elaborates “A/B testing is an essential tool for a team that wants to improve its product because it helps you make data-driven decisions. It works by showing two different versions of a product (Version A and Version B) to users at random, and then measuring how they interact with each version. The goal is to see which version produces better results, whether that’s more clicks, more sign-ups, or whatever metric you’re trying to improve.”

A/B testing is not a quick fix, but it is a powerful tool that can help you improve your response rates and build better relationships with your target audience. When done correctly, LinkedIn A/B testing can help you connect with more people, build better relationships and generate more sales. So take your time, test different things, and see what works best for you.