What Is A/B Testing, and Do You Need It in Funeral Home Marketing?

While the concept of marketing is simple—get your message in front of more people and convert them to potential clientele—the details of the process can get complex.

The internet makes marketing more accessible than ever, but it also makes it more complex. You don’t need a huge budget to reach a wide audience, but you do need to pay attention to all kinds of details and methods. From SEO to CPC, the acronyms start piling up quickly to create confusion for anyone new to the space.

Enter A/B testing, which sounds like another complex acronym you may not have time to learn about. But the concept of A/B testing is actually fairly straightforward, and it’s a critical part of any marketing strategy.

What is A/B testing?
A/B testing is another term for split testing. It refers to the act of creating simple marketing experiments to analyze the differences in results between two versions of an ad, email, landing page, or other effort.

By comparing the results between two versions, you can determine which was more successful. That helps you improve marketing efforts in the future.

Setting up split test experiments
Travel back in time with me for a minute to middle school science class. Chances are you learned how to create an experiment. At minimum, you need both a control and a change or test. For example, if you wanted to see if coffee helped keep plants alive, you would water the control plant with plain water and the test plant with water and coffee. Then you would record and compare the results.

The key is that you changed only one thing—the addition of coffee. If you also put the test plant in the shade and used a different kind of soil, you couldn’t be sure it was the coffee that made a difference.

These same rules apply in A/B testing for marketing. You might create a PPC ad for preneed funeral home services and bid on a certain keyword. But is it the best keyword? To find out, you could run the same ad with a bid on another keyword. Alternatively, you could run two versions of an ad bidding on the same keyword and change only the CTA in the ad.

Making single small changes and evaluating the results lets you continuously improve your marketing.

Yes, split testing is something you need in funeral home marketing. But you don’t have to do all this testing and analytical work yourself. That’s what funeral home marketing firms are for!