What You Need to Know About A/B Test Outreach Campaigns on LinkedIn

What You Need to Know About A/B Test Outreach Campaigns on LinkedIn

If you are familiar with email marketing, then you may have tried out a combination of different tactics to determine which one works best for you. In the end, the results you get from testing out various campaign features help you optimize your overall marketing strategies, as you take out poor-performing elements and hone in on the tactics and strategies that yield the best results and revenues.

This post explains how to apply similar A/B tests to improve your outreaches on LinkedIn. That sounds new, I know, but it would also interest you to know how well-implemented A/B testings can help you make the most of your B2B marketing efforts on LinkedIn. Many professionals have used this strategy to generate more leads for their businesses and increase their customer base. It entails strategically testing out different campaigns, along with monitored changes in their sales funnel.

So, what is A/B testing?

Going by Outreach's definition,

"An A/B test is a randomized controlled experiment to scientifically identify and evaluate the impact of a change to a template or sequence step."

For typical A/B tests in email outreaches, you may consider asking questions like "would a different subject line, or call to action, in my current email template improve prospecting? You can also consider other changes that can produce the same or different results depending on the dynamic of your relationship with your audience and prospects.

When you run an A/B test, you get to access or obtain data that enables you to make smarter decisions about updating the content you share. A/B tests help you see the exact or measured impact you can expect from making those changes. Also known as split testing (as it practically involves showing your audience two slightly different marketing campaigns, messages, or web pages), A/B testing is the best alternative when you're not getting any replies from your messages or outreaches, whether on LinkedIn or via emails.

How does A/B testing work?

Did you know that marketing experiments, such as A/B testing, can increase your ROI by 30% when done correctly? Consider a classic split for your LinkedIn outreach messages. LinkedIn is currently the most rewarding marketing platform for lead generation, especially for B2B enterprises. Therefore implementing A/B testing on LinkedIn is one way to attract the influx of leads you have always wanted for your business.

A/B is ideal for situations where you have at least two great campaign ideas, but you're not sure which one will give you the best results. The next thing to do is split test these ideas and see which one gives you the most opens, click-throughs, replies, and CTA conversion rates in real-time. But how do you do this?

To keep things simple, I suggest narrowing your focus down to one or two parameters at a time. This is because if you test several formats or features at a time, it may be challenging to know what exactly is driving the results. For instance, you can craft a well-written copy and change any of the following aspects to split test:

• The opening line of the message

• The subject line

• The call to action (CTA)

• Try video or audio message and a written message

• Use case studies

You can now send out the two messages to two different groups of prospects on LinkedIn and track the responses you get from both. Use those responses to optimize the campaign and subsequent outreaches.

You may ask why worry yourself doing split tests when you can actually look at your competition and copy what they're doing or simply follow industry best practices. That makes sense, but you'll also realize that industry best practices aren't actually always the best practices at the time or even for your business. Testing a combination of different practices yourself and optimizing your messages/campaigns for your business and audience offers you real-time, practical insights into what works and what doesn't.

Making the most of A/B testing on LinkedIn

When it comes to split testing on LinkedIn, two strategies give the best results. You can either go for:

Sponsored posts: sponsored posts are your typical LinkedIn post on your company LinkedIn page, but this time, they are promoted to reach more audience.

Or, you can opt for:

Direct sponsored content: this is a paid ad that will be shown on the feed, not your company page posts.

Alternatively, you can use direct messages or InMails to reach out to prospects on LinkedIn. However, this is very common practice on LinkedIn. In fact, it has earned such a bad name that people expressly state that they don't want connections who are only interested in sending cold messages to them on the platform. Many people use direct messages but get very little results from them.

If you're looking to explore direct messages on LinkedIn, we have a solution that can help you do a better job, reaching out to prospects that are more likely than not to message you back, practically automating the whole process and returning lots of messages in your inbox.

Our LinkedIn B2B marketing automation software, grobot, is designed to ease the stress in LinkedIn prospecting by automating tasks like choosing a target audience for your campaigns, LinkedIn post scheduling, sending out and replying to LinkedIn messages, and much more.

grobot is the ideal tool designed with the sole purpose of helping you supercharge your lead automation strategies on LinkedIn. To find out more about how grobot can help you grow your marketing results on LinkedIn, feel free to reach out to us and request a demo of grobot. See for yourself how you can save time and money and improve your productivity.

Wrapping up

Finally, I believe that you now understand the power of running A/B tests for lead generation on LinkedIn. Keep in mind that the best results come from running the tests simultaneously. Believe it or not, split testing is one of the most effective ways of improving your ROI. And it doesn’t even require expensive ad spends.

Always remember to use highly personalized messages and compare your campaign analytics from time to time. That way, you’ll be able to optimize your campaigns for better results.