The Time is Now To A/B Test Your Product Packaging

You may have heard of A/B testing in the context of websites and digital ads. For the uninitiated, most digital content (like the ad banners you often see) can be tested across different audience groups. Are we still not making sense? Let’s start at the beginning.

Before we had digital advertising, we had traditional advertising. With traditional advertising, there are two main ways to reach out to people. ATL or Above The Line advertising referring to broadcasts such as TV ads and radio jingles. These are basically sent to a lot of people in the hopes of converting some. BTL or Below The Line ads refer to newspaper ads, hoardings, etc. which are put in specific media or places in a city for maximum impact on the relevant audience.

Nowadays, digital advertising has one key benefit that traditional does not - knowing exactly which ad lead to a conversion. This is where A/B testing comes in. Many marketers today create at least two different ads and test them across their audience pool to see which one performs better. What’s more, A/B testing is not limited to ads alone - User Experience (UX) Designers use it to create variants of a website’s page to see which one leads to most conversions.

Why is A/B testing So Powerful?

• It lets you go from just designing your content to actually seeing it work.
• You get to test your market for a far lesser amount that you would spend on a failed campaign.
• You can increase customer retention.
• It’s a great way to test out an idea before taking it to the market.
• It helps you continually improve upon existing processes.

Something brands often overlook is that product packaging plays a huge role in a great consumer experience. We all love watching unboxing videos, and would love nothing more than to unbox our own product to find little surprises within. With that in mind, we think it is a great idea to A/B test your product’s packaging too! With Arka, not only do you get to design your own custom packaging, but you also get to order quantities as few as ten boxes per order. This means you can order far fewer packages and test them out before placing a bulk order.

Things To Consider When A/B Testing Product Packaging 

The basis of A/B testing is that there is both a good model A and model B to test against. Both need to be equally appealing, at least in the creator’s head. With Arka, because you can order a low number of boxes, you can try out the two models for a far lesser investment.

1. Test For Repeat Purchases: Why not use your product’s package for some creative communication? You can encourage repeat purchases through discount codes. Do this by printing out different coupon codes on your packaging. You can also gamify the process by placing one coupon code behind a scratch card and the other under a quirky description and see which one performs better.
   
   You can also test to see if a coupon code is required at all! Print some boxes with the code and some without and send them out to your customers to see how many people make a repeat purchase using their code vs. how many people make a purchase anyway. This can also serve as a good indicator of your consumers’ preferences - some products can be sold without offering any discount at all!
   
   
2. Location-based packaging: You can also restrict packaging by location to see which kinds of boxes perform better and where. You can customize the messaging on each model and send it out to ‘lobbies’ within the locations - subsets of people who you have identified with certain buyer attributes.
   
   Again, A/B testing is a means to improve conversions, and customizing based on location is just one more way to encourage people to buy. We see this kind of packaging mostly in the food industry to represent attributes such as local sourcing and green manufacturing practices.
   
   
3. Shareable packaging: If you can find ways to make your packaging so attractive that people cannot help but share on social media, then you know you’ve done a good job! Shareable packages have another great benefit - they open up avenues for user-generated content, so that’s a few extra Instagram posts that you didn’t have to create. However, how do we know what people might share? With A/B tested packaging, of course!

Final Thoughts 

There’s no better way to test your packaging than with Arka! Start with as few as ten custom boxes for a competitive $5 per unit. You can even custom design your own packaging on our website at prices that are simply too good to miss. Also, check our top-quality custom mailer boxes and custom shipper boxes!  Don’t hesitate to get in touch and find out more!