A/B Testing in Medspa Marketing Can Improve Patient Conversions

When you’re advertising a medspa, there’s usually a lot of guesswork involved. Should the subject line on your email say “Book your Consultation” or “Ready for your transformation?” Should your ads be about the treatment itself or about the results your customers are looking for? Should your landing page be about cost, benefits, or pictures of before/after treatments? These types of questions make it easy for marketers to decide based on their own preferences. However, when we make decisions based on our preferences, we forget that the marketer isn’t the customer, and the customer may not resonate with our preferences. This is where A/B testing comes into play.

In basic terms, A/B testing (also known as split-testing) is used to compare two versions of marketing communication to find out which version works best. When deciding which advertisement to use, which email to send, which landing page to create, or even which call to action to place at the bottom of an ad, A/B testing allows marketers to use real data from their audience to help them decide.

What is A/B testing used for in marketing?

Usually, A/B testing uses identical audiences to test two different versions of the same message. One version serves as the control group, while the other uses some sort of variation. Ideally, there would be only one thing that differs between the versions so that marketers can isolate the change during its performance. This difference could be something as simple as a headline, an image, a call-to-action, email subject lines, etc. Hubspot recommends testing one variable only so marketers can see which factor affected the results.

For example, a medspa sends two different emails to promote their Botox appointments.

• Version A: Book your botox appointment today!
• Version B: Get rid of fine lines before your next event!

If version B gets more appointments from potential customers, then it’s likely that benefit-oriented communication works better for that specific audience. That last part is important: that specific audience. One important rule of A/B testing is that it doesn’t uncover one universal way or rule to market. People are different in terms of how they think and experience things. Therefore, while testing can give you the ability to make a decision based on data, the test results should never be looked at as being absolute.

Benefits of A/B testing for medspa marketing

One of the main advantages of A/B testing is that it minimizes the impact of assumptions. At a medspa, there’s multiple people that can give thoughts on how to do advertising and marketing. Medical assistants, providers, owners, and marketing teams can all have varying opinions on the same topic. However, none of these opinions can actually be predictive as to whether or not a potential patient is motivated to schedule an appointment. This is why data-driven marketing is so important. Marketers can make decisions based on measurable results from each type of message sent to their audience.

A/B testing also gives potential patients an opinion in those decisions. It helps marketers isolate individual factors in communication. As I mentioned earlier, A/B testing is the most beneficial when you isolate one factor like an image, headline, music, etc. If all aspects of an ad are changed at the same time, it’s impossible to know which aspects affected the results.

For example, you can run separate campaigns for each variable in a medspa campaign like:

• “Book Now” vs “Schedule a Consultation”
• Headlines focused on treatments vs Outcomes
• Images of providers vs Images of patient lifestyles
• Priced based messaging vs Benefit based messaging
• Subject lines used for educational emails vs Promotional emails

These tests over time can teach us more about how to communicate to our target audience.

Realistic Medspa Examples for A/B Testing

A medspa wants to get more people to book an appointment for one of their skin tightening treatments. Currently, their landing pages have the title "Advanced Skin Tightening Technology.” Instead, they can change the title to “Tighter, Firmer-Looking Skin Without Surgery.” All other elements on the landing page remain the same. Instead of just determining which headline gets more clicks, I’d want to link the test to something more important to the company, which is consultation bookings.

That differentiation matters because A/B testing isn’t meant to focus on top-of-funnel metrics. More clicks on a landing page isn’t the same as more revenue or better quality patients.

For example:

• Version A can have a 7% CTR (click-through rate), but only 2% conversion (consults booked)
• Version B can have a 6% CTR, but a 4% conversion

As long as the intention of the campaign is to create new client appointments, then version B may be the better marketing message, even if version A looks better at the top of the funnel.

The Real Value of A/B Testing

The biggest and most valuable lesson of A/B testing is the insights it gives you about your audience.

A single test can tell us that a particular headline works best, but testing repeatedly will allow us to see more over time. For example, a medspa can see over time that their clients respond better to benefit-based communication, or that educational emails convert at a higher rate than promotional emails.

With those insights, we can start to shape our future campaigns/communication with our audiences and be able to rely on data when making decisions about our marketing.

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