Key takeaways
🔦 Test marketing is a smart technique that tests products before launch.
🔍 It plays an important role in identifying risks, meeting customer demands, and achieving cost savings.
💡 Marketers use different test techniques like A/B testing, usability testing, surveys, and polls to drive customer engagement and enhance user experience.
Before a final launch, marketers perform test marketing to understand customer preferences, identify market challenges, and uncover feature gaps.
As Brian Marick rightly said,
This article explores what test marketing is in detail, what to test, how to run effective campaigns, and how to use feedback to improve product launches and ensure long-term success.
Let’s begin!
What is test marketing?
Test marketing is a properly strategized marketing approach used by businesses to test their products, services, or solutions before their full-scale launch within the market.
Marketers perform testing with a smaller market or a selected audience group.
It helps them collect sales data, gather customer feedback (both positive and negative) and reviews, and use A/B testing techniques to identify product gaps and market challenges beforehand.
Businesses use test marketing as an opportunity to ‘trial run’ their services or products with a live audience in a real market scenario.
This way, they can spot problems and identify opportunities for improvement.
There is no limit to test marketing. You can use it to check the response to a new product feature, collect feedback on different website layouts, or gather reviews on full-blown product releases.
In a market research review conducted by Harvard Business Review, Arthur S. Pearson, director of marketing services, shared:
If marketers conduct test marketing correctly, about 65-75% of the tested products may drive successful results with a broader market after the final launch.
Why is test marketing important
According to the latest statistics, 80% of the products launched in the US market fail due to insufficient testing.
Here are the top four reasons why test marketing your products is important:
✅ Minimizes risk
Testing your products before launch reduces the risk of failures in a larger market.
You can catch mistakes and missing elements with your services early on by testing with a smaller targeted audience right after the project discovery phase.
You can then make improvements to guarantee success with diverse customers.
💡 Pro Tip
To minimize risk, run your test marketing with a segment that closely mirrors your target audience — this ensures feedback is relevant and reduces costly surprises post-launch.
✅ Ensures customer demands
Suppose you are planning to start a clothing brand.
In this case, identifying customer demands is critical to earning profits and minimizing product waste.
You can use A/B testing methods to gain customer insights about the clothing designs, fabric, or even price range for your clothing products.
🔽 Try it yourself with UXtweak’s A/B testing and preference testing tools!
Thus, test marketing can help you ensure that you build products or offer services that customers truly need.
✅ Saves cost & money
Once you put the products to test marketing, either the outcomes will show successful results or they may suggest improvements.
Even after making improvements, if the tests show signs of failure, then there is no point in rolling out the products on a full scale when you know that the product won’t work.
This way you can save time retesting failed products and also a lot of money by preventing faulty production.
✅ Boosts confidence
Test marketing your products helps in gaining real user feedback in live environments.
This boosts a business’ confidence that its products have a higher chance of performing well in the market.
Rather than relying solely on gut feelings about which products will succeed, marketers can count on actual data insights from their collected feedback and move forward with clarity.
What can you test before launching
Test marketing allows you to evaluate several critical components of your products or services before the full-scale launch. Here are some examples:
💡 New product ideas or features
Use test marketing to validate customer acceptance of new features or products.
If the reviews point to improvements, make the necessary changes. Otherwise, it is better to drop failed ideas after test marketing instead of making huge investments and achieving poor results.
Here is a real-life Coca-Cola case study:
Company: Coca-Cola
Problem: In 1985, Coca-Cola introduced ‘New Coke’ with flavors that tasted too sweet and packaging that users did not welcome.
Cause of failure: The company conducted only blind testing and did not perform proper test marketing to gather valuable customer feedback.
Result: The company faced huge revenue losses as ‘New Coke’ was a major flop and outraged customers.
💡 Website or app layouts
You can also test websites or different web and mobile applications in terms of navigation and usability.
🔽 Want to see how it works? Try UXtweak’s website usability testing and prototype testing tools!
Use test marketing to evaluate users’ responses to the overall layout, structure, placement of buttons, tabs, and content flow.
Users should be able to easily navigate through the website or app without any confusion or delays.
You can measure user-friendliness to increase customer engagement and provide a more enhanced experience to website visitors.
Usability testing is where UXtweak excels. It can help you uncover where users struggle and why they drop off, giving you actionable insights to refine the checkout experience. 🐝
💡 Marketing messages or landing pages
Test marketing helps identify which type of content or marketing messages resonate with the audience.
Use techniques like A/B testing, interviews, or sharing within focused groups to discover how well the customers can connect with the messages. You can also use test marketing for landing pages.
Since landing pages have limited and concise content, the messaging should encourage customers to take the desired call-to-action (CTA).
Measure the KPIs – conversion rate, dwell time, and customer experience of the landing page.Make changes to achieve the desired results in the KPIs.
According to the latest statistics, 60% of the companies test their websites and landing pages:
💡 Pricing models or packaging
There are different pricing models in terms of marketing like penetration pricing (a company sets a low price to enter a competitive market), value-based pricing, premium pricing, etc.
Test marketing can assist in identifying which pricing model is most welcomed by the target group of customers.
You can also gather real-world data to understand the audience’s perception of the pricing, like customer response, brand image, and purchasing behavior.
💡 Pro Tip
Use A/B testing across segmented audiences to compare pricing models, then analyze not just conversion rates, but also metrics like customer lifetime value and price sensitivity to identify the most sustainable strategy.
💡 Target audiences or segments
Test marketing is one of the most effective strategies to identify a target audience or different customer segments of the market.
You can test the products or services with segmented customer groups based on their age, demographics, lifestyles, or income level.
The results may help you understand the preferences of various audiences and also uncover the most suitable markets for your products.
Here’s what Vineet Gupta, founder of 2xSaS, has to say about the target audience in test marketing:
One of the most common mistakes that organizations make is presuming to understand their target consumer. Test marking allows you to test these assumptions, discover hidden possibilities, and focus on customer segments that genuinely drive customer engagement.
How to set up an effective test marketing campaign
An effective test marketing campaign is essential to minimize risks, identify opportunities for improvements, and understand customer preferences before the complete launch. Here’s how to get started:
1. Start with a clear goal
Defining your goal for test marketing is crucial to gaining positive results.
If your goal is to increase signups on a landing page, then ensure you implement landing page best practices like minimum navigation, elimination of distracting elements from the page, and content that guides the customers to the desired CTA.
2. Pick the right audience
Choose the right audience for test marketing your services.
📌 Example: If you want to test kid-friendly skincare products, then your ideal target audience may be kids between the ages of 5 and to12 years.
Outside this range of audience, you may not gain the accurate results required for your final product launch in the market.
💡 Did you know?
According to a Reddit user, this is how to optimally research your target audience:
To identify your target audience for test marketing, test your sample with at least 30 individuals using several test research techniques.
These may include demographics and psychographic profiling, competitive analysis, Reddit research, social media analytics, and Google Analytics.
This may help you develop a clear, data-driven profile of your target audience.
3. Choose the right method
Adopt the best method to test market your products and solutions within your target audience. You can conduct surveys to gain real insights about customers’ likes and dislikes.
Organizations widely use A/B testing to test landing pages, website content, images, or even product variations among their customers.
Here is an example of A/B testing for checking user response on variations in visual aspects and video thumbnails on a home page.
Usability testing helps discover real-time interaction issues of websites or products with the users.
Similarly, you can conduct live face-to-face interviews with your target groups to understand the problems and seek feedback in one-on-one sessions.
4. Test one thing at a time
Testing multiple aspects at one time often fails to provide accurate results.
📌 Example: if your target is to optimize website elements with a focus on how to increase sales in retail, then you should perform one-by-one testing of website aspects like CTA, product image placement, or product description.
Testing one element at a time will give focused results and bring more clarity about which elements encourage customers to make a purchase and which don’t.
5. Measure success
Use KPIs to measure the success of test marketing:
👉 Conversion rate
It is the percentage of users who have completed the required action or CTA on your website.
👉 Click-through rate
The percentage of people who click on a specific website link or call to action.
👉 Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
It measures how many customers are satisfied with your products or services.
According to Salesforce, a CSAT score of 70% or above indicates good customer satisfaction.
Tools and techniques that help you run smarter tests
With advancements in marketing techniques, conducting test marketing is just a matter of seconds.
Remote usability testing
Usability testing requires live monitoring of user interaction with the testing product to gain real customer feedback.
Remote usability testing helps improve product design, monitors customer satisfaction, and reduces the risk of post-launch errors by providing real-world user insights -all within a remote environment.
UXtweak is a remote usability testing tool that helps streamline this process by allowing businesses to observe and analyze user behavior from anywhere.
It offers features like mobile app testing, first click testing, prototype testing, and website testing.
Card sorting and tree testing
Card sorting is an effective test marketing method. It asks the target audience to place labeled cards into groups that make the most sense to them.
These cards may include images, links, or descriptions that users may use to navigate your website. It aims to understand how customers mentally analyze and group content.
The tree testing technique, on the other hand, validates the existing hierarchical content structure. It asks customers to find the specific content in the tree’s structure. The goal here is to measure how easily users can find the targeted information.
🔽 Want to see how it works? Try UXtweak’s card sorting and tree testing tools!
Preference testing
Use preference testing to understand customers’ preferences for visual images, text content, layouts, or even product presentation.
This will help marketers understand which design elements or messages resonate with their preferences.
If you observe any gaps, you can make further changes to increase customer engagement and enhance user experience.
Session recordings
Record your test marketing sessions to observe real user behavior.
This will help you understand how customers navigate your website, identify distracting elements, and which website elements they engage with most.
You can further use these records to find which parts of your website need upgrades or modifications to generate effective results.
💡 Pro Tip
Session recording during test marketing can also help detect major issues or risks that may lead to big failures or unacceptance within the audience in a larger market.
Surveys and polls
Surveys and user polls are the most cost-efficient test marketing techniques.
They help you gather direct opinions from real customer reviews and data based on experience and priorities.
You can use online platforms to design surveys and polls.
UXtweak’s user survey tool offers easy-to-design and highly customizable options to create surveys depending on your branding and messaging requirements.
It can further simplify survey analyses by filtering respondents and segmenting customer responses.
Turning feedback into actionable changes
Now that you have gathered user data using different test marketing techniques, it’s time to turn these data-driven insights into actionable outcomes. Here’s how to go about it.
📍Analyze responses
Identify patterns like why most visitors bounce back after reaching the payment page. Maybe you need to optimize your pricing strategies.
Analyze results like why many users have preferred a second image. It might be because it is more visually appealing or conveys the right message.
Similarly, use data to identify high-performing elements of your website or services.
📍Identify what’s working and what’s not
As mentioned previously, not all the elements of your test need to generate effective results.
There might be some features like interactive quizzes, charts, or infographics that may engage the customers efficiently.
Conversely, there may be other aspects, like boring theories or concepts that might overwhelm or confuse customers and deter them from taking the desired action.
📍Prioritize changes
Most marketers get puzzled about which improvements to make first to gain better results. Prioritize high-impact and low-effort changes first to ensure they drive maximum value while test marketing.
📌 Example: A small change like moving the CTA button from the top of a landing page to the end or after the product description can generate a high conversion rate as compared to the previous CTA position.
📍Iterate and retest
After making the required changes, it is crucial to iterate the same tests to ensure that improvements drive successful outcomes.
If necessary, make small tweaks like enhancing the image quality or personalizing the content according to the user’s preferences, and then perform a retest on the same scenarios.
These tiny improvements can make big differences in the results.
💡 Pro Tip
Always compare pre- and post-change test data—quantifying the impact of tweaks helps you validate what truly works.
Real results: How test marketing pays off
Test marketing yields positive results most of the time. Here are some examples:
✅ Better user experience
Check out this real-life case study of Airbnb:
Testing methodology: Airbnb implemented usability testing, extensive interviews, and A/B testing for their new website layouts.
Results: They simplified the search process and improved user engagement and experience.
This helped them increase customer retention by 25%.
✅ Higher conversion rates
Test marketing can help optimize pages and features before the complete launch to generate high conversion rates.
According to Shopify, A/B testing on landing pages can boost conversions by up to 30%.
✅ Confident product launches
According to statistics, companies spend 46% of their budget on developing failed products.
Test marketing the products provides marketers with real data insights from users to understand how the product will perform with a diverse audience.
This builds confidence and boosts the morale of the marketers that the products may succeed in the larger markets.
Stronger brand trust
According to an Edelman survey, 71% of consumers stated that it is important for them to trust a brand before they make a purchase.
Test marketing helps businesses to implement changes suggested by the audience, thereby improving the brand trust in the customers.
When companies listen and act upon customers’ opinions, customers feel valued.
Summing up
Test marketing is not a one-step process. It requires continuous efforts to improve products and services to give the best user experience and ultimately generate revenue.
A small tweak can lead to big conversions or a big failure.
So, use effective test marketing campaigns and the right testing tools to make smarter and real-time data-driven decisions.
Enhance your test marketing experience with UXtweak’s innovative testing techniques. Try it for free today!
📌 Example: If your ideal goal is to increase customers through Shopify, you must identify products that sell well on Shopify. Along with this, you should understand their pricing strategies, product descriptions, reviews, and feature gaps to optimize your products accordingly.