By-Himanshu Shekhar

*Test Marketing

*Test Marketing

* Test marketing is a tool used by companies to provide insight into the probable market success of a new product, or effectiveness of a marketing campaign.

* Test marketing may last from few weeks to several months.

* Test marketing is an experiment conducted in a field laboratory (the test market) comprising of actual stores and real-life buying situations, where the buyers is unaware of participation.

* Test marketing can be used by a business to evaluate factors such as the performance of the product, customer satisfaction or acceptance of the product.

* Advantages of Test Marketing

*Ease of implementation. Many software packages support simple split tests. You even may be able to collect the data you need with your existing Web analytics tools.*Ease of test design. Split tests don’t have to be

carefully designed or balanced. You simply decide how many versions you want to test and then split the available traffic evenly among them.*Ease of analysis. Only very simple statistical tests are

needed to determine the winners. All you have to do is compare the baseline version to each challenger to see if you’ve reached your desired statistical confidence level.

* Disadvantages of Test Marketing

*Limited number of recipes. While you may want to test dozens of elements on your landing pages, because of the limited scope of split testing, you have to test your ideas one at a time.*Inefficient data collection. Conducting

multiple split tests back to back is the most wasteful kind of data collection. None of the information from a previous test can be reused to draw conclusions about the other variables you may want to test in the future.