What is Message Testing and How to Use it? + 9 Tools To Get Started

“We help B2B companies increase revenue through sophisticated omnichannel marketing” or “Get more leads, close more sales today”. Which one sounds more appealing to you?

Copy is one of the most integral parts of good marketing and the words you use on your sales, home and landing pages can make a massive difference. A change in just a few words could either double or halve your conversions.

However, for many businesses, copy is an afterthought that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. How do you even know if the words you use on your pages are even making an impact on your desired target audience?

Today, we’ll show you how - with these nine tools you can use for message testing. But first, let’s get something important out of the way.

What is message testing?

Message testing is running two or more versions of the same page with different copy against each other. If you have a hypothesis that you want to test, such as a shorter vs. longer landing page or formal vs. informal copy, you run message testing to find out which of them performs better.

Marketers use message testing to find out what copy works better on their target audience and drive more conversions. It’s an essential process for maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing and sales materials.

But as it turns out, testing manually which version of a page performs better is kind of difficult. Luckily, there are tools that can help out.

Survicate

What’s the best way to test a message with your audience? Simply ask them what they think with a short survey.

Survicate is the tool of choice for countless marketers who use it every day to get feedback from their audiences. The benefits are many, but let’s start with use cases - Survicate can be used on any device and platform, including mobile apps and emails. No matter where you need it, you can run a survey.

You don’t have to think up a survey from scratch - Survicate has over 80 survey templates to choose from, for all your feedback needs. Some examples include:

• User feedback surveys
• Website feedback surveys
• Product-market fit surveys
• Microsurveys

And many, many others. Simply choose a template and you can have it up and running on your website, mobile app or email marketing software in minutes. Survicate stores all your customer responses and you can integrate them with a host of tools for richer insights.

You don’t have to worry about seeing the feedback or not - simply send all survey responses to a Slack channel using the built-in Slack integration. If there’s a tool you use and we don’t support it - simply use Zapier to connect it.

Survicate has a generous free plan that lets you collect feedbackf from surveys and store it for up to seven days. You get all the most important features so you can test out Survicate for free before committing. Paid plans start at $89 per month, giving you access to all the features for superior feedback collection. Sign up for your free trial today!

Wynter

This platform was built for one specific purpose - testing out messages with live, expert audiences. If you can’t test on your own customers, or you have not even launched yet, Wynter is here to help.

The platform has a simple premise - you don’t want feedback from just anyone - you want to target people in a specific industry, with a specific title. Wynter lets you send them a page (or pages) that you want to test for messaging. Simply choose the kind of person you want to get feedback from (e.g. head of sales in a company with 100+ people) and wait for your results.

You can ask for feedback on specific aspects of your page or messaging. Wynter has a database of more than 40,000 experts to draw from. Depending on the plan you choose, you’ll get your feedback anywhere from 12 to 72 hours.

In theory, Wynter sounds amazing. In practice, it gets very expensive, very fast. Testing a single page costs $899. You can get a monthly subscription for $1,489 per month, but that gives you only a few pages a month. The yearly subscription is $19,000.

Overall, Wynter is an excellent platform but you have to be wary of the costs. If you have a single page that is super important for conversions, it’s worth giving it a test here. However, it can get very expensive if you want to do message testing in this tool all the time.

Maze

Ever wanted to give a voice to your customers and give them an environment they can play in? With Maze, you can do just that. Built for product teams, this tool can be used for a variety of activities, including message testing.

Just log into the app, choose a page you want to play with and create a test. For example, you can create the following types:

• Open question test
• Tree test
• 5-second test
• Mission test

And many others. Just choose what you want to test (messaging, in this case) and send your customers a URL with the test link. You can then sit back and relax as your results come in. Like many tools here, Maze comes with a number of templates, including usability testing templates, jobs-to-be-done surveys, and many others.

You can even get screen recordings from your users as they are in Maze, unlocking even more insights.

Considering what it does, Maze is pretty affordable. There is a free plan, but $75 unlocks up to 1,800 viewable responses per year with 10 active projects.

LiveSession

Sometimes, the very best feedback that you get on your messaging is the one that your customers neglect to tell you about. In fact, most people unknowingly make decisions every day and you really have to nudge them to tell if your website or offer is good enough or not. LiveSession to the rescue.

This tool allows you to record and replay user sessions from actual visitors on your website. You can get an overview of how your visitors react to your messaging by simply going through your dashboard and looking at user recordings. 

Get even more detailed insights by checking out clicks and heatmaps in LiveSession. Clicks show you which parts of the web page are driving the most activity, while heatmaps allow you to see the “hottest” parts of a page that get the most engagement.

You can get a free LiveSession plan with up to 1,000 recordings a month, which should be enough to get the most basic feedback about your messaging. The paid plans begin at $69 per month for up to 5,000 sessions, which is an incredible value for money.

HemingwayApp

Granted, this is not a marketing or sales message testing tool. If you’ve done a bit of writing before, you’ll be familiar with HemingwayApp. This is a completely free tool and it’s been a lifesaver many times for the author of this blog, as well as countless other people who write for a living.

The concept is simple - copy and paste the text into Hemingway and it gives you suggestions on what you could fix to make it easier to read. It will show you a total score in the form of a grade - on which reading level the copy is. The more complex the copy - the higher the grade = the more difficult it is for customers to understand you.

It also helps eliminate complex phrases, passive voice, the overuse of adverbs, lengthy sentences, and more. In general, it’s a must-have if you want your text to sound as simple and easy to understand as possible.

While Hemingway won’t save you from missing the mark with your target audience, it’s an excellent tool for running your copy through it as a sanity check. It helps you write cleaner, crisper and more precise copy written for the average person - not a PhD diploma holder.

Ribbon

Another tool built for SaaS products, Ribbon promises rapid user research and for the most part, it delivers too. Using this tool, you can target specific customers by taking a look at which pages they visited before that and how they behaved on them. That way, you can ask someone who bounced off a pricing page for the specific reason they did not purchase, for example.

Besides this, you can also do message testing by embedding microsurveys, polls and questionnaires within specific pages. You can ask customers to grade their customer experience on a scale from 1-5, ask them an open-ended question.

You can even engage with customers in real time and ask them to do an interview with you from your website. If they’re not in the mood for it at the time of visiting, simply schedule a video call later.

The free plan is okay but won’t give you the deep, detailed insights you need. Paid ones start at $149 monthly, giving you 5 studies per month and up to 10,000 tracked users. For detailed product research, this is a good value. However, for message testing alone, it might be on the expensive side.

FiveSecond Test

Don’t you love it when a product tells you everything about itself from the name? FiveSecondTest is just what it claims to be - a platform where you can order five second tests from people online. It’s an easy way to get an overview of the first impression about your landing page. If your copy is on point, the five second test will show it.

The tool is relatively simple to use. You choose a page that you want to test, you add it to the tool and you give some basic pointers to the test participants. They have five seconds to answer questions such as:

• What is the main purpose of the page?
• Who do you think the audience is for this page?
• What did you think of the design?
• What are the most memorable elements of the page?

The premise is that five seconds is just enough to get the basic impression of the page, thanks to our shortening attention spans. The tool works fairly well, but remember that you cannot choose the target audience, so you might get answers from people who are definitely not your ideal customer profile.

FiveSecondTest is a part of the UsabilityHub platform, so you’ll have to go through them to start doing tests. The cheapest plan is $89 per month, which gets you access to the platform but not the test takers. Each five second test response costs you $2, which can be a superb deal if you’re looking for assurance on your messaging.

Userpilot

If you run a SaaS product, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Userpilot, as it’s a great tool for product onboarding and activation. However, you can also use it for message testing within your product.

With Userpilot, you can run targeted microsuveys on specific pages within your product and app. In the same way that you would nudge customers to try a specific feature, you can ask them to give you insights about the messaging.

You can design the surveys to fit into your app interface so that they appear seamless. Besides microsurveys, you can also run NPS surveys when you want to get a bit more details about how your customers perceive you.

At $249 per month, UserPilot is a pretty expensive tool if you use it for message testing only. However, if you need something for product onboarding and guiding your users through your app, getting this tool is worth the money and message and user testing is just the cherry on top.

Instapage

A household name in landing page design tools, Instapage has become an irreplaceable tool in many designers’ arsenals. Besides building great-looking pages with ease, Instapage can also help you do quite a bit of testing on those pages as well.

Instead of building just one page in Instapage - build two or more with different messaging. This tool lets you run A/B tests with your audience to find out which version performs the best in terms of conversions and activity.

Besides specific conversion numbers, you can get deeper insights with click activities and heatmaps. All of this goes straight to dashboard which you can connect with the rest of your marketing tools. As a result, you can get insights such as cost per visitor and cost per lead.

You can get a free trial for 14 days to give it a try and paid plans start at $149 per month. If you’re looking for a landing page design tool with A/B testing as an extra, this is a great choice. However, if all you want to do is message testing, Instapage is probably a bit pricey. Note that heatmaps also don’t come in the cheapest plan and you’ll have go for a more expensive one too.

Wrapping up

Testing out your marketing messaging is vital to the success of your most important web pages. Miss the mark and not even the most perfect product in the world can save you. On the other hand, just an average product with excellent messaging can get some groundbreaking sales.

Unlock the power of customer feedback insights by joining Survicate for free. Test our essential features during a 10-day trial. Don't forget to check our pricing.

Also, you can foster your decision making by checking our newest ranking of best website satisfaction tools.

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