An ideal product launch involves an avalanche of sales and good brand PR. But how can you know if your product launch campaign was a success?
Sure, sales are fine and everything seems to be going smoothly, but that’s just scratching the surface.
Product launch success involves cementing your brand as an authority in your industry and laying a foundation for future successes.
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of evaluating your product launch success and the most effective ways you can get started.
The importance of evaluating your product launch success
You’ve made the product. You’ve launched the product. You’ve marketed the product. What else is there?
Modern product launches look beyond simple units sold. In the age of the internet, data, and automation, success means making an impact at every touchpoint in the buyer journey.
A successful launch might include increased brand awareness and a slew of user-generated content spreading positive word-of-mouth about your product.
To leverage these opportunities, you need to know what you’re doing right and what needs work. You need to collect and analyze product launch metrics and assess your successes and failures.
By utilizing a mix of qualitative and quantitative data and automation technology like AI sales software, you can improve your product launches and create a successful campaign every time.
Ways to evaluate product launch success
A product launch is a stressful time, so we’ve compiled a handy guide to help you evaluate your product launch plan:
Get everyone on board
Product marketing is no longer the sole purview of marketing departments. Everyone at your company has a stake in a new product, everyone is part of your product launch team:
- Product developers understand the ins and outs of the product, its target audience, and the solutions it offers.
- Customer communications and sales teams understand the customers, the platforms they use, and the language to appeal to them.
- Marketing departments are skilled at putting everything together in one shiny, appealing package.
Getting the right teams together with the right goals and mindsets is the first step to monitoring the success of your product launch process.
Create KPIs
When it comes to a product launch, it’s easy to fantasize. Developing a product is like realizing a dream, and it’s tempting to wax romantic about all of your hopes and aspirations. Boiling those down into a realistic set of measurable KPIs can be difficult.
But Key Performance Indicators can help you stay focused on your business goals, measure your successes, and evaluate where you need improvement. If you’re hitting your KPIs, that’s great. If you’re not, you can find actionable and data-backed ways to turn that around.
KPIs also help get everyone on the same page. If your teams have targets to hit and data to help, everyone is working towards the same end.
Utilize automation tools
Modern marketing tools allow you to collect, analyze, and utilize data to improve your campaigns. To effectively implement automation, think about:
- Your existing tech stack.
- The tools your teams will need.
- How those tools integrate with your systems.
- Your budget.
- Architecture that will scale with your business, like choosing monolith vs microservices.
Automation tools have more scope than ever before, and they are able to integrate marketing, sales, communication, analytics, and more into comprehensive suites.
Brand awareness
A product launch campaign needs to promote your business. For audiences unfamiliar with you, your product launch should get you on their radar, and for your target audience, your launch should generate a garment-rending frenzy and queues around the town. In an ideal world, anyway.
Positive brand awareness is good PR. To evaluate yours, you can track:
- Audience sentiment analysis: this metric measures how people perceive your brand by analyzing social media data like tone and language.
- Mentions and follows: if you’re seeing an uptick in people talking about you on social media, your marketing efforts have created brand awareness.
- Market share: The slice of the market you dominate compared to your competitors.
- Social share of voice: Similar to market share, social media share of voice gives you an idea of how many people are talking about you online vs. your competitors.
- Traffic: An increase in web traffic to your website or online store can indicate growing brand awareness.
How much buzz your product launch generates for your brand is a good indicator of success.
Engagement
Your product launch strategy should generate leads. Measuring and evaluating audience engagement is a good way to assess how much attention and interest your product is generating.
Email marketing
A growing email list indicates interest in your brand–the more email sign-ups, the more buzz your product launch has generated. Making interesting, informational, and relevant content is key to improving your email campaign.
Having an appealing landing page created by the best landing page builders available can also help grow your email list.
Uptake of trials and demos
Many digital service providers offer free trials or demos of their software as a hook. If someone is willing to sign up for and download a trial, they are engaged and primed to purchase. This makes trials a good KPI to evaluate success.
Providers can utilize free trials to capture data like service usage, customer feedback, and contact details. This data adds value to a product launch strategy by offering opportunities for improvement and deeper customer relationships.
Social media engagement
A strong social media strategy is a vital part of any successful product strategy. Utilizing social media content can build brand awareness, generate buzz about your product launch, deepen relationships with audiences, and open up a channel to collect more customer data.
The most useful social media engagement metrics to measure are:
- Gaining new followers around your product launch.
- People liking and sharing your social media content.
- User-generated content around your brand and product.
- Influencers willing to promote your brand and product.
Product launch success depends on your campaign reaching and capturing a wide audience. This makes social media engagement a powerful indicator of success.
Organic web searches
If people are searching for you, your product launch has struck a chord. The amount of organic traffic filtered from search engines to your website or online store is a good indicator of how interested people are. And what they’re interested in.
If you’re a cloud-based phone platform getting a bunch of hits from a search term like “Ringover competitors”, you might be succeeding where your competitors aren’t.
Sales
Converting as many potential customers as possible is every business’ main priority. Lots of sales = successful product launch.
Leveraging opportunities to sell online efficiently can significantly boost your launch campaign’s success.
There is more to the story than that, of course. We can expand the concept of sales to other key metrics:
- New product sales.
- How well your product sells to existing customers vs. new customers.
- How well you’re up-and-cross-selling during a new product launch.
- A sudden decrease in sales.
Overall, though, sales metrics are a strong indicator of how well your launch campaign is doing. If you can keep sales on a steady high, even better.
And, if you notice there is room for improvement, you can look to make some changes. This could mean adapting your approach, looking at boosting productivity rates through specific tools or productivity podcasts, or even investing in software that will make your team more efficient.
Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction metrics come in a few different flavors:
- Net promoter scores measure online customer sentiment about your brand, marketing campaign, and products.
- Customer satisfaction scores let customers rate specific product features and buying processes.
- Qualitative customer feedback about your new product is less number-based and offers deeper insights into how customers feel.
To ensure seamless interaction and data collection, consider integrating a user-friendly feedback mechanism into your website or app. You could build a form to gather insights during the product launch phase.
But product launches inevitably come with hiccups. Utilizing customer satisfaction metrics can help you collect and analyze data on what’s working and what isn’t. It offers valuable insights into issues and how to fix them.
This can go a long way to appeasing unhappy customers and creating more trust in your brand. Tracking customer satisfaction can also help predict customer behavior leading to sales or churn.
Artificial intelligence isn’t just a buzz term–it’s a powerful tool for finding patterns in customer behavior that can predict future actions. AI is trained better than ever, using concepts like a boosted decision tree to train machine learning models and create stronger predictive models.
Understanding your customers better and improving customer satisfaction can help you retain customers, avoid churn, improve your products and marketing efforts, and increase customer loyalty and brand advocacy.
One important aspect of assessing customer satisfaction is through customer reviews. Encouraging customers to leave reviews and feedback about your product can provide valuable insights into their experiences.
Customer retention rate
After sales comes customer retention. So why is customer attrition important? If you’ve had a solid product launch but find customers asking for refunds, offering negative feedback, and dropping off at higher-than-average rates, there’s a problem.
To discover the root of that problem, you’ll need to analyze how customers are interacting with your product. Why are customers asking for refunds? How does your customer retention compare to your competitors and what are they doing differently? What problems are your customer service teams reporting?
Customer churn can impact overall brand PR. Unhappy customers will talk about it–to their friends, to their colleagues, and often to the entire internet. Keeping an eye on customer retention is both an important way to evaluate product launch success and a long-term growth strategy.
Evaluating the success of your new product launch campaign
A product launch can be a PR goldmine–or a PR nightmare. Luckily, knowledge is power.
To ensure new product launch success, you’ll need to collect and analyze data across different touchpoints to evaluate what you’re doing right and where you’re falling short.
From there, you can improve, grow, and create successful product launches every time.
