Tricks to Increase Beta Tester Engagement

Testing a new product or feature is always a challenge. Let us say that you have overcome the challenge of obtaining a healthy number of passionate people to test your new product or feature. How are you going to ensure that they are engaged with the product? In this article I wanted to share a few tricks that I have previously used to great effect to increase Beta tester engagement with your new product or feature. This article will focus on a qualitative testing environment, where we actively are in contact or dialogue with our testers, and they are not simply filling in a survey. All points are applicable to any kind of tester. From your current and previous customers, to your professional acquaintances.

Set Expectations

The first step to a great Beta test is communication. To ensure that any potential tester will be able to adequately engage with your product. You need to ensure they have enough free time to properly commit to your testing program. When you are sending or calling your candidates to invite them to the test program, you need to outline your expectations to your candidate. A user needs to know what they are expected to do during the beta test. How much time should each tester spend on the product per week. And have a good understanding how the user-test process will look like.

Internally within your own testing team, it needs to be clear who is responsible for what during the testing process. Is the founder leading the calls? Or is it the Customer Success Manager (CSM)? Who is going to be the first point of contact for each tester? How frequently are we going to have our feedback calls? How should testers provide their feedback, in a survey format or from calls?

It is important that everyone, from the tester to the internal team knows their roles in the test. This allows for a smoother operation, and reduces the likelihood of people talking over each other, or losing information.

You can also provide this information in waves rather than bombard a candidate immediately with too much information. Such as, firstly informing about time commitment, then in another call outline how they are going to use your product, and what they can expect from you.

Structured Feedback Sessions

While this article does assume that feedback will be often collected qualitatively. That feedback needs to eventually be converted into a quantitative method that will be easy to assess by a Product Manager. To get to this stage we first need to ensure that we are structuring our beta calls in a relatively similar fashion.

The advantage of doing this is that we can then easily compare testers experience. You can really structure the whole process from the beginning if you wish to do so. This could include:

• Organising who we are going to test with – getting a good balance of professionals from various verticals. Assign each candidate to a CSM. Ideally select candidates who are supporters of your product, since a champion is more likely to express interest in participating
• Deciding the duration of the test. A good balance would be 3x 30–60-minute feedback calls with one taking place each week. Optional – short pre-Beta presentation to fully outline the Beta process; Must – a short tutorial/walkthrough of the product
• Call/email each beta candidate – explain what they will be testing, and how much time they are expected to commit
• Decide where feedback notes should be organised and how feedback should be collected.
• Rewards or incentives. I would recommend sending a small merchandise gift for the most engaged testers as a reward for committing time. Otherwise, its important to outline how the tester will benefit from participating (direct impact on the product development)

Beta Test Community

If you are testing your new product or feature with several different testers. You may consider creating a community to bolster tester engagement. This can even be done in a small personalised space such as a Slack or Discord channel, or a private thread in a community forum. There are several advantages to this approach:

• Testers can have direct access to members of your team – so questions can be instantly answered
• You can easily share and post product updates that are easily accessible to all testers
• Encourage testers to share their use-cases or builds with other testers
• Testers can share their experience with others, and even network a little bit!

Homework/Assignments

One of the best ways to increase engagement is to provide a series of tasks or assignments for the tester to complete. Left to their own vices, it is not a guarantee that a tester will be that eager to self-explore a product or try to create something new using your tool. They may face bugs or get confused with the product creating no real starting point to test.

Therefore, creating a series of tasks or challenges for the tester to complete may help testers understand what they can ultimately create with your new product or feature. These tasks can be broken down into weekly assignments, and can start from little complexity, and end with a more complex challenge.

These tasks can be hosted on any platform, but best to create them on a Kanban board (like Trello) that is visible to both the tester and the employee conducting the tests. This way it’s easy for a user to track each assignment, add feedback or questions per assignment card, or add images show casing their progress.

However, there is a downside to this approach. Since all the users will all be facing the same weekly challenges. The type of feedback you receive over time can become quite repetitive. So, either create a final challenge tasking your testers to create a unique use-case that would be relevant to their line of work. Or create a series of different tasks/challenges that suit each testers professional background. The second point does require more work but could yield more interesting feedback.

Incentives

Should we provide incentives? This is a common question poised by owners and managers a like. I have researched whether start-up companies offer any type of incentives for users joining a beta program and the resounding answer is NO. What we do find is that beta testers often have access to the features and the product for free during the duration of the test, and in some rare cases, receive a discount on premium features after the test. Whilst this is the industry standard, you can take it an extra step or two further if you wish.

If your product is complex in nature, you may consider offering successful testers free use-case builds. Or better, for the most engaged participants. Send a company merchandise product! This will go a long way towards building a good rapport with your testers and ultimately your customer.

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