Testing is usually the first casualty of a marketing transition — not from a decision against it, but from the absence of one for it. In midmarket B2C companies navigating an acquisition, expansion, or new mandate, testing gets sanded down into a small, occasional A/B habit or dropped entirely, crowded out by budget pressure and a department already stretched thin. This piece looks at why that quiet erosion is more costly than it appears, and why a deliberately unfinished testing program still tells you more than none at all.
I asked about the testing program on a call last month, and the answer came in pieces.
“We’ve done a little A/B testing.” A pause. “Subject lines, mostly.”
That’s the whole program.
This isn’t unusual in midmarket B2C companies moving through a transition. Testing is almost always the first thing to quietly go missing. It’s not for a lack of belief in testing.
Everyone I talk to agrees that it matters.
But belief isn’t budget, and testing rarely survives the year a company goes through a transition.
I see a few reasons why.
It also asks for budget nobody has spare, especially when Marketing is already being asked to give dollars back in Q3, as the business quietly massages revenue projections against expenses in every department. And it asks for bandwidth in a department already running on “we’re getting to it.”
Testing was never a nice-to-have
It’s the mechanism that tells you which parts of your funnel can carry more weight.
And I can tell you that after the usual steps levelling up marketing – a rebrand, refreshed strategy, a revised org chart – the next shift your CEO comes looking for is a double-digit increase in leads.
The department that protects testing, even a small, deliberately unfinished version of it, knows where its next 20% is coming from. The ones that stall usually have a strategy deck that hasn’t been tested against anything in over a year.
I can tell which is true of an organization before anyone shows me a number.
