What’s your Net Promoter Score?
It’s a big question for brands these days – especially considering the massive impact referrals and reviews have on your business. In fact, they’re so important that 82% of all consumers (and 92% of 18-34 year olds) seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a purchase.
With this in mind, it’s important to know what percentage of your customers you have on your side. How many trust your business enough to tell their family and friends?
Before you improve any metric, you have to measure it. And that’s where Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys come in.
NPS Scores
Your Net Promoter Score is calculated by asking your customers to rate their likelihood to recommend your business to a friend on an 11 point scale – i.e; between 0 (definitely wouldn’t recommend) and 10 (definitely would recommend). Once you have all your responses, it’s time to divvy up your customer base into three categories:
- Detractors,
- Passives, and
- Promoters.
A Detractor is anyone who rates you at a 6 or below. With a rating like this, you’ll know that there was probably an issue. Next up, Passives. These are clients who gave you a 7 or an 8. It’s clear that they liked your work, but there probably isn’t much holding them back from switching to a competitor. Finally, Promoters have given your business a solid 9 or a 10. It’s obvious they’re ecstatic about your brand, service or product.
From there it is simple. Take the percentage of Promoters, and subtract the percentage of detractors from it. You’ll arrive at a number between -100 and 100, a measure of the willingness of your customers to recommend a company’s products or services to their friends. If you have more Detractors than Promoters the score will be negative and vice versa. It’s generally accepted that any score in the positive is good, and if you’re getting 50 or higher, you’re running a five star service.
Sure, it’s not a perfect system, but it’s a great way to quickly gauge your customer base’s overall satisfaction with a your product, and their loyalty to your brand.
When to ask?
The next question – when to ask for them to rate your service?
Most companies that run NPS surveys do so as though it were a once off audit. Every year or so, they’ll send out an email campaign, asking everyone who has ever done business with them to rate their service.
The problem is, there doesn’t really seem to be an awful lot of point. What good is a single figure? What would you do with that information?
Sure, it’ll let you know if you need to change things up or not. But if you’re seeking to improve you’re going to need a lot more substantive data. Once you do make changes, you’ll have to test the to see if they’ve worked or not. Luckily, it’s entirely possible to keep your NPS score updated in real time. All you need is a little automation magic.
Automation
Setting up an automated email flow will allow you to send each customer an NPS survey at the perfect time along their journey with your brand.
Not only does this give you more accurate results, but because you’ll be getting responses in real time, you’ll be able to effectively measure the impact of any change that you make to your product or service.
This is, of course, vastly more beneficial for your business than sending out a NPS campaign once every blue moon.
Setting up an automation is easy if you’re using an email automation platform like Klaviyo or Dotmailer. These will hook directly into your ecommerce store (i.e, Shopify). This means you can share data between the two platforms, such as when a customer last purchased, to ensure your NPS email arrives in their inbox at just the right time. You’ll be able to create dynamic and interactive content in the email campaign itself, or simply link out to a simple Survey Monkey or Google Forms survey.
Once you have everything set up, hit live, and watch as the responses start pouring in.
Let’s say that on Monday morning, a customer buys something from your online store. You know that fulfilment will take one day, and shipping generally takes around a week, so here’s an example of how your flow might look:
- A customer completes an order.
- Their email address is sent from Shopify to your email marketing software, and is automatically added to your NPS flow.
- The automation waits 10 days to ensure their products have arrived and they have had a chance to use them.
- After ten days, your email is sent, asking them for feedback on your product and service, and to rate their likelihood of recommending your business to a friend out of 10.
You might like to store your NPS ratings against the customers in your CRM, or use this valuable data to add your Promoters to a hot leads list in your email software for post purchase cross selling, or more. The options are as varied as the ecommerce industry itself!
NPS is a valuable, simple metric that can work help you steer your online ship in exactly the right direction.
If you need a hand choosing an email platform, integrating your systems, or setting up an automation, we’d love to help! Get in touch with one of our team today for a quick chat.