The Net Promoter® Score (NPS®) is a powerful tool. One simple question to your customers can reveal the health of your entire customer experience (CX). From there, you can pinpoint and fix areas of weakness, improving your CX. You can also uncover and capitalize on CX strengths, even celebrate those successes internally. Morale boost anyone? With good NPS survey software, it’s even possible to segment data, slicing and dicing to examine how the perception of your CX changes depending on various customer demographics and locations.
Most NPS users know all this (and love it), but all too often they also miss a golden opportunity—one that’s indicated in the title of this blog post. They underutilize their NPS in marketing communications.
5 Ways to Use NPS in Your Marketing Efforts
You’ve invested in an NPS survey program. Ideally, you’ve also been using those insights to improve your CX and earn an NPS you can be proud of. That’s hard work! Get the most out of it by using your NPS in your marketing efforts. Here are five ways you can start now.
1. Create an NPS landing page or blog post to showcase your CX and explain your score.
Remember: When you started your program, you educated people internally. Now it’s time to educate externally. Why? The challenge of using NPS in marketing communications is that your audience may not understand what this score means and how it’s measured. Some customers might even see an outstanding NPS and think it’s terrible. To the average person, a 70% NPS may look like an D on a report card (even though it’s a world-class NPS!). That’s why starting with education makes sense. Just keep in mind that they’re not likely to be motivated to learn about NPS, so keep things simple, digestible and fun.
Create an NPS landing page. This page will serve as the hub for all NPS-related marketing communications. Offer a brief, simple explanation of what NPS is, how it’s calculated and why your organization cares about it (Psst! It’s because you care about your customers). Even just explaining that NPS can range from -100% to +100% goes a long way. We also highly recommend sharing your industry benchmark alongside your own score to offer context. If you have a 42% NPS while the rest of your industry hovers around 25%, that means you offer a far better CX than any other companies your prospects may be considering. Here are industry benchmarks for accounting, staffing, B2B services, HR services, legal services, insurance, and IT services.
Finally, most people love visuals. If you’ve put a lot of effort into improving your CX, consider showing a graph that illustrates how your NPS has improved over time. This very clearly shows that you care about your customers and have made an effort to deliver a great CX. While you’re at it, why not share some of your NPS program wins? Consider including a bulleted list of what you learned from NPS surveys and each action you took to improve. Bonus points if you can show the boost in NPS tied to each improvement.
2. Share NPS updates with current customers via email.
Now that you’ve gathered all your NPS wisdom in one place, you can parse that out and share. Get to work repurposing your NPS content and educating your customers, always offering a link back to your landing page. Email updates are a great option for spreading the word. You can show your NPS next to the industry average. You can include insights gained from NPS surveys and how you plan to respond.
Beyond automating a thank you email or sms message to those who answer your NPS surveys (with a link to your landing page), share positive updates whenever you have them. If you’ve finished making a positive change to your processes or added a new tool or feature based on NPS survey feedback, why not share the good news? Or you can plan a regular NPS progress update with current customers. Communications like these remind them that you’re always looking out for their experience.
3. Display your NPS and any related award badges.
Some NPS survey programs come with the opportunity to earn awards based on customer satisfaction, like our own Best Of awards. These awards signal to current and potential customers that you’re focused on delivering great service — and that you’re succeeding. So, if you earn a CX-based award, share the good news! Add any associated badges, logos, or icons to your website, social channels, email signatures, and maybe even your Zoom backgrounds. Write an announcement about how and why you earned the award and publish it on your blog, sharing a link on social media. And don’t be shy about calling out all-stars on your team with a tagged mention. It gives them the accolades they deserve while organically bumping your reach on social channels. Once again, you can always include a link to your NPS landing page.
4. Talk about it on your social media channels.
Regularly use your NPS survey program to produce engaging social media content. Beyond sharing your NPS with the context of industry benchmarks, announce related awards on your social channels. Share quotes from positive feedback you receive. Share a shout out to your employees when they’re mentioned as being part of a great experience. Show humility and public gratitude for feedback that helps you grow — just post the customer feedback or suggestion you received and explain what you’ve done to make things better. All this activity displays active, consistent customer care.
5. Ask for reviews and testimonials, and develop case studies.
When someone takes an NPS survey, they’re giving you their time and some valuable feedback. Make the most of it. Respond to detractors with care and a helpful plan of action. Formerly unsatisfied customers have the potential to be won over and turned into your biggest champions. And when you receive great NPS survey feedback, use it to produce marketing materials. Good reviews can turn into testimonials and case studies—great marketing content. So, reach out to promoters. Thank them, engage them, and maybe even ask for referrals.
While NPS surveys are a great way to gather customer and employee feedback, that’s not all they do. Don’t stop at collecting feedback. Use it to improve your CX and produce effective marketing content while you’re at it.
For more on this very topic, listen to myself and our VP of Customer Success, Bridget Harper in our Survey Says podcast episode.
