NPS is the go-to score for measuring customer loyalty. It’s easy to use, it helps you track changes in customer satisfaction and identifies brand advocates. What’s not to like? Sending an NPS email is, however, a bit different than other customer satisfaction surveys as you want to reach people who have interacted with your service or product before. Not to worry! We’ve listed everything you need to get your NPS email campaign ready and sent!
A general customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey can be placed on your website, reachable via a feedback button, at all times. Conducting an NPS survey, however, requires you to be more selective with whom you display your questionnaire to.
For it to be effective, your target audience should have purchased a service or product from you before. This makes a confirmation email or email campaign the perfect place to include an NPS survey and collect email feedback. In fact, most NPS surveys are sent via email as it’s easy to target the right people and to track performance. Not to mention the fact that NPS emails are easy to fill in for the receiver.
In this blog, we’ll dig into the best practices for NPS emails, the benefits and how to get started. We’ve even thrown in some handy examples, so let’s dive in!
What is an NPS email?
As you might suspect, an NPS email is simply an email in which an NPS survey has been included. Either as part of another type of email, like an order confirmation, or as a separate customer feedback campaign.
If you are unfamiliar with the term NPS, it stands for Net Promoter Score and it is a way of measuring customer loyalty. Basically, it shows you how likely your customers are to recommend your product or service to friends and family.
An NPS survey is straight to the point and usually consists of one to two questions. The first one is phrased along the lines of:
“How likely are you to recommend [insert product, service or company name here] to a friend, colleague or family member?”
The customer will then be asked to answer with a ranking from 0-10. To collect even more actionable insights, you’d follow up with an open question, but more on that later.
Based on their rating, your customers are divided into three categories:
- Promoters (9-10): These people are your fans! They are the ones promoting your company enthusiastically by word of mouth.
- Passives (7-8): They are content with what you offer, but might also try out a competitor. They are however not actively talking poorly about you.
- Detractors (0-6): These people are unhappy with what you offer and it’s safe to assume that they will tell others about it.
Based on your answers you can calculate your overall NPS score, which helps you keep track of your customer satisfaction. You can find out exactly how this works in our blog about NPS surveys.
With that in mind; how do you then create an NPS email? As with any email marketing campaign, there are things to keep in mind for your survey to be a success. Before you sit down and start crafting, let’s go through some tips and tricks for creating the optimal NPS campaign.
10 NPS email best practices
Creating and sending an NPS email is pretty straightforward, but a good strategy helps you reach the best results! We’ve put together a list of 10 handy things to include in your campaign strategy before you send out your email survey:
1. Shorter is sweeter
Be short and concise when you conduct your NPS survey. The longer your questionnaire is, the less likely it is that your customers or users will reply. Keep it to the point.
This is true for both the amount of questions you include as well as the copywriting. Make sure that the questions you ask are clear and short. You don’t want to create room for a misunderstanding.
These are some examples of NPS questions that you can ask in your email:
- On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [business/product/service] to a friend or colleague?
- Now that you have received/used [product], how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
Check out our article which includes an exhaustive list of survey questions for more examples and inspiration.
2. Add a follow-up question
While it’s important to keep your NPS email short, you should include one, open follow-up question. This is where you ask your customers or users why they feel the way they do. It gives you actionable insights that can improve the overall experience (and raise your NPS score the next time it’s time to conduct a survey!).
Examples of open follow-up questions are:
- We’re happy to hear that! What do you enjoy about [product/service/brand]?
- What can we do to improve in the future?
3. Decide how to send your NPS email
This one depends on your industry and your company. If you are working within the B2B industry it might make more sense to send out an email campaign with the NPS survey being the main reason for the outreach.
If you are working B2C, however, you could run a continuous NPS survey within your order confirmations. It all depends on what works best for your company.
4. Embed your NPS survey
Embedded surveys have a higher response rate than simply including a link in your email. It makes sense. It’s less effort for the user as they don’t have to leave their inbox to give you an answer.
If you happen to have a longer survey (we get it, sometimes it’s needed), you can also embed a link in a question. This means that your first question will be visible in the email. When the customer clicks their response, a new tab with the rest of the survey will open.
The example below shows an NPS email from leading Dutch food produce store Albert Heijn. In this case, they’ve reached out after an order has been delivered, asking how likely the customer is to recommend their service to friends and family. When clicking on the rating a new tab with two additional questions open.
Find out exactly how to embed a survey in email embedded email survey here.
5. Pay attention to the sender
Sending emails from a person rather than an organisation can have a huge impact on your open rates, but it depends on which sector you are in.
In B2B settings, using a first name and the company name, like “Elin @ Mopinion” has been proven to be more successful. This is because B2B companies sell partnerships in addition to their product or service.
If you are sending out emails to consumers, however, it’s preferable to just keep your company name as the sender. It holds valuable brand recognition, that a person’s name doesn’t.
6. Mobile first
We have everything on our mobile phones nowadays and email is no exception. In fact, 81% of people say they prefer to check their email on their phones.
This is why it’s important to ensure that your email campaign doesn’t just look good on a desktop. It has to be user-friendly and look clean on smaller screens too. This can be achieved by creating your NPS email with the help of smart feedback software.
7. Brand your NPS email
Make sure that your customers know where the email is coming from. Include logos and your brand colours. Feedback software, like Mopinion, will even allow you to customise the survey itself so it blends in with the rest of your email campaigns.
8. Follow-up on low and high scores
Following up on low scores is important as it can affect how the detractors feel about your brand going forward. If their feedback is handled well and promptly, they can likely be persuaded to give you a second chance.
You can stay on top of this by setting up notifications for low scores. Have your customer success team reach out to the detractors to find out why they are dissatisfied and try to find a solution.
It can also be fruitful to follow up on high scores! Your promoters are enthusiastic about your brand and are likely to spread the word if you encourage them to do so. Consider giving them referral codes with discounts or benefits.
Not to mention the fact that chatting with your promoters will help you identify unique selling points for your company.
9. Time your NPS email
What day and time you send your email affects both the open and the response rate. It’s a pretty common consensus that promotional emails perform better on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. In terms of time of day, it has been proven that mornings and early in the afternoon are the most effective.
Make sure that your email is also being sent at a time that makes sense within the customer journey. For example, after your customer has purchased an item, a service has been used or after a subscription period. Sending an NPS email before a customer or user has proper experience with what you’re selling won’t provide any valuable insights.
10. Write clear subject lines
Make sure your subject lines are clear and to the point. They don’t have to be overly short and snappy, but they should convey what you want the customer to do.
Some examples of subject lines for an NPS email could be:
- Do you have a minute to fill out our survey?
- What do you think about our [Product/service/brand]?
We’ve reached the end of the list of tips and tricks. This brings us to the last point of this blog:
How to send an NPS email
When sending out an NPS email, you’d ideally need two things:
1. an email marketing tool that makes it easy to send and track your emails. You can find an extensive list of the top 20 best email marketing tools here.
2. a customer feedback software, like Mopinion, that allows you to gather and analyse the insights you are collecting from your customers.
So why do you need a feedback software? In short terms: It makes things digestible and easy. Sending out NPS emails usually means that you are going to get a lot of responses. Feedback software with capable analytics functions allows you to design your forms, gather your feedback data and analyse it in one place.
If you are working with more digital channels, a cross-platform solution also provides an all-rounded view of your customer satisfaction. This makes the process of gathering, accessing and implementing feedback a lot easier.
With this being said, are you ready for the next step? Well:
Time to find a feedback software solution!
Mopinion is the #1 feedback software for web, app and email. All surveys are completely responsive and adapt to any device or screen size. Not to mention the fact that you can brand them however you like.
We also have a wide variety of survey templates, including NPS, CSAT, CES and GCR. Do you already have a CRM software? Great news: Mopinion is easy to integrate, making your email campaigns that much smoother.
Do you want to hear more about Mopinion? Book a demo to speak with one of our specialists or try our software for yourself with a 14-day free trial.
Ready to see Mopinion in action?
Want to learn more about Mopinion’s all-in-1 user feedback platform? Don’t be shy and take our software for a spin! Do you prefer it a bit more personal? Just book a demo. One of our feedback pro’s will guide you through the software and answer any questions you may have.
