From tracking the real, long-term results of a campaign to judging the potential for customers to refer your company to their friends and colleagues, Net Promoter Score is a versatile metric that belongs in any marketing manager or consultant’s arsenal.
Below, we’ve listed five ways marketing managers can use Net Promoter Score to more accurately track the results of their campaigns and monitor long-term customer acquisition performance.
Monitor campaigns results easier
Every marketing manager is familiar with metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (CLV). Both of these metrics play an important role in calculating the profitability and return on ad spend of any marketing campaign.
Far fewer marketing managers are familiar with Net Promoter Score and its huge importance for measuring the effectiveness of sales, marketing, and advertising.
Since NPS measures the likelihood of a customer recommending a product or brand to their peers, it’s arguably the most important metric in your marketing toolkit for staying on top of your campaign’s performance.
When you measure Net Promoter Score during and after your marketing campaign, you gain a far deeper understanding of your brand’s ability to attract word of mouth feedback. It calculates the number of promoters you have – those who are willing to recommend your brand and spread the positive word of mouth.
The ability to earn and retain customers is ultimately the most important measure of any sales or marketing campaign’s success. After all, there’s little value in acquiring new customers only to lose them even faster than you gained them.
As a marketing manager, adding NPS to your key performance indicator dashboard is one of the most effective ways to make retention and customer satisfaction as much of a priority for your company as acquisition and short-term return on ad spend.
By paying attention to Net Promoter Score, you’ll always have a finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction and thus produce lasting benefits for your employer.
Judge organic customer referral potential
Net Promoter Score is an excellent barometer of your company’s ability to earn new customers organically. If the goal of your marketing efforts is to fuel long-term growth through real word of mouth, it’s vital that you pay attention to your Net Promoter Score over the long term.
If you’re preparing to start a growth-focused marketing campaign one of your first steps should be to carry out an NPS survey.
This gives you a Net Promoter Score that serves as a customer satisfaction baseline. Just like you’d optimize a campaign for a better return on ad spend over time, your goal should always be to convert your detractors and passives into promoters over the course of a campaign. Simply because in most industries, we see a strong correlation between a company’s growth rate and the percentage of its customers that are promoters.
Net Promoter Score trends are important to follow. If your marketing efforts show an upward trend, it’s an excellent sign that your campaign is attracting customers that are in for the long haul, not just for a month or two of use.
This is true even if your initial NPS survey puts your brand at the lower end of the NPS benchmark. Net Promoter Score rarely jumps overnight; instead, a long, upward trend can take a brand from the bottom of its field in terms of customer satisfaction to the top.
As a marketing manager, it’s vital that you survey your customers to learn what they think of your brand or product. Often, it only takes a small change in your efforts to produce a significant upswing in your company’s Net Promoter Score.
Fuel organic growth by tapping into Promoters
NPS doesn’t just let you identify ways to improve customer satisfaction – it also lets you identify opportunities to tap into your brand’s promoters to fuel word of mouth feedback and encourage organic growth. As Fred Reichheld, the creator of Net Promoter Score, says: “The only path to profitable growth may lie in a company’s ability to get its loyal customers to become, in effect, its marketing department”
Organic growth from referrals, word of mouth and person-to-person recommendations is by far the most valuable marketing asset for any business. It’s your promoters – the people that rate your business 9 or 10 on the rating scale – that fuel this organic growth through brand advocacy.
Net Promoter Score helps you identify your company’s promoters, giving you direct access to an audience of motivated, satisfied people who are ready and enthusiastic to talk about your brand.
By tapping into your audience of promoters, you can earn free product reviews, organic brand mentions, customer referrals and more. In our guide to turning your NPS into reviews, referrals, and feedback, we share several strategies for encouraging your Promoters to take action.
See what the promoters liked about the product and then emphasize it in your marketing efforts. In order to increase your customer response and referral rate offer something in return. It can be anything starting from a discount to offering a free service or a gift card. Or you can let them know about a free perk that can only be accessed by referring friends to the business. Incentives are a great way to not only increase response rates but to also thank respondents for their time.
The data you generate from Net Promoter Score surveys is more than just a number – it’s also an index of powerful brand advocates. Give your promoters a reason to recommend your brand and they can easily become your most powerful, valuable marketing asset.
Use Promoters to improve brand awareness
A lot of businesses make the mistake of thinking that brand awareness is just a one-way street – you invest money into it, and don’t really get much in return. That’s false since brand awareness can help you score more sales by exposing more people to your brand (usually in a positive light). Plus, according to research, a consistent representation of your brand can generate a 23% increase in revenue.
How do you use NPS to increase brand awareness? It’s rather simple – you use NPS surveys to find out who your Promoters are, use follow-up questions to find out what they love so much about your brand, and then have your customer success team follow up with them through online interactions to encourage them to talk about your brand on the Internet – on their blogs, social media profiles, podcasts, etc.
Some customers might be willing to do that simply because they love your brand or because they like you acknowledge them (they’re loyal clients for a reason, after all). But it never hurts to set aside a budget for customer incentive – like offering Promoters discounts, extra loyalty points, or access to exclusive products or events, for instance.
Identify marketing liabilities
As a marketing manager, one of your primary tasks is identifying marketing liabilities – advertising claims, product defects and other problems that could lead to customers forming a negative opinion of a specific product or brand.
Many detractors form a negative view of a product as a result of marketing claims that don’t, in their view, live up to the reality. Others have a negative opinion as a result of product weaknesses, defects, and flaws that are no longer current.
This data can be valuable in helping you identify problematic marketing statements that hurt your brand’s image among its customers and revise them to improve satisfaction.
NPS also lets you understand which aspects of a product or service produce negative feedback from customers. By digging into the qualitative feedback you receive from each survey participant, you can identify weak points that affect customer retention.
Finally, by measuring NPS right after your marketing campaigns and tracking how customer sentiment has been changing over time, you can identify which marketing messages and offers were more successful. By identifying “weak” campaigns, you can revise your efforts to get more promoters (and fewer passives and detractors) on board.
Set goals
No one argues that marketing is essential when it comes to business growth, but it often lacks clear data. Data is proof, and when you have proof it’s easier to convince clients that you are on the right track.
Marketing managers need to start backing up their ideas with data and NPS should be one of the main tools they use to do it. It provides a tangible number marketers can present both internally and externally to demonstrate customer satisfaction and loyalty towards the company.
Even though the score itself is irrelevant, it can still be a great target for an organization. Different industries can have vastly different score results. But it doesn’t mean that you should give up and not try to improve it. Measure changes in score over time. Start by looking at what has the score been the last time you surveyed customers and strive to improve it, by paying attention to what your customer liked and disliked about your business. The goal may simply be to create a significant improvement in customer satisfaction, quantified by an increase in NPS score.
The next goal can be to reduce the number of detractors. Sometimes detractors’ issues can be easily fixed if you really put your mind to it. Take Groove for example, after fixing the problems that detractors mentioned in a previous NPS survey, they bumped their NPS score up by 45%.
Using a tool like NPS will help unite you and everyone in the company around a common purpose. All of the departments would be able to equally impact and improve NPS, which will keep them responsible for overall customer success. So reaching your goal will keep the whole team motivated.
Get the insight you need to acquire and retain customers
Retently helps you boost customer satisfaction and improve your retention rate by sending an automated Net Promoter Score survey to your customers. Learn more about how NPS works and start surveying your customers today with our 14-day free trial.
