Email, based on the findings from various surveys, still stays the king of customer engagement. So, it’s imperative to understand the various ways organizations use Email and NPS surveys to reach out, collect feedback, and engagement ratio. On top of that, many things were designed to replace it, such as Facebook, Twitter, RSS Feeds. But email survived the cut-throat competition because of stellar ROI, privacy, and affordability. 

In the past decade, companies have pushed customer communication to a new level through email and push messages. Simultaneously, brands use these methods to collect feedback from their customers/consumers. Unfortunately, all those efforts end up ignored as the response rate hardly goes beyond 5%. So, what would compel consumers to fill out that survey form and increase the NPS score?

What is NPS?

Before diving in, let us look at NPS surveys. Also, known as net promoter score is an indicator of how likely is your product/service to be purchased via Word of Mouth. In simple words, the NPS score is a way of saying whether your consumers will recommend your product/service to their peers or not!

Is it the design, the copy, or it’s just that most users don’t feel like doing it?

Well, I think it’s the combination of all these. However, we can reduce the impact of a person’s will by focusing on the design aspects. Survey design consists of both the operational and visual factors of the survey email.

15 tips to increase NPS surveys response rate

The below-mentioned tips have shown to not only improve the response rate of NPS surveys. But also improved engagement, brand loyalty, and recognition. So, they make sure to internalize these tips before implementing them. Now you don’t have to follow all the steps as it is; you can add your own flavour, experiment, and see what works best.

1. Stick to the NPS Formula

Go with the straightforwardly simple form that asks to rate on a scale of 10.

And then the reason behind that score in a textbox. Such simplicity leads to accuracy and is often actionable.

2. Send Branded Surveys

Minimalistic design has been a widespread practice.

You can keep things clean and brand your assets (in this case, survey email) simultaneously. White label your online surveys with the right balance of colors, logos, fonts, and images, you can adjust the communication style to reflect your brand in the NPS surveys. This would ensure the authenticity and increase the chance of receiving inputs.

3. Personalize the email

People prefer informal communication as it lets them know other people better.

You say, which of the following questions would you respond to?

Mary, how likely would you recommend us to a friend or colleague?

OR

How likely would you recommend us to a friend or colleague?

See the difference! Just by adding a name, the whole intention of the statement changed. In fact, by doing so in your NPS surveys, you are giving your consumer a sense of belonging, which increases the trust factor. As a result, 74% of marketers say that targeted personalization boosted their customer engagement numbers massively. 

4. Ask Why?

As I mentioned in the first point, ask why your consumer gave you that particular feedback. What did they like about the product? What would have been better? It’s the most obvious one, but surprisingly brands miss out on this.

NPS scores are vanity metrics that are not actionable, which is why it’s imperative to ask the reason behind their score.

If you ask why, you get reasons that will help you understand customer experience even better. Doing this in NPS surveys is vital for sustainable customer experience management.

5. Don’t over ask

Now that I advised asking questions don’t overdo it and add 20 new questions. The customer won’t spend much time with your form. Instead, try to stick to one question only or, as per the NPS surveys standard, stick to 2 items.

Trust me, just two questions will give you a detailed picture of the whole customer experience without losing the response rate.

Still, if there have to be more than 2 or 3 questions, you can go with MCQ-type ones which are likely to take less time and won’t require much typing.

For example: How did you like the behavior of the sales executive?

i. Polite ii. Neutral iii. Friendly iv. Rude

6. Go Mobile

Nearly 75% of the people attend to survey using mobile.

Ensure that your survey email is mobile responsive and well-optimized. Test it yourself because nothing could be more frustrating than a slow-loading email. In order to avoid any road bump, consider testing your email using an HTML Email Check.

For better validation, send the NPS surveys to the marketing team as a pilot test

to see whether there’s any room for improvement.

This will let you determine whether your email is properly rendered across all email clients, devices, and browsers.

7. Send as a human

Let’s take personalization a step ahead. In order to make your customers feel at ease, you need to sound less like a brand and more like a human. Ensure your NPS email survey is sent from a real employee instead of email addresses [email protected] or [email protected].

This will lower their guards and would make them respond to your NPS surveys more honestly. This is because people think that you actually care for them and your feedback form is not just a formal procedure.

8. Schedule According to Customer Journey

Understanding the timing to send NPS emails is critical. To better understand, let’s say a customer buys your phone on day 1. Now to get acquainted with the features and functionality, they will need at least a week.

If you send them the NPS survey within that, it might be too soon for them, and the survey won’t be attended. Instead, give them some space and time, say a month or two, and then send the feedback email.

However, the time interval varies with each industry and product/service category. For a restaurant and food delivery brand, you want instant feedback to take proper action for the next delivery. Whereas, a mobile or smartphone brand can wait for a month or two before sending out their NPS Survey or a structured series of NPS Surveys. 

9. Get the survey timing right

Like mentioned in the previous point, figuring out the survey timing is crucial for a good response rate. So, here are some of the basics of survey timing as per SaaS industry:

For SaaS or a subscription-based model:

• Initial NPS survey – 15-20 days from the day sale took place. This is required to know whether the sales process took place smoothly or not. Along with that, it also helps you determine what to improve in the service delivery part of your business.
• Second round – After a quarter from the initial survey, in case your customer doesn’t engage frequently, then you can take one more quarter. This is helpful if your customer is facing issues while using your service. In the second round, try to understand their roadblock and clear that. By now, you’ve built trust and comfort with them, and that’s the best way to go!
• Ongoing round – The survey’s final round should continue even after a year and continue until they’re no longer your customer.

As per the Pareto Principle, 20% of your customers bring 80% of your revenues.

For this very reason, put your old customers in that 20% basket and continue the surveys in an informal way. This will also help you pitch new offers or services to them, which have a higher chance of getting closed in their case. 

Now, a thing to keep in mind here is that the interval varies according to the industry and customer journey. So, draft a strategy before deciding on the time frame for the net promoter score surveys. With that, refrain from sending emails too frequently – customers will get annoyed, impacting your response rate.

10. Get the clock right

After figuring out the right time interval, it’s crucial to know the exact time of the day your consumers are available to read and respond.

The best way to figure that is to test different times and weekdays with various sets of people, also known as the A/B test. This would give you the idea of when your customers are active. We’ll learn more about the A/B test in a while.

Moreover, as per the study by coschedule, the week’s best time to send emails is Tuesday at 10 am. Other than that, Wednesday and Thursday are second popular days with 8 pm, 2 pm, and the 6 am time slots. However, take a note of time zones before deploying the strategy.

11. Follow-up

Every day, your consumer receives a ton of email, which makes your email lifespan utterly short.

This is where follow-up comes in. In order to ensure that your emails are worth the effort, make a follow-up plan. If you do that, there’s a 21% chance of getting a response to the net promoter score email.

Needless to say, following up is quite essential if you’re really serious about the customer experience. Like Damain Thompsom of Leadfuze puts it: “You can’t follow up too much in the earlier part of an engagement.” Also, remember that follow-up email templates vary from the first net promoter score email, so design that accordingly.

Example Template for NPS Surveys:

Hey {{Name}},

We hope our {service name} is proving helpful to you and your organization.

In our last email, we asked for a quick feedback regarding the {service name}, but we didn’t receive any response.

Would you consider sharing a little about your experience with our service so far and whether it could help someone else?

{{Net Promoter Survey form}}

In case you have some complaints regarding the service, please get in touch with the support expert at [email protected].

Cheers,

{{Your Name}}

12. Run A/B test

A/B tests are more than what marketers or designers use it for. If used wisely, it can give you insights into your audience’s behavior or reaction towards your email or message. This is crucial because what works for one company may not necessarily work for you.

What is the A/B test, and how can you apply it to the emails of your NPS surveys?

A/B testing (or split testing) is an experiment where you divide your audience into different sets and test variations of assets (in this case, email) to see which performs better.

In the case of an email, you could test:

• Email Subject line
• Email sender
• Copy and Content (Description and message)
• Timing of the survey sent
• Style of the message (casual or semi-casual)
• Incentive or no incentive

However, it’s imperative to jot down the campaign goals before conducting an A/B test.

13. Know your processing limits

Make sure you can process all the feedback you receive. Because otherwise, the customer would feel ignored or neglected if their message is not addressed.

In order to tackle this, limit the number of NPS questions in your NPS surveys. The less it is, the better for the marketing team to process the message and draw conclusions. And you don’t have to do it manually. There are amazing tools available that analyze a massive amount of customer feedback in a jiffy. This will further ease the process of calculating the NPS score.

14. Show that you’re grateful

If your customers have taken time to fill your net promoter score survey, it’s time to thank them for their little effort.

Some popular survey tools allow you to customize the thank you message tailored to each user. With that, make sure to prioritize critical feedbacks and reach out to the unsatisfied customers first. This shows concern and eagerness to improve.

15. Run an incentive program

Even after all the efforts, if you don’t see a rise in your NPS email response rate, offer an incentive.

Humans look for what’s in it for them. To address that, run an incentive program with your NPS campaign, as such campaigns have a high probability of fetching you a good NPS score.

However, you need to be careful with the people who are just there to get incentives instead of leaving honest feedback.

    What type of incentives can you run?

1. Monetary incentives – The phrase ‘Cash is King’ holds true to date. If you give some amount in the form of cashback, it tends to boost the response rate and increase the net promoter score. Such incentives work better than Amazon Gift Cards or similar schemes.

1. Non-monetary incentives – Let’s say you’re selling tablet computers. Your target market is teachers, and due to the ongoing pandemic, education has mostly shifted online. You can offer free data to the instructors in exchange for honest feedback. This option is best if you are tight on budget and can’t afford to offer monetary incentives.

Win-Win in both cases! 

Bonus tip to boost NPS survey response rate: 

Now that you’re here for this long, there’s a bonus, an incentive for you too!

Follow Up Strategically – This is more important than the individual follow-up. As it is even more crucial to catch the customer churn and encourage customer advocacy to increase brand value. Measuring your follow up against a scale might be an issue if you’re getting a plethora of feedback. This will make things complicated while calculating the NPS score.

Using modern tools to analyze and follow up would greatly improve the quality of follow-up.

 It’s Time For us to Wrap up…

Now that you know the value of NPS email, tips to improve your response rate and increase the net promoter score. Let me tell you that not all the points are to be implement-worthy.

Which strategy you deploy depends on your industry, customer segment, and of course, budget. In that case, you’re allowed to compromise on some pointers and find the most affordable method that works.

But remember that in the end, all you need is quality and honest feedback that is actionable.

Hope this works for you! 

The post 15 Tips On How To Send NPS Email Surveys That You Can Implement Right Away appeared first on SurveySparrow.