In today’s competitive landscape, having brand advocates is a significant advantage. It’s how a brand flourishes and gains a reputation that sells itself, which in the long-term ends up saving you marketing costs and helps foster a better customer and team relationship.
As a business wanting to generate brand advocates, adopting an NPS survey has always been a great starting point. With its ability to provide insight into customer sentiment from a single question, an NPS is an easy and cost-effective way for businesses to stay on top of customer demands.
With that said, the success of an NPS survey rides on the number of responses you receive from customers. This means if your business is struggling to get responses, you won’t have that overarching visibility into business performance.
In this article, to help you gain optimal responses, we’re sharing our top tactics that you can use to improve response rates.
Make It Mobile Optimized/Visually Appealing
As we’ve mentioned before, mobile has grown to be one of, if not the, most effective ways of reaching a large group of people. In fact, according to digital marketing publication Search Engine Land, 57% of a businesses traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets. In addition, Statista reports that by the end of 2019 the number of mobile phone users is forecast to reach a new high of 4.68 billion users.
With such a large percentage of audiences leveraging mobile, the chances of them accessing your NPS survey on their phones are significantly larger than desktop or any other medium. This makes mobile critical to perfect. If for example, the NPS experience is difficult to navigate, visually unappealing, or certain elements are missing, it’ll be less enticing and you’ll reduce the chances of them filling it out.
In order to generate the most responses from your customers, mobile optimization should be a key consideration. Not only should it be easy to use and navigate through, but your NPS survey should also be visually appealing on mobile. Whether that means adopting a survey platform or hiring a UX designer, it’s an investment that will make all the difference for the modern customer.
Test Subject Lines
Depending on how you send out your NPS survey, this element might not apply to you. Only applicable to an emailed NPS survey, a subject line can be the determining factor into whether or not a customer opens your survey or not.
An ideal subject line will be engaging and succinct. It should give the customer an idea of what the message entails but still leave them wanting to know more. In addition, a successful subject line will never be a one-size-fits-all approach. Each customer is different so your message should be tailored to each type of individual.
In order to determine the most effective subject line, we suggest testing several options. Here some tactics worth testing:
- Using the customer’s name in the email
- Using an exclamation mark versus using a period
- Keeping it short versus making it more lengthy
- Using acronyms like “BTW” or “ICYMI” as opposed to no acronyms
By testing out several options you can determine what subject lines work best to improve both the open and response rates of your NPS.
Make The Accompanying Message Engaging
If you aren’t using email (which may be the majority of you) the message you craft will be the most important aspect of getting customers to fill out your NPS. When leveraged correctly the message accompanying your NPS can entice and persuade customers to complete the survey and feel good about it.
To construct an effective message, aim your efforts at personalizing as much of the content as possible. That, in addition to reminding customers of how valued they are or creating a sense of urgency, will help elicit a response.
If you’re looking to personalize messaging or your overall message without a huge uplift, we highly suggest investing in a third-party vendor. A messaging solution like a Customer Experience Management solution, for example, can provide you with insight like the customer’s location, details of previous interactions, channel preference, and so on. Using this information you can better tailor your initial message to increase NPS survey open rates and the likelihood of them filling out the survey.
Keep It Short And Sweet
Although you’ll want to create an enticing message, you don’t want to lose the customers interest with a lengthy message. When crafting your note you should be keeping both your wording and questions to a minimum. Be direct and succinct, as the customer should be able to view your survey and think of it as a simple and easy process that they’d be happy to set time aside for.
Keeping it short and sweet is even more imperative if it is your first time reaching out to a customer. Sending a message that is lengthy can leave a sour taste in the customer’s mouth if they feel you aren’t being considerate of their valuable time.
With a survey, there really is no recommended time, so you should be using common sense as to what each customer would feel comfortable with. Each customer is different and should be treated as such. For instance, a long-term customer of yours should be receiving a different type of survey than a customer who just purchased once.
When drafting your NPS survey, remember that at end of the day they’re doing you a favour by filling it out, so the least you can do is reward them with a less obtrusive survey.
Utilize Technology
Although technology may seem like an operational benefit, it can also aid you in garnering more NPS survey responses. With technology, like a customer engagement platform, you can get more granular data on each customer so you can better tailor each NPS survey message and how you send it. Creating a more personalized experience through technology not only increases response rates but fortifies customer and business relationships.
What’s more, an ideal solution should be able to provide information on things like the customer’s preferred communication channel, their location, their sentiment, and much more, so you can further tailor your NPS survey messaging.
Conclusion
When creating an NPS survey there are a lot of elements to consider in order to get the most optimal response rate. From our research and experience in customer experience management, we highly suggest looking at your mobile experience, tailoring your messaging, and incorporating some sort of technology, so you can continuously enhance the experience.
