First of all, I really believe that any business person – especially if you’re a marketer – should be aware of all of the feedback they get from their customers, whether it be positive or negative. Net Promoter Score is built on a simple question that you ask your customers: “Would you recommend my company to your colleagues?” Respondents then rate you on a scale of zero to 10, zero being the worst, 10 being the best.

Here’s the breakdown:

• 0 to 6 are your “detractors” – People who wouldn’t recommend your product or service.
• 7 and 8 are your “passives” – People who think you’re all right, but not great.
• 9 and 10 are your “promoters” – People who tell all their friends/colleagues about your company.

Then you take the percentage of all detractors and subtract them from the percentage of all promoters. You ignore passives. You’ve got your NPS rating.

It’s a great metric to find out how your customers feel about you and track any changes or trends over time. It’s also a great opportunity for you to ask for open comments. If your customers are saying great things about you to their friends, you’ll potentially get a new customer, and you didn’t have to pay for it.

NPS isn’t just for internal knowledge; it also gives you a chance to reach out to customers to let them know you’re listening to them. The key to success is the communications that go back to the detractors about their issues (which they’ve explained in the open comments section) and what you did – or what you are doing – to fix them. Here at VerticalResponse, our customer support team follows up with all of our detractors via email and phone.

Create Your Own Rating Survey

While I love NPS, you can create your own version of an online rating survey. Don’t forget to include the option to add any open-ended comments at the end. Then use email marketing to send the survey out to your customers and add a link to the survey in your order confirmations/invoices/transactional emails. To encourage participation, consider running an incentive for any customers that take the survey, like a contest. Just make sure anyone can win, regardless of the rating they give you.

Have you done this type of survey with your customers? Share your learnings!

So when we decided to give our online product away totally free back in 2001, people looked at us like we were crazy. Our largest competitor wasn’t doing it; they gave a free trial of their product for the first 30 days, but you had to input your credit card. Then they would charge it on the 31st day and monthly thereafter. That’s not really free in my opinion.

We not only decided to give away a free trial of our product, but we also took away that nasty notion of a subscription (which we offer now if our customers want it), so that our small business customers wouldn’t get their credit card charged every month if they simply didn’t use our product. Think of the real estate agent in South Dakota who might not have a great February, and might not want to spend any money on marketing then. We didn’t feel that they should pay for what they didn’t use.

Our potential customers log onto our application, create an email and send it up to 100 recipients (in some cases 500 depending on the channel). They can track their reporting in a full working version of the product so they can see the exact experience they’d see if they paid. Since we also have surveys and direct mail postcards, they get 25 free responses on surveys and they get to send themselves a free postcard so they can see the quality.

And it turned a tough sale into an easy sale. When asked by prospects, “How are you different?” or “What makes you better?” we could simply say, “Why don’t you try us out; it’s totally free. And try our competitors, too. Then pick which one did the best job for your company.” It was, and to this day is, the greatest sales pitch I’ve ever had. It takes any pressure off, and puts the decision right into the hands of the prospect. No hard sale needed. We obviously message them pretty hard during the first trial month, which helps push them to interact with our product.

Giving a full working version of our product has been the way we get over 2,000 new customers each month and how our customers become accustomed to our product — without them having to fork over a credit card or pay us a dime. It’s been worth it.