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  • Writer's pictureAlex Floriano

How to measure your marketing efforts using NPS.

Updated: Dec 8, 2020

How easily would a customer of your product switch to a competitor’s?


Costumer loyalty is a metric often measured by the buy frequency, product features in relation to a competitor’s, time since the first buy and even the “personal perception” by senior staff.


Unfortunately, though, measuring customer loyalty by those metrics can lead a company to make misguided decisions that may cost sales and the very loyalty they claimed to have.


What is NPS?


In a nutshell, NPS (Net Promoter Score) is the most efficient method for measuring customer loyalty available today. Introduced by Fred Reichheld in a Harvard Business Review article in 2003, Reichheld discovered that traditional metrics used by most business to measure customer loyalty didn’t reflect the reality of those businesses’ sales reports.


Customers claimed to be happy with the company they purchased from, act like they were happy but switch to a competitor for no apparent reason.


After two years of research comparing survey answers with purchasing behavior, Reichheld concluded that customer loyalty came down to one simple question:


On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?


You may change the words around and even add a few more questions, as long as the intent is the same: Finding out, quantitively, how close your customers are of recommending you to someone else.


Base on their answer, they’ll fall into 3 distinct categories:





Promoters (9 or 10)

They love your brand and want to let everybody know. They’ll put their reputation on the line for you no questions asked (try telling an Apple fan that Android is better than the iPhone and see)


Neutral (7 or 8)

They’re ok with. They’re not going to bad mouth you to anyone, but they’ll sure not going to recommend you either. They may have had a few problems during their buying journey but they won’t hold that against you, after all, they probably bought from you because you had a sale, were conveniently close by or maybe your competitions just have an obvious inferior product. They’ll switch to somebody else in a heartbeat if any of these conditions change.


Detractors (0-6)

Usually they’re more vocal than promoters because their level of frustration is very high. Not always they will take their grievances to social media, though, but you can be certain they take any chance they have to tell everybody what a bad experience they had.


How to calculate my NPS?


It’s pretty straightforward: NPS = %Promoters - Detractors









Scores above 50 é usually very good. But there are benchmarks for different segments on the web, it might be worth looking them up depending on your industry.


I know my NPS. Now what?


The lesson there is that your NPS should a very important KPI for your marketing efforts. Your team should be measuring their results against your NPS trying to increase the number of promoters and decreasing the number of detractors.


Personal recommendations from acquaintances are very important to us when were looking to buy something new or make a change. How many times have you chose a brand over other because of a recommendation from a friend, even when there were probably cheaper or more convenient options available?


Neutrals can switch to a competitor at anytime. Ask yourself:


What can you do to turn them into promoters?

When you launch a new campaign, how does it impact the loyalty of your base?

What have you been doing to increase your Net Promoter Score?

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