Net Promoter Score (NPS) Email

NPS email surveys are based on the simple NPS question:

Customers are divided into detractors, passives, and promoters based on their responses. You can calculate your score with a tool like this or check as it automatically updates in real-time within the Survicate results panel.

a banner that encurages to use survicate email surveys for NPS campaigbs

You should analyze your NPS results to

gauge customer loyalty
predict future growth
develop your products and services based on customer feedback instead of assumptions

You can distribute NPS surveys in many ways - aim to catch your users on their preferred channels at the right time. And since email is the most successful marketing communication channel, giving NPS email surveys special attention makes perfect sense.

How do you send NPS mail the right way?

With just a few tricks, you can improve the effectiveness of your NPS email survey.

1. Segment your respondents

Before you send your NPS webmail, split the recipients into groups.

You can segment your customers based on

their job title (e.g., marketers versus customer success specialists)
their previous scores (promoters vs detractors)
age
joining date (new customers vs. those who have been with you for over six months) or
any other factor that matters for your business

You may discover that while marketers are your promoters, customer support is much less eager about your product. Use such insights for further investigation, feature prioritization, and marketing campaigns.

Can you automate this? Of course! If you use Survicate, each email survey will have special merge tags that will let you identify respondents. You can also take advantage of integrations like HubSpot.

2. Determine your sample size

Before sending out your NPS email, ensure you’ve got the right sample size.

There is no “right sample size number.” Especially in customer experience, you should pay attention to every single answer.

But remember that the bigger the sample size, the more statistically significant your results will be. Email survey response rates are among the highest, so you can count on your results.

If you want to be super careful, use a sample size formula to help you assess your ideal number.

3. Update your email list

Before you send NPS email surveys, update your email list.

Sending emails to an old list can skew the results—you’ll have the wrong idea about your sample size. Plus, your open and response rates will drop.

Low open rates indicate that your survey respondents don’t wish to communicate with you. This will harm the deliverability of your future emails. Worst-case scenario, mailbox algorithms will interpret your NPS email campaign as spam and block it. This is especially important in 2024, with Google's recent spam update.

For this reason, make sure that:

your email list consists of an active target audience only
every email address you have is correct
you keep building a solid, permission-based subscriber list where your recipients have expressly agreed to receive your emails (to stay safe from spam filters or GDPR-related penalties)
your emails are engaging enough to activate your subscribers—you don’t want your mailing list to keep shrinking

4. Thank customers for their feedback

Customers fill in NPS email surveys out of courtesy or because they like you. They don’t have to do so.

Whenever someone completes your survey, send them a “thank you” message to show appreciation.

Survicate lets you add a “thank you” note to your NPS survey. It will be displayed as soon as your respondent completes it.

5. Add follow-up questions to understand the reasons for each answer

This NPS survey best practice is recommended by its creators. After all, knowing your Net Promoter Score (and benchmarking the NPS against your competition) is just the beginning. You must also find out the reason behind it.

Here’s where follow-up open-ended questions come into play. They will give you concrete, actionable, honest feedback to fuel your customer experience program.

You can ask NPS detractors (i.e., the respondents who give you a score between 0 and 6) for suggestions on improving.

As for passive customers (those who gave you a 7 or 8 score, so a relatively positive one), ask them what would turn their chosen NPS score into a 9 or 10 next time around:

Finally, you can ask your NPS promoters (i.e., happy customers) about what exactly it is that they love about your brand:

And if you’re feeling frisky, you can ask if they would actually like to recommend your company by leaving you a review!

Remember, don’t use too many open-ended questions to avoid survey fatigue. One at a time is perfectly okay.

6. Track email open rates

Checking how many people open your NPS survey emails is important to see if they are interested. It helps improve emails, target specific groups, and fix any issues with email delivery. Businesses can improve their NPS email campaigns by looking at open rates and getting more useful feedback.

Survicate integrates with reputable email marketing service providers like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and HubSpot. These platforms offer built-in tools for tracking various metrics, including open rates.

How to boost NPS survey response rate?

If you are unhappy with your average NPS response rate, you can do a few things to help boost it.

1. Embed the first question into your NPS email.

Embedding the first question in the email body is among the best ways to boost response rates.

With Survicate, you can easily embed your NPS surveys in emails by copying and pasting some pre-generated HTML code.

2. Personalize your NPS email survey

72% of consumers say they only respond to personalized messaging, including emails. You can personalize your survey invitation, email subject line, questions, and even answer choices.

While writing your questions, the least you can do is include your respondent’s first name to make it more appealing. With Survicate, you can recall information inside survey questions with respondents’ previous answers or even use pre-saved attributes.

After all, saying:

Hi Tommy, quick question. How likely are you to recommend our brand to your friends and family?

sounds way better than:

Hello, could you tell us how likely you are to recommend our brand to your friends and family?

Doesn’t it?

Many NPS tools, including Survicate, let you send multilingual surveys. Use this feature to appeal to international audiences. While English usually does the trick, many respondents might be more inclined to take a survey in their mother tongue.

3. Send your NPS email surveys from a person, not a brand

Sending emails from an individual’s account can also positively impact the email open rates and NPS survey completion rates.

There are two reasons for that:

A name and a face behind a message make it more friendly and personal.
It lets people know they can engage in a dialogue.

Sending your email from an inaccessible-sounding address (such as “noreply@companyname.com”) kills the conversation. And you don’t run NPS surveys because you don’t want to talk to your clients!

But an email coming from a person is just half the battle. A good practice is to explain why you’re running the survey. Write a short survey introduction explaining that you’re reaching out to understand your users’ needs better.

4. Find the right time for your email

As the old saying goes, timing is everything. It’s no different for your NPS email survey.

Research the best time to send it before you click “send” on your Net Promoter Score email.

Regarding email open rates, the best hour and day depends on whether you’re a B2C or B2B business.

Hubspot reports that for B2C emails, there isn’t one magical time of the week when you can get the most eyes on your message. However, you can start by testing out weekday evenings and weekends. For B2B emails, it’s best to give Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday a shot.

best days to send marketing email — Source: Campaign Monitor

But don’t just take these rules of thumb for granted. If you’ve sent marketing emails or email surveys before, look at your previous response rates. Are there any hours or days when you’ve seen the best results?

If you have an international audience, things get a little more complicated. For best results, you should send emails based on the time zones. Most CRMs, like Hubspot, automatically schedule an email according to time zones. If you have a large segment of clients with no geolocation data, dive into your analytics tool and try to find the average best time.

5. Use mobile-friendly NPS survey software

Imagine a person on a bus or at a cafe casually scrolling through their mailbox only to come across your survey. They have some time to kill, but they don’t feel like making much effort for you.

If all it takes to complete the survey is one click, you might be in for an excellent survey response rate.

The number of people primarily using mobile devices to check their email keeps growing. People tend to lurk in their inboxes on the go throughout the day. For this reason, choose the right survey software that makes it easy to complete surveys on a mobile phone.

If you use Survicate, you don’t have to worry about that. All our email surveys are perfectly responsive, regardless of screen size.

6. Follow up on low scores

Your customer success team should pay special attention to NPS detractors—customers unhappy with your service.

To avoid negative word of mouth spreading online, always try to reach out to them and make things up. And that’s a job for your customer success team.

Since reacting to feedback in real-time is always best, consider implementing an outreach process like the one below.

Set up alerts for scores between 0 and 6—make sure your customer success team is notified immediately, for instance, on Slack. With Survicate, you can set the alerts up in your survey panel.
Review the scores and answers to the NPS follow-up questions (if applicable).
Ensure that one of your customer success reps reaches out to unhappy customers. Outreach should show empathy and promise improvements or offer to reimburse them for their inconvenience.

7. Send a follow-up NPS email

If your first NPS response rate is low, don’t give up. Send a follow-up in a few days with a call to action.

Ensure that the copy and subject line are friendly and non-obtrusive, and don’t overdo it with the number of emails you follow up with (two or three will suffice).

Remember about the power of personalization. Consider sending a separate follow-up email to those who opened the email but didn’t respond and those who missed the email altogether.

NPS email subject lines—best practices and ideas

The first factor that will impact the success of your NPS email is the open rate. Let’s quickly look at some tips to make your email survey subject lines irresistible.

1. Add the recipient’s name

We mentioned personalization earlier in this post—it’s just as applicable to your subject line. Use your respondent’s first name to make it sound more friendly and to trigger their interest; for example,

Tony, we’ve got a little favor to ask you.

According to Campaign Monitor, users are 26% more likely to open emails with personalized subject lines.

2. Keep your NPS email subject line short

Long subject lines get cut off in inboxes, especially on mobile devices.

Keep your subject lines under 50 characters to make sure they display correctly. You can also get email previews in most CRM and email tools.

3. Create a sense of importance or urgency

As Net Promoter Score surveys are recurring and limited (i.e., run every few months for a certain number of days), trigger your recipient’s reaction by creating a sense of importance.

Provoke a sense of urgency in your audience with a clock-is-ticking kind of subject line, such as:

Only three days left to fill out our NPS survey!

4. Use humor or a distinct tone of voice

People receive hundreds of emails a day, so try to get yours noticed.

Align your voice with your branding, and add some twists and humor. You can never go wrong with a series of jokes like in the subject lines for survey emails below.

5. Prioritize your NPS email subject lines’ clarity

Email subject lines that are clear to the recipient have a whopping 541% higher response rate than vague ones.

To best understand what ‘clarity’ means, take a look at the example below:

Vague subject line: “Hannah, we need your opinion!”

Clear subject line: “Hannah, care to fill out a quick survey?”

Ready-to-grab NPS email templates

Here are two sample survey emails you could try out. You can adjust them as you please or take them for an A/B-test spin!

NPS email example #1:

Hi [name],

Thank you for your recent purchase. We truly appreciate having you as a customer!

We always want to provide the absolute best service, so we have a small favor to ask.

Would you spare a moment to fill out our NPS survey? It would mean the world to us and will only take a few seconds (promise🤞). Just click on the relevant score below:

NPS template

‍All best,‍

[Name & surname]

Head of Customer Success at [Your company]

NPS email example #2: