NPS Scores: Mine, Yours, and How We Can Do It!

Hey!

So I’ve been promising y’all an explainer on NPS Scores and why I have been asking you to share a score so I could teach y’all a lesson.

To start, NPS is Net Promoter Score.

It is a really good way to measure quantitatively how a product is doing. In this case, how y’all like the newsletter.

It works like this, you ask folks to rate you on a scale of 0-10. A rating of 9 or 10 is considered a promoter; a rating of 7 or 8 is neutral; and, 0-6 are detractors.

You take the total number of promoters and subtract the total number of detractors and divide that number by the total respondents to get your score.

It matters because if you are doing a good job and your product has a high NPS, it typically has a pretty strong correlation to growth.

Here are the scores of some famous brands and then I’ll tell you the one that I have here and for Talking Tickets since those are the two products I’ve been measuring to use to create new products and opportunities coming out of the pandemic.

So a few NPS scores:

• iPad 75

• Apple as a whole 65

• Tesla 37

• Verizon 7

• Walmart -4

• Costco 79

The scale here is -100 to 100. Anything over zero means your audience is more loyal than not. The median score is 44. And, anything over 50 is considered outstanding.

So…

For this newsletter, the NPS score is 40.

And for Talking Tickets, the NPS score is 54.

If you just track this number alone, you can track how folks feel about your product or your business. Granted, NPS works best for products or services where it is normal for people to tell you about a purchase or to make a recommendation.

But the real magic of the NPS score comes when you combine this quantitative measure with the qualitative data that comes out of the two additional questions I asked.

In this case why and whether you were willing to discuss this with me.

Here, the score is lower due to one primary reason:

• First, the audience is a bit mixed between folks that are interested in marketing and strategy and folks that found me through my column for the Project Management Institute’s PM Voices section. Creating a bridge that doesn’t always get easily crossed for everyone.

On the ticket side, the biggest reason someone was neutral or a detractor seems to be due to the fact that much of the ticket work hits all the major markets around the globe and that means that no one market gets 100% of my attention…and that can make it sometimes difficult for folks to always pigeonhole it.

Which to me is a strength, but I’m not my market.

Back to us, how I’m using this is that I’m going to work to boost the neutral folks to get them to promoters. So I’ll double down on the strategy and the marketing with action items because that seems to be something folks really like, having something they can readily put to work right away.

The great thing, I’m telling you what I’m going to do. I’m leaving the score open at the top and in a few months, I’m going to come back and ask you to rate the newsletter again so I can measure my progress.

It is a merciless statistic. Either I’m doing better or I’m not.

Simple.

Now, for an action item for y’all.

Put the NPS Score to work for you:

Create a survey, any service works. I use the Google docs but you can use Survey Monkey or any survey tool you like.

Ask 3 questions:

1. “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend…?”

2. “Why have you given this score?”

3. “Would you be willing to share more information with me?”

The first one is about getting your score: quantitative data.

The second one is about getting context: qualitative data.

The final one is about getting even more context: qualitative data.

Together, they help you get a rounded picture of how well you are doing. Let me know what you are measuring and how this works for you.

Or, if you are wondering if it works in your situation, send me a note and we can figure it out.

Dave