Using NPS Surveys to boost growth and reduce churn

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The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become a standard among SaaS brands to measure customer satisfaction. Many SaaS companies use NPS rating to measure “how good they are doing” and how they can improve their service.

But there are actually many more ways to use NPS scores in SaaS. One of them is to proactively reach out to users who responded either with a very positive or very negative rating.

Once a user responds to an NPS campaign, you immediately know in which bucket they fall. They are either Detractors, Passives or Promoters. Based on this information and depending on your goals, you can send different emails to each group.

Here are some ideas for emails you can send to NPS Promoters:

• Invite them to share information about your service with their peers, either through a formal referral program or simply by forwarding a note

• Invite them to share their experiences and turn them into a customer case study

• Request them to leave a positive review on platforms like Yelp, TrustPilot, G2Crowd etc.

When it comes to NPS Detractors, you could for example ask them if they’d be open to speaking with someone on your team and include a meeting scheduling link in your email. 💡 Bonus: As a Segment customer, you can even go one step further and add other customer traits to the mix, for example, the subscription plan of a customer. This allows you to send emails only to a specific group of your customers and personalize your emails even further. With all that being said, let’s jump into how to implement personalised NPS follow-up emails with Segment, Refiner and Customer.io (email marketing tool).

Step 1: Install Segment on your Website/App

The first step is to sign-up or log in to the Segment dashboard. Next, create a Source for your SaaS app. After you set up your Source, it’s time to implement user tracking inside your SaaS app. You can choose to send user data to your Segment account with the Segment Javascript client or a backend library. Check out these docs to learn more about setting up your source. To get the most out of this recipe, you should send an identify call each time a user registers, logs in, or updates their info. After identifying users, you can also track important events. 

We recommend you track the below events to understand what actions users are performing on your site. 

Step 2: Configure and enable Refiner Destination

Once your customer data is flowing from your SaaS to your Segment account, it’s time to push these events to your Refiner account. Sending your user data to Refiner allows you to precisely target specific users with surveys at a specific time in their user journey.

All user traits and events that you send from Segment to Refiner can be used to create segments and target users, as well as personalizing NPS surveys.

Step 3: Launch a Custom NPS Survey Campaign

Refiner is a customer survey tool for SaaS companies that makes it easy to launch customized in-app NPS survey widgets.

To get started, create a free trial account or log in to your existing Refiner account.

Create a new survey and customize it to your needs. Refiner supports a variety of use-case and comes with many templates to choose from. Finally, it’s time to install the Refiner javascript client in your SaaS App. Installing the Refiner javascript client is a mandatory step to be able to launch survey widgets inside your app. You can install the client by copy & pasting a javascript snippet, through Google Tag Manager or our NPM package. 

As mentioned above, you are free to define which users you want to target and when they should see your NPS survey. You can create target audiences in Refiner based on user traits as well as tracked user events.

Step 4: Analyze Survey Responses 

Shortly after launching your survey campaign, you should see the first survey responses in your Refiner account. 

Note that you can visualize your survey responses inside the Refiner Dashboard.

Step 5: Send NPS Survey responses to Segment

Whenever a user responds to a Refiner NPS survey you can sync their responses to your Segment account in real-time. All you need to do is to create Refiner as a source inside Segment, copy the write key associated with the source and paste it inside your Refider dashboard.

That’s it. From here on Refiner will send new survey responses to your Segment account as identify calls, as well as Survey Completed events. 

Step 6: Send NPS Survey Follow-Up Emails

Now that your Segment user data is equipped with NPS survey responses, it’s time to build personalized emails campaigns. In this recipe, we are using Customer.io to send emails automatically. You are free to use any other email tool that is compatible with Segment.

First, you need to create a Customer.io account if you don’t have one already. Then, configure and enable Customer.io as a Destination. From this moment on, all your user data, including your newly collected survey responses will flow to your Customer.io account.

Customer.io offers a branching logic that comes in handy for what we want to achieve. We can use the branching logic to distinguish between Promoters and Detractors right inside their tool.

💡 Bonus: Your email campaign strategy depends on your goals. To get you started quickly, we assembled 17 NPS follow-up email templates which you copy & paste for your campaign.

Wrapping up

In this recipe, you learned about how you can launch in-app surveys with Refiner and use NPS feedback to trigger automated emails.

The steps we went through were:

1. Install Segment on your App

2. Connect your Segment source with Refiner destination

3. Launch in-app NPS surveys with Refiner

4. Analyze NPS Survey Results inside Refiner

5. Send NPS Survey responses back to Segment

6. Create and send personalized NPS follow-up emails with Customer.io

With Refiner, running an NPS campaign right inside your SaaS product is easy. NPS feedback is synced to your Segment account automatically, the minute a user completed a survey.

Email tools like Customer.io make it easy to then send personalized emails based on NPS ratings to your users. You can use this technique to boost growth or proactively prevent churn.

You can of course also leverage your NPS survey responses data in 400+ other destinations supported by Segment. For example, you can analyze your NPS results inside product analytics tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel. But let’s keep this for another recipe!