Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

[00:01:30]
Arlen:
Welcome to the e-Commerce Marketing Podcast everyone. My name is Arlen Robinson and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Antonella Pisani, who is the founder and c e o of Dallas-based I, full media, a digital marketing and consulting firm focused on performance marketing and digital strategy for mid-market. Welcome to the podcast Antonella.

[00:01:54]
Antonella: 
Thanks so much. I’m excited to have a chance to speak with you today.

[00:01:57]
Yes, yes. 

[00:01:58]
Arlen:
And I’m, I’m excited to talk to you as well. Today, uh, we’re gonna be talking about something. I don’t think we’ve really covered them, uh, directly, at least on the podcast, which is, uh, the net promoter score, uh, what it means to an e-commerce business, what it is. Uh, how they could benefit from tracking it and the kind of all the ins and outs of the net promoter scores.

[00:02:16]
So that’s the, the hot topic of today. But before we do get into all of that, if you don’t mind sharing with us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today.

[00:02:25]
Antonella:
Sure thing. Um, so I got involved with, uh, digital marketing and. And building websites as early as 96.

[00:02:33]
So I got a, a good pair of veterans on here. I’m sure we can talk through it for hours and hours. Um, for sure. And, you know, started out, uh, building websites for my university. It was a work study job for a couple years and then got into web analytics. Digital marketing, um, and e-commerce General management worked on the in-house corporate side for companies like ProFlowers, guitar Center, JCPenney and Fossil.

[00:02:56]
And then about six years ago decided to, um, sort consulting by myself and one thing led to another. And so through, through word of mouth, now we’re a team of about 26 people. Um, I think we’re in about 14 different states now supporting different companies. Um, and it’s a nice blend of kind of former in-house marketers.

[00:03:16]
As well as former agency, uh, or big agency marketers as well.

[00:03:20]
Arlen:
Okay, great. Great. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s a good mix, uh, to have, you know, people that are familiar with the, working with the big agencies, the kind of enterprise level stuff, as well as people that are, you know, familiar with working. Kind of, uh, boots on the ground with, uh, smaller businesses, startups, and, and the like.

[00:03:37]
So, uh, yeah, that’s a, that’s a great team that you have there and thank you for sharing that, that background. Um, you know, as I mentioned, of course, the top episode today, we’re gonna be talking about the net per motor score. And so really the first thing is for anyone that’s not familiar with what that is, why don’t you tell us really what it is and why Important.

[00:03:54]
 Yeah, 

[00:03:55]
Antonella:
So even if people haven’t heard the phrase net promoter score, I’m confident that most everyone here has received a survey that just says, Hey, you know, are you willing to recommend this to a friend or family member? Or it might say, a colleague. So that one simple question like really makes up Net Promoter Score.

[00:04:13]
And what Net Promoter Score is, it’s really like a measure of your customer’s satisfaction, um, with either your product or your service. And what it is is, A formula that’s looking at the percentage of people that are promoters. So that would be a score of a nine or 10, uh, on a zero to 10 scale. And then you take that percentage and then back out the percentage of what’s called a detractor, which is people that have given you a zero to a six.

[00:04:40]
So, Effectively, people who are sevens and eights get considered as like neutral. And those numbers get thrown out because, you know, they’re not gonna be your raving fans, but they’re also not, not gonna be out, you know, bad mapping you either. And so it’s just, it’s a simple way to understand, like, are, are your clients happy with you, um, at the end of the day?

[00:05:00]
And, and, you know, I think you can correlate it to their likelihood to come back. Purchase and, and say nice things about you. 

[00:05:07]
Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good, good stuff there. And uh, yeah, you know, it makes total sense. Um, and like you said, even if people aren’t familiar with that term, net promoter score, I’m sure they’ve gotten the email cuz I, I get ’em to this day, you know, consistently, brands are steadily using it and so, I mean that’s kind of one of the indication.

[00:05:25]
Of, uh, why it is important. Cause if you have some of these major brands still sending out those emails, you know, w will you rate us on a scale from one to to 10? Uh, you know, what’s the, um, you know, likelihood that you would recommend us to somebody? That’s typically what it is. And, uh, you know, so if the big guys are doing it, it’s something that we all really need to, to take a look at.

[00:05:49]
Um, now it seems pretty straightforward, as you mentioned. Um, simple survey you can send out to. Customers, people that purchased, you know, you can kind of think about what timeframe, of course, that you wanna send that out, but pretty straightforward, um, email that you’re gonna be sending out there. Um, now to do this, uh, as far as like an emo e-commerce brand is concerned, or any particular tools or resources, That you’re gonna need to have in place to not only facilitate this, this whole process of getting that survey sent out, but then taking a look at the results, which is really the heart of this, calculating the score, and then really what do you do with it once you’ve done that.

[00:06:26]
Antonella:
Yeah, for sure. And I would say a couple of things, so, so one is I think this is actually really important for smaller businesses as well, right? So I mean, we capture this for ourselves and I think that in a way, the smaller the business too, like the more that every single. Customer really matters. And so, regardless of the size of your business, I, I’d encourage people to capture this.

[00:06:47]
Um, so it can be done a few different ways. So, you know, you can use a survey tool, um, you know, if you wanna go pretty inexpensively, you can use a Survey Monkey or Typeform. Um, you know, there’s other tools like Qualtrics. We actually prefer a tool called Ask Nicely. Um, and the reason for that is it allows us to kind of slice and.

[00:07:07]
The data a little bit more and understand, okay, what types of customers are happiest with you? Which kinds of customers are maybe a little bit less happy? And also really getting that feedback that that pairs with the score, cuz I think the score is really important, but then understanding the why behind the score is, Really critical in improving it.

[00:07:27]
And I think what I would say is like, the main reason to start capturing it is so you know where you stand and then you can actually take proactive steps to, to improve upon that score. Um, you know, for e-commerce business, I think there’s a few ways to do it. So, you know, you can do it as. , like a feedback tab.

[00:07:44]
Um, you can use I think like a hot jar or something like that. Um, we’re doing a prompt. I’ve used, um, some different tools. Um, I’m trying to remember the, the original names. A lot of these, these companies have kind of morphed names, but yeah, you know, you can do something like that at the end of checkout and that’s gonna give you more of a score of like, satisfaction of the, the website.

[00:08:03]
Um, yeah, you can even do like, if you go to like a Home Depot or something like, You’ll see a feedback tab that you can engage with and you know, the value of doing it there before someone has purchased is it also gives you a little bit of context on how people are feeling about your site overall. Um, so you can capture it a couple different times.

[00:08:21]
You could obviously send an email. Um, you know, I would recommend waiting maybe at least like a week after you’ve delivered the product to the client if you’re an e-commerce. So that they have a sense to a sense for engaging with whatever they bought from you. Um, you know, it’ll be a reflection of like your fulfillment process as well because I think, you know, as well as I do that you can have an awesome looking website and the product can be great, but if fulfillment’s not great, that’s gonna negatively impact per um, Perceptions.

[00:08:49]
Yep. And then obviously, like if you’re selling something that’s maybe like a, a software solution, um, sometimes you can do a prompt, like within the actual platform as well, so mm-hmm. , different ways to go about it. Um, what’s really nice with this, this score is that it’s not a complicated formula to figure out mm-hmm.

[00:09:06]
So you don’t need to be this like, Analytics wizard and most of the, the tools that I mentioned, you know, they’ll just give you what your score is. Um, okay. It’s such a simple formula that, you know, Excel, , accelerate calculator will get you there. Uh, you don’t need much more than that. So, um, it’s more about just getting started and, and starting to get that baseline for yourself.

[00:09:26]
Arlen:
Gotcha. Gotcha. Now, let’s see, you’ve gone through this process and, and, and you mentioned some key things here that I’m, I’m glad you brought up that you, you don’t, To just track it in one place. Like you don’t have to just use it as like an email campaign post-purchase, cuz you know, that’s, a lot of times you see companies doing that.

[00:09:43]
I get tons of those emails. But that is not the only way you can do it. You can do it on the site, um, you know, immediately after checkout just to get that initial feedback on the site. Um, and then, yeah, like you said, even, even in the live chat, just to get people’s impression of certain components or areas of your website.

[00:10:01]
Um, so you can really take the. With that score in multiple areas, and that’s very key. Um, and so I’m glad you mentioned that. Um, now let’s say a company has gone through the process, they’ve got the score and whether it’s calculated, they’ve manual calculated it. What do they do with that score and what is that saying about their company once they have that score?

[00:10:20]
Yeah, 

[00:10:21]
Antonella:
so I mean, I think the big thing is understanding now relative to a benchmark. How are you doing? Right? Yeah. So 80 and above is considered world class. Um, I’d have to look at the different thresholds below that, but I think the first thing is understanding are you, you know, are you at a zero? Are you at a negative score?

[00:10:39]
And so depending on where you show up, that’s gonna drive really what your next steps are. Like if I, I won’t name names, but I will tell you the first time I deployed it at one of the companies where I. It came back and this was just a website one, it was a negative score, which that’s a best place to start, right?

[00:10:57]
Yeah, yeah. And so in that case, um, what was really cool is the tool was actually giving us information about, uh, the browser version and the operating. System and device and all of this. And so we figured out that like the site wasn’t land, like it wasn’t loading for a bunch of people. Mm-hmm. , and that’s part of what was driving some of those poor scores.

[00:11:18]
And so, you know, this is why I was saying getting that feedback associated with it and mm-hmm. being able to slice and dice the information if you’re. A decent size e-commerce company it’s worth investing in. And that versus like a straight up survey monkey type solution? Yeah. So that you can see what’s driving your lower scores.

[00:11:36]
Mm-hmm. or what’s driving your higher scores. Right. If you’re doing pretty well, like we have, uh, a client that, you know, their 12 month average was. Call it a 76 and you know, they started taking the scores that were a little bit lower and immediately contacting those people, right? Yeah. And figuring out, hey, what can we do to make this right?

[00:11:54]
And, you know, over the last couple months, like this score has gotten over an 80 now because of that diligence of reaching out to people that, that are giving a little bit lower score. Um, and that’s why I said even with the smaller companies, it’s really important cuz so. You know, it could be something you’re not even aware of that’s driving it.

[00:12:12]
It could be something they heard or it could be something with the fulfillment process that really wasn’t something that your business screwed up, right? Mm-hmm. , it could have been a APS issue or FedEx issue. And so I think it’s really, once you’ve got that score, creating your benchmark, um Yep. Getting to the understanding of what the drivers are, good and bad, so that you can start proactively working against those, um mm-hmm.

[00:12:33]
you know, I first learned about. Back in my, back in the day at ProFlowers and there like we had calculated the dollar value of each NPS point. Mm-hmm. . So we knew if like we could get that score up, you know, an extra point or an extra two points, what it was worth to our business. Okay. Yeah, that type of analysis is getting a little bit more advanced, I think for most companies right now it’s just.

[00:12:53]
Hey, or are folks happy with me? Or, or not? And, 

[00:12:56]
Arlen:
and why? Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s the bottom line. And that, that really can just kind of say a lot, right? There is just people’s overall opinion of your company, um, at, you know, at various points. Now, I know a lot of the brands and, and companies that are listening.

[00:13:10]
People these days are really always concerned about the individual touchpoints that they have with their customers or, or, or even the perspective customers. And, um, sending out something like this or taking the poll of something like this, um, a lot of times you companies who are gonna gonna be a little bit more cautious about what they’re asking when they’re asking Now, do you recommend, um, adding other questions along.

[00:13:37]
This, or always keep it more as an individual question, just, you know, ask for the rating, leave it at that, or have you ever seen, or would you suggest bundling this in with some other, uh, you know, feedback questions, um, that the company would want to 

[00:13:51]
Antonella:
ask? Yeah, I think you can bundle it in, I would say lead with this question.

[00:13:56]
Right. Okay. And so, I mean, I can walk you through how, how we do it for ourselves and similar how, how we implemented it for that company. The first question is the NPS question, right? And then, um, what is cool with those, those more advanced tools, is you can build in logic. And so let’s say that person is a promoter, so they’ve given SN nine or 10.

[00:14:15]
The next thing is, and it’s, it’s done in almost like a, um, it feels like you’re just texting with someone. It’s a really cool interface. And so it makes it really easy to get more details without it feeling intrusive or annoying, right? Mm-hmm. , because it’s just like, oh, I’m just texting with someone. It’s like a, a chat bot, basically.

[00:14:32]
And so, you know, if, if someone gives you a nine or 10, then it’s like, Hey, awesome. What, what is it that we did that that delighted you? And maybe that it’s like a select one from five options. Um, and. Hey, great. Thanks so much. Is there something we could do better for you? Right? And then it could be the same five options, and then based on that, we may refine one more time.

[00:14:52]
Conversely, let’s say we got a zero to six score, that’s when it’s like, okay, this person doesn’t like you very much, so I’m not gonna ask for a lot of details. I may just say, Hey, I’m so sorry to hear that. You know, we’d really like the opportunity to make it right. Which of these things could we be doing better for you?

[00:15:09]
Mm-hmm. . And it’s like, pick one of five. So I think you have to be, um, thought. At it. And I think you can get away with asking your promoters a little bit more detail than you can your distractors. Like they’re not gonna wanna spend a bunch of time. But yeah, you can at least use it as an opportunity to try to get, you know, one, um, one thing that’s maybe a little bit quantitative.

[00:15:29]
Like pick one of these options from these five and then one piece, it’s a little bit more qualitative. Like, Hey, anything else you wanna share? Mm-hmm. . Gotcha, gotcha. So, you know, I think keep it, keep it tight. Mm-hmm. , I wouldn’t go ask like 15 questions and then lead with something like this. A lot of the.

[00:15:43]
if you are doing it through an email, you can just embed the survey into the email. So they’re really just clicking a button. Mm-hmm. , um, or what looks like a button within the email. They’re, they’re just picking their score right from there. And then that opens, that opens up the ability to ask more questions, but that way at least you capture that score right away.

[00:16:00]
Gotcha. 

[00:16:01]
Arlen:
So basically with some of these tools, then you. You, you can lead with this question, as you said, with what you guys do. And then is it based on that, the response? So like, if they’re a, uh, you know, zero to six, you’re gonna ask a different follow up question as opposed to somebody that says that they’re, you know, they reach you a nine.

[00:16:19]
Yeah, yeah. And same thing on, on the promoter side, right? Like, um, and you can do logic based on what they’ve picked. So let’s say for us it’s, let’s say, you know, one of the options was like a. , great. We’d love more details, like is it the speed of analytics, the frequency of analytics, the depth of analytics.

[00:16:36]
And so I think when you have the ability to use that logic and make it really easy, like you’ll, you’ll be able to extract a little bit more info. Gotcha. 

[00:16:45]
Arlen:
Gotcha. Yeah. One other, uh, question that I have, and, and I don’t know if this has, has changed as far as kind of like the, the whole history of this net promoter score.

[00:16:53]
Um, but I, I, I do recall several years back, if you were gonna use this type of rating system, or at least. At the net per promoter score, uh, I don’t know if it was like a, uh, licensing fee or something you had to pay. Um, the organization or the company that initially came up with that whole concept, if you’re gonna use the name, that promoter score, is that just.

[00:17:16]
Still the same case? Uh, or is it this, at, at this point? Is it just kind of wide 

[00:17:21]
Antonella:
open? I think it’s probably pretty wide open. Like Okay. Certainly for, you know, the e-commerce site or whoever’s sending out the survey. I, I mean, when you’re sending something out, you’re, you’re not really using that phrase anyway, you’re just saying, Hey, we’d love your feedback or, right.

[00:17:36]
Can you share your thoughts? I think where there may be a licensing thing is like the software, right? So if Qualtrics are asks. Or someone like that is advertising their product for net promoter score there, there might be some licensing fees. Gotcha. Got gotcha. I haven’t gotten involved with that side. I just think, you know, if you’re a brand or, or a service organization, you’re not like, you’re never saying that to your clients anyway.

[00:18:01]
Arlen:
That’s exactly, that’s kind of what I thought. I think you’re right. I think it comes down to the fact where if you’re one of these, if you’re a software company and you’re looking to incorporate that as a, as a tool within your solution, you can’t call it net promoter score cuz that’s, uh, you know, think it’s trademarked names, but if anyone’s just you looking to use it anyway as a brand, you’re not gonna mention that pro score.

[00:18:21]
Cause people are gonna be like, what is that anyway, , that’s probably gonna turn confuse people even more. So, uh, that, that makes, that makes a lot of. Um, you know, as uh, we get ready to, to wrap things up, I’m always interested in the kind of looking at examples of brands that are using some of these strategies.

[00:18:39]
Um, you mentioned, of course your company uses it internally, but I wanted to see if there’s any other companies that you can, um, mention or highlight that you use the Net promoter score. Um, if you can give a specific details on kind of how they used it, um, what their results were, if they made any changes based on that, what were they and how did it benefit their company?

[00:18:57]
Yeah, 

[00:18:57]
Antonella:
for sure. Um, Don’t think they’d be mad at me for sharing this because it’s kid scores. But yeah, the, the client that I mentioned is a company called Peacock Alley. They do luxury linens and their score, we, we implemented the solution that we use, which is the one with a lot of that logical conditioning in it.

[00:19:13]
And so we could capture a score based on, you know, um, not only an overall score, but understand it’s like, oh, people who bought sheets gave you this kind of score. People who bought blankets gave you this kind of score. People who. Pillow cases gave you this kind of score, and so that ability to slice it up a little bit, um mm-hmm.

[00:19:31]
and so they started really high. I, I would say just, just shy of that world class score, but over, we actually, I pulled some of the benchmarks just before this call, is if you look at kind of their 12 month average versus year to date, We’ve moved over to world class, it’s improved by about five points, which is, is pretty meaningful.

[00:19:51]
And I would say the way that that’s been done is, you know, one of the things has been a, having that segmentation to understand like, are there certain products causing dissatisfaction or, you know, less happy clients? Um, getting that feedback to see, okay, what, what are the things that are tripping people?

[00:20:09]
And then what we do is actually route it. So if someone gives a low score, that feedback immediately gets sent to the customer care team. I see. And see, so that customer care team can immediately reach out to that person and say, Hey, we’re so sorry about this. We just got your feedback. What can we do? Can we hop on the phone?

[00:20:26]
And so, you know, one thing that we always recommend, , um, capture that NPS score at, at a certain cadence, whether it’s every quarter, whether it’s every year, but just mm-hmm watch how those individual customers also trend and change. But you know, there was some feedback about the website that was coming in.

[00:20:43]
Um, we were right in the midst of a redesign, so I think with the redesign like that addressed some of those customer issues as well. But that’s been a pretty fun case study just because it was already high, but then getting it to continue to go higher by just monitoring. Being really responsive and, and looking for those patterns in, in the things that might have been causing some dissatisfaction.

[00:21:04]
Arlen:
Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I like that. I mean, I think the key thing there that you mentioned is, is really, uh, using that information and being proactive. Really with it. Yeah. And because if you’re getting certain people or a few people that are, are rating it, uh, their experience in a certain way, most likely it’s, there’s gonna be others.

[00:21:22]
So if you kind of jump right on it based on that initial, you know, poor, uh, response or that low response, get it over to your customer care team and then kind of jump right on it, I think. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Cuz you’ll be able to identify any holes that you have in your. And hopefully prevent others from, you know, that lower rating.

[00:21:39]
So yeah, that’s the key thing. And I think with marketing in general, um, these days especially, we have all of this data coming in from various sources. Um, un you know, trying to figure out what our comfort customers are doing, their behavior on our website, uh, uh, you know, there’s a ton of things and metrics that we’re all tracking, but the bottom line is if you’re, if you’re just trapped tracking, Things, um, storing them in a database, you’re not doing anything with it.

[00:22:03]
It’s, you might as well not even be tracking them at all. Um, so that’s, that’s the key thing there is just to make sure that you make use of that data. And, um, yeah, a great way to do it, like you said, is that in that example, um, they immediately jumped on it and, um, try to resolve any issues to prevent, you know, other people having that same, uh, dissatisfaction.

[00:22:22]
Yeah. 

[00:22:22]
Antonella:
And sometimes it can be little things, right? Yeah. Like one of the things that, you know, I’ve seen crop up on, you know, various e-commerce sites, especially something that’s like tactile textiles or clothing is like, oh, the color swatch wasn’t quite the same as the product. Right. And right. Those like little things like that.

[00:22:40]
And so it is so much about just getting that feedback right so that you can go, oh, well, geez, like it was this shade of gray, but the product is this shade of gray. And so let me. Let me update the swatches or, you know, small changes like that. Once, once you get this customer feedback. Um, you know, one way I like to think about this also is it’s kind of this army of QA people, right?

[00:23:04]
Yeah. Yeah. Most companies do not have. enough QA resources, like content qa, and so all of a sudden, like people do like to give feedback, it seems like. Yeah. And so all of a sudden you have this army of QA people on different devices and browsers and oss and mm-hmm. giving you insight in this stuff that might not be quite right.

[00:23:23]
And so it’s, it’s an awesome opportunity if you. Take that data and actually act on it to your point. Yeah, right. Like just having the score and not doing anything with it. Like even if you have an awesome score, like you can’t stay ile cuz someone else is on your tail. Mm-hmm. appreciate, always be, always be striving for.

[00:23:40]
Arlen:
Yeah. Yep, yep. Definitely. Definitely. And I, I like that you, you have that army of Q eight people, which you, you’re, you’re totally right. It’s your customers. Everybody’s looking to give their opinion about something and their feedback. So you might as well take advantage of it and, and use that to your benefit.

[00:23:54]
Uh, for sure. Well, Antonella, this has been an awesome conversation. Um, I, as I mentioned, we hadn’t really talked directly about the net promoter score before in the podcast, so this is very, very refreshing. I know it’s gonna go a long way with our listeners and our viewers as well. And, um, thank you for, for coming on.

[00:24:10]
Uh, we really appreciate that. Um, but before we do let you go, we always like to, uh, switch gears and just so that our audience. Can get to know you a little bit better. So if you don’t mind sharing one quick fun fact that you think we’d be interested to know. 

[00:24:23]
Antonella:
Yeah. Um, fun fact is I’ve been super involved with service and giving back since I was about 16, so really long time ago now.

[00:24:32]
Uh, it’s something that we, we bring into the company pretty heavily. Like we, we support a ton of organizations and the fun fact is that, Hopefully in the next few days I’ve got my own nonprofit going live. And so, uh, that’s gonna be a big adventure on top of, of running an agency. So that Great. That’s a, that’s a big fun one.

[00:24:50]
Arlen:
Yeah. That’s, that’s awesome. Well, yeah, service is, is always a good thing and I always have to, no matter what you’re doing, I always gotta give. Back some way to, uh, to help others that are less fortunate. So I definitely AP applaud, applaud you in that. And I’ll be looking forward to what you, what you have going on once that’s, uh, you get all that together for sure.

[00:25:07]
Uh, well great. We thank you for sharing that Antonella. I appreciate that. Um, and lastly, before we do let you go, Uh, any of our listeners wanna reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about the net promoter score or, or kinda anything digital marketing, what is the best way for them to reach you?

[00:25:22]
Antonella:
Yeah, absolutely. Um, best bet you can go to our website, it’s Eiffel Media, which is e y e f u l m e d i a.com. Or you can track me down on LinkedIn.

[00:25:32]
Arlen:
Okay, awesome. We’ll definitely recommend people to, to check you out, check out your website. We’ll have the link in the, in the show notes and I definitely look you up in LinkedIn as well.

[00:25:41]
So thanks again. That’s, Joining us today on the e-Commerce Marketing Podcast.

[00:25:44]
Antonella:
Thanks so much. Great speaking with you. Likewise. Thank you for listening to the E-Commerce Marketing Podcast.

Podcast Guest Info

Antonella Pisani
Founder and CEO of Eyeful Media and Provision Promise