We have two new products at Drift that help SaaS businesses engage with their customers (Drift Daily and Drift) — and one of the best parts about being a marketer at Drift is that we get to use the tools that our team is building every day. We get to eat the Drift dogfood — or as we call it internally, “Drifting on Drift.”
One of the most powerful things about Drift is the ability to get feedback from customers in seconds — and since we’re in the early stages, that feedback is hugely important. And because we’re a small and hungry team, all of that feedback gets acted on instantly in one way or another — bugs get squashed, and new ideas get added to Trello or ProdPad. We even use customer feedback to inform the content we write on our blog and in our newsletter.
At the bottom of this post you can download our free checklist with the six questions you need to ask before sending in-app messages.
The Value Of In-App Messages
The average email open rate for a SaaS company like ours is just over 20%, while in-app messages have been proven to see engagement rates that are typically north of 40% (and often times much higher than that) since they can be hyper-targeted.
If we wanted to get feedback on a new campaign editor we’re working on, we could send an email to our customer list — but more often than not, people are reading email on the go, or at a time when the last thing they’re thinking about is what the current editing experience is in Drift.
As a result, in-app messages have become the most valuable tool for us to get feedback from our customers when we need it, since we can show the message to a particular set of customers when they are actually doing something inside of Drift:
In-App Messages with Drift
Getting customer feedback is all about sending the right message in the right place at the right time.
We typically send in-app messages when we have an important new feature that we want customers to know about and when we’re working on converting free trial users into paying customers, but we also use them to help measure customer happiness with Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Measuring Customer Happiness With NPS
NPS is one of the easiest ways to get customer feedback since it asks one simple question: How likely are you to recommend [Product Name] to a friend?
NPS is measured on a scale of 0-10, and each responder is assigned a score:
- Detractors: anyone who gives you a score between 0 and 6.
- Passives: anyone who gives you a score of 7 or 8.
- Promoters: anyone who gives you a score of 9 or 10. The holy grail.
Your NPS “score” is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors – but when it comes to NPS, the value is in the feedback, not the score.
We use in-app NPS as a relationship metric to figure out how likely new customers are to recommend Drift to a friend or colleague.
We measure NPS for all new Drift Daily users, and we also have an on-going campaign to get feedback monthly for Drift customers. Monthly works for us right now since we’re frequently making changes to the product and this allows us to benchmark our progress month over month, but this all depends on how often customers use your products and how often you are making changes to it.
In-App NPS with Drift
We segment customers by promoters (to ask for referrals to help us grow), detractors (to figure out we can be doing better) and even passives (how can we get them from a passive to a promoter?) — and the more data that we get, the more we will be able to segment based on responses.
The best part about in-app NPS is that it gives us the ability to follow up with everyone — positive or negative — and get real-time feedback:
From VIPs to free trial users and more, in-app messages have quickly become the best way for our team to get feedback from customers in the right place at the right time — and we’re noticing that the feedback is better when we can get really specific with both our targeting and messaging.
10X The Impact Of Your Next In-App Message
Not all in-app messages are created equal, and there are a few things you can do to make sure your messages gets the response and feedback you need depending on the action you’re hoping to drive.
Download and bookmark this free checklist and learn the six questions you need to ask before hitting send: