I know the importance of long term thinking. I’ve seen how much it has paid off in my life.
But something which I feel is relatively low effort is – adopting a platform’s new features and gaining a quick (often temporary boost) because of it. I’ll explain.
The result of these activities is simple – more traffic/visibility. Remember though, more traffic does not mean anything if you don’t have an effective funnel to convert the traffic. Also, more traffic does not mean the right type of traffic.
We rely on platforms to market online without spending money. When I say platforms, I talk about search engines and social networks mainly.
So these companies that own them – Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Bing, Pinterest have their own agenda. I’m sure you probably know it already. It is usually to get people to spend more time on their platformand keep them coming back.
So, Of course, the 1st answer is to produce great content. Content that is shared, liked and gains followers. This takes skills, practice, understanding and focusing on a specific audience, etc. This is a medium to long term activity.
Personally, I’d say playing this long term game on social media platforms is risky. With a flip of a switch, your traffic can be lost, you can lose the ability to directly stay in touch with your followers, or even have to pay to actually communicate with your own followers. (*cough* boosting *cough* posts)
But there is another way. The 2nd answer is to adopt their new features. Massive teams are working in these companies to keep updating the platforms – again to help stay fresh, so people don’t lose interest and move to another platform. Also to improve the overall experience for its users.
Here are some examples of what kind of features I’m talking about
Instagram carousel posts
Google’s rich snippets
Facebook, Youtube live.
LinkedIn’s slideshow.
Now, when a new feature is released, they give a temporary boost and visibility to the posts/creators that utilize it. They do it for two reasons
One is to gain data about how users interact with it
Promote the new features so that more new creators see and start using it.
Thinking briefly about it, you can use it with many other situations too. I’ve seen the same happen with Apple’s App-store. Apple actively promotes apps that utilize their latest features. The latest example that I’m aware of is Apple Arcade.
Perhaps the bigger message is that we are all here to help each other and grow together (even if we have selfishness in us), and when we focus on creating win-wins we grow faster.
I really can’t believe email sequences are *not* more popular than they are.
I also can’t believe that there exist people on the web who teach or coach online and they aren’t using it… yet.
If you think about it, every business spends loads of time educating their potential customers. I mean that is what most of the sales calls and meetings are for.
And when I say email sequences, I am talking about a sequence that is sent out for X number of days. For e.g. A 7 day email sequence to help someone solve a particular problem, learn something etc.
So why can’t I believe they aren’t as popular than they are?
Email sequences are the easiest way to
Get the attention of existing customers or potential customers everyday with their own permission.
Educate them everyday.
Create what we fancily call “brand touch-points”. Another term for developing a relationship over time by communicating regularly so they feel comfortable with you. Like the dates you go on with a person you like.
Help your prospects or customers develop a habit and practice something regularly. If your customers success depends on you helping them develop a habit or practicing something – Esp. Music, fitness, productivity etc. it is a sin if you don’t useemail sequences. Just kidding… not really.
Pre-qualify and filter the “not-good-fit” customers and clients so you don’t have to spend time with them in meetings and calls.
I’ll stop there.
My challenge to you – Can you show me a business that cannot benefit from educating their prospects or customers over a simple email sequence?
If there is one thing I regret doing for my clients when I started out, it is that I helped them build a custom website focused on “unique design” before even finding their first 3 customers.
See, the truth is nobody wins. First off, there is the probability of your website actually converting anybody when you begin. It is really low. Then you probably regret hiring your web-designer and spending your money on stuff that didn’t generate any results.
I mean, I’m confident enough to even openly challenge you that – if you show me someone who has built (or hired someone to build) a perfect website the first time, with no prior business experience and actually gotten results out of it, I’d give you 100$ just for telling me about that person.
I’d still benefit from just knowing this person, their story and the lessons behind it. Only people I’ve seen pulling this off are the ones who have a natural knack for business. They often fall into the following categories
Grew up in an entrepreneurial family and absorbed lessons just by watching their family habits.
A person who has already built more than 2 businesses successfully.
Someone who has built an audience already on mailing list, or in some cases social media and yet have great response rates.
There could be few more…
For the rest of us, we have no clue when we start out. We are even worse off if we had a job for a long time where you never dealt directly with the customers.
Sometimes people with experience in sales and marketing have an edge. I say “sometimes” because I think I was surprised by some people who have years of sales/marketing experience in a high paying corporate job and yet have no clue how to start a business.
Anyways the point is, “validation” when you start with no business experience is hard. 99% of us have a massive over-estimation of how much work is required to validate our ideas. I’ve admired how experienced ones do it. I’m thankful that I could learn some of it, from them.
Today, the only thing you need to start doing some validation online is a “landing page” that promises to solve your potential market’s problem. Worst case build your website on “SquareSpace”. Even worst case, buy a template and modify its design as little as possible, then focus on your content.
Trust me, the amount of maintenance you need to do on WordPress for its updates, plugin updates, security updates, plugin incompatibilities, fragmented nature of the entire ecosystem is annoying. You’d better be focusing on actually finding your customer, delivering your product or services, getting feedback and iterating it again.
Over the last few years, I’ve done numerous WordPress website redesigns.
In every case so far, I’ve helped clients switch to a new WordPress theme. And when you switch to a new WordPress theme, so many parts of your website can break.
Here is a “WordPress Theme Switch Checklist” you can use to reduce the risk of your WordPress website breaking when doing that.
Shortcodes that your existing theme provides.
Make a list of shortcodes that your old theme supports.
Search for it across your pages, posts and custom post types.
Remove or replace it with similar functionality.
Scripts
This includes everything like Facebook pixel, Google Analytics, Hubspot tracking code etc.
Usually it might be inserted inside your theme’s option panel.
Re-insert them after you switch to the new theme
A better way is to use Google Tag Manager for all your scripts so that there is only one script on your website.
Pages created with different page builders
Manually check pages created with page builders (like Elementor, Thrive Architect etc.) to see if they render properly in your new theme.
Custom CSS or JS from WordPress Customizer panel
This is an additional place where your developer(s) might have inserted codes.
This has to be done even if you are simply switching to a Child theme.
Are you switching from an old theme you bought from ThemeForest?
Check for revolution sliders embedded across your site.
If you were using Visual Composer (which I advice you to get rid of), you might have to recreate most of your pages
WooCommerce generated pages (cart, checkout, thank you etc.)
Check if your new theme provides the same WooCommerce template overrides.
Take a backup before switching. If your hosting doesn’t support it, use UpdraftPlus plugin. Its free.
Frequently asked questions about this topic
How to change WordPress theme on live site?
Also in some cases, you might change WordPress theme on live site. I don’t recommend that. But you might have constraints where setting up a staging is not possible for you. Then this checklist will help you with damage-control only.
How to change WordPress theme without losing content?
The checklist above also helps you change WordPress theme without losing content. Remember that, even if your content disappears it is only temporary. Sometimes content might disappear if you deactivate some plugins. So beware of this. Always have backup and test on staging site before changing theme on a live site.
I really hope that checklist helps you save some headache!
Bookmark this page, or print this page so it comes handy when you switch to a new theme on your WordPress website.
Dear reader, This is my first 4400-word article. I will keep adding/updating this. Bookmark this page. So if you find any editing errors, leave a comment and help me fix it, please. But, it is free of typos though and ‘Grammarly.com’ says so too.
I’ve written it so you can simply scan through without having to read the entire article. You can directly jump to sections. They are self-contained.
Also please share this article with someone who might benefit from it.
The main reason most people want their website to be redesigned with Thrive Themes is mostly for just one reason – Thrive Architect. They love the ability to make the edits for themselves and to add new pages themselves.
Your entire business’ productivity can potentially 10X or more when you switch from an old outdated setup where you have to wait for ages to make a simple change on your website.
Historically, you have always needed to ask your web developer to add new pages, or in some cases a full team – designer, developer, admin, etc. But now with the advent of modern day page builders, the game has changed. One person can totally put together a kick-ass landing page or even a full website in just a few hours.
So all you need to do is make a list of pages that you want to redesign using Thrive Architect first.
Using Multiple Page Builder Plugins
Remember this important point, just because you use Thrive Architect doesn’t mean that you cannot have other page builders installed.
And no! installing multiple page builders don’t slow down your website (at least not Elementor and Thrive Architect). Because internally, the plugin is used only if the page is built with that particular page builder plugin.
I have built multiple sites where both page builders I recommend are installed – Thrive Architect + Elementor. I have them both installed on this very site too.
Picking the right theme for using with Thrive plugins.
Good folks at Thrive Themes claim that their plugins work with all WordPress themes. Personally, I have verified that it works great with StudioPress themes or any Genesis child theme. I also recommend the Astra theme or GeneratePress. They both seem to be gaining a lot of popularity due to their speed and light-weight nature.
Two Modes of using Thrive Architect
There are two modes of using Thrive Architect to build pages.
Mode 1: From a blank canvas (without the theme header and footer), or Mode 2: From a normal page where you still have your WordPress themes’ header, footer and in some cases even sidebar.
Advantages of Mode 2: The advantage of using it with your theme’s header/footer is that the page you build will inherit the styles from your themes. This is great for building branded landing pages easily. Also, you don’t have to manually set the font, color, sizes, etc. for your text, buttons and few other elements.
Advantages of Mode 1: The advantage of building a page on a blank canvas is that it is portable. You can simply export and import it to any website and it will look the same. But you will have to manually set the styling on each page. If you use the Thrive Architect’s built-in typography settings and create a few templates/symbols for common elements, you can reduce the amount of work and make the page maintainable.
A word of advice to newbies:
Avoid setting fonts, colors, sizes manually in multiple places throughout your page. Not only does it look bad, it is complicated to process if you use too many fonts (a common amateur designer mistake), also it is hard to maintain/change.
Instead, use the typography setting inside Thrive Theme Builder and simply use one of those choices. Use a maximum of two font families if you absolutely have to do it. If you are bad at design, stick to one font family and multiple weights of the same family.
The great thing about Genesis child themes is they are easy to customize with a little knowledge of CSS and WordPress coding (enough to find and edit the child theme’s style.css) Their code is so well commented I almost cried looking at how elegant their sample child theme was.
But this advice is not for the average DIY business owner. I don’t recommend learning CSS or anything. Instead, you’re better sticking to what your theme offers and focus on your business until you have enough money to hire a professional.
Word on updating:
Do not update frequently. Unless they explicitly claim it is a security fix or something. In my experience for the last few years, never once was there a security update. Their plugins are pretty secure.
But remember that Thrive Themes’ plugins and updates are a little buggy when they update. Especially when they release new versions. They don’t test it well enough and rather release and use users feedback to fix their bugs. I hate this practice, but the company hasn’t changed its attitude towards this.
Also, you do not want to be breaking your website and fixing it all day instead of building your business.
Thrive leads
How to organize your massive list of Thrive Leads lead groups? Thrive Leads lead groups.
If not arranged properly it can give you a lot of headache down the line. You can have multiple lead groups within which you can have multiple forms of opt-ins.
Here are the shortcuts to understanding Thrive Leads lead groups
You can ONLY have one lead group active on a page. So never expect your 2-step ribbon from one lead group to appear along with your post footer opt-in from
Arrange/sort them so that the most generic ones go in the bottom and the specific ones go in the top. What do I mean by this? If you have a lead group for just 1-2 pages/posts, those should be kept above lead groups that are designed to appear site-wide or for an entire category of blog posts.
That is it! These are the two most important rules to avoid all confusions with Thrive Leads lead groups
Don’t innovate on layouts unless
Never innovate on layouts. Don’t make your users and customers think (and solve puzzles) to engage with your brand/business. If something isn’t apparent in 3 seconds then it needs improving.
The only exceptions are:
You’re building art – in any form. Perhaps it is a live installation. Maybe it is an art festival website and you want to do something to compliment the theme.
Your end-users love solving puzzles and novelty for the sake of it. Perhaps you’re building a website for a game release. Or its a website for hardcore programmers who would appreciate and enjoy a command-line interface inside the website.
In any other case where the purpose of your website is to communicate, connect, convert (and delight) your audience, puh-leeze do not innovate on layouts and make your users stare long and hard at their screens trying to figure out how to use the fancy new website.
“Just look at the world’s top websites from the biggest companies used by billions of people every day and generates millions in revenue through them. How many of them are complicated? How many have innovative layouts? They don’t
Pre-planning work before you start your website redesign
This part of the article applies to every type of website redesign job. It doesn’t matter if you use thrive themes or any other theme.
1) Retaining the SEO when you start your website redesign
1.1) Run a crawler/spider on your website
Okay, don’t worry. I’m not asking you to go near an actual spider. I’m scared of them and I know a lot of you are. No shaming in admitting.
A crawler is a software that can crawl through all the public pages on your website. This is important to get a list of pages that are accessible by Google and other search engines. The software outputs a huge list of all your search-engine accessible pages and all the pages linked through these pages along with technical on-page SEO details.
Important: check if your crawler can automatically read your sitemap.xml file. If you have specified non-linked pages directly on the sitemap.xml, you might have performed a manual crawl on those pages if your software doesn’t automatically detect that.
There are various elements on your website pages that communicate important data to search engines. This is usually called metadata. This is partly responsible for your search engine optimization and contributes to your website traffic.
1.2) Hunt and export all your backlinks in a list
Backlinks are simply links mentioned on various pages on the internet that point to resources on your website. These are a major part of “trust signals”. The real world analogy would be people recommending your business to other people. It is extremely valuable, builds trust and eventually translates to business revenue.
You will need a professional SEO tool to do this. The good thing is that a lot of them give you a free trial. Some of the world-famous ones are Moz Pro, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Mangools.com, etc.
Also second thing, you will need to export linking sites from google webmaster console.
These lists are important as backlinks play a big role in how your pages rank in search engines. It is very important to pay attention to your most linked pages and the metadata on them.
Also, you will need a plan to set up redirects (also called 301s) for your backlinks. This will ensure Google doesn’t see a page missing error when following various backlinks for pages that you might modify/remove.
1.3) Export important pages from Google Analytics
“Important” is subjective to each business. But as a starter, you can safely assume you will need the following for most businesses
List of pages that receive 80 percent of your entire traffic. You can do this by going to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages and sort by sessions/users.
List of all your product pages. If you’ve set up google analytics e-commerce tracking properly, this will be available under the conversion tab.
An idea of how important mobile is for your website. It is assumed that everything is mobile now. While it is true for the majority of cases, I still come across sites where the users are primarily desktop-only. You can get this from device reports. Also if you have an e-commerce website, find out which devices your buyers use to make purchases.
Apart from this, you will need to sit and think about what other pages could be important. Because in some cases, low traffic pages might have a high revenue rate due to your visitor pathways. So you need to consider investing some time to learn how buyers, subscribers and converting visitors travel on your website.
2) Track other factors to help your redesign process
2.1) Make a list of all important private-pages
This is going to be usually manual. These are pages that are not accessible by search engines (maybe because you’ve intentionally hidden them using Yoast plugin settings, or they are meant to be accessible only by their links)
Usually, this includes pages built for your mailing list, membership content pages, or any page that can be seen only after signing-up or purchasing.
2.2) Make a list of plugins and shortcodes that are used by old pages
A lot depends on your current setup so I have explained a few setups that are very common.
If you have visual composer, make a note of all the pages that actually use visual composer. If you use a visual composer on some of your blog posts and you have a lot of blog posts, then it is going to be a bit of work to make this list.
It is very common for clients to want to get rid of plugins during a redesign. Plugins can become a living hell to update and maintain your website if setup wrong. When you want to turn off plugins or replace them, you need to take care of shortcodes supported by them.
A good way to track these down is to set up a clone of your existing website on a staging server and disable the plugins you are hoping to get rid of. Then manually check your old blog posts and pages to see if they render properly.
Not all plugins are visual. Some are used to facilitate/automate various internal operations and they will need to consider on a per-plugin basis.
Once you identify the shortcodes to get rid of, have a plan in place to re-write those parts.
2.3) Make a test plan
This might sound fancy, but you will write down the common use cases of how people use your website.
Common examples could be
Subscription flow for your website
Purchase flow for the website
Mailing list automation(s)
Course completion automation(s)
Once you have these ready, you can perform these tests on the new website at the final stage before making it live, to ensure a peaceful sleep during the night.
Thrive comments
There is a huge army of people and automated software (aka. spam bots) continuously running to invade your comments section. Also purely for their own benefit without adding any value to your website or your readers.
They are getting more and more creative every day. Take this example comment below
“I am not sure exactly, but I love the way you’ve written this article. Great work, please keep posting.”
This is a typical comment designed to stroke your ego. Cleverly kept generic so it can be left on any blog with a legit writer.
BUT, this is by a spam bot.
Why do they do this?
For a few reasons…
The most common one is for getting a link. Usually, such people clearly leave their website URL. This is so that they can have their website linked permanently from your comments section.
Even though comment links are not considered valuable for SEO, due to the nature of SEO itself the rules are not well known. In some cases, I have personally seen comment links help in SERPs of really niche pages. But it could be a coincidence.
(Nerd stuff: Comment links usually have a nofollow attribute, which makes them lot less valuable than normal backlinks)
Anyhoo.. on the other end of the spectrum though are your actual engaged readers who love to leave a comment. They add a lot of value (for other readers) with their feedback, questions, etc. to your website.
And moreover, a person who leaves a genuine comment has a higher chance of
wanting to promote your content (given an opportunity), or
wanting to buy your products or services.
This is where Thrive comments plugin comes in. My favorite feature is to simply turn off the backlinks by default. This prevents spam links from getting added, and even prevents people who are sleazy in leaving comments.
Preparing the site-wide styles
This is is perhaps the most important thing, if you want to save your time changing designs. Prepare a style-guide. Just a minimal one.
A style guide is a loose definition of a one-page guide which visually shows, how the most common elements of your website should look like. It serves as a single point of reference that everyone working on the website can go back to. It reduces the time spent on design revisions.
IMPORTANT: There is no right/wrong way to define a style guide. The elements contained can decided based on your needs. Usually if its a brand style guide, it is extensive with a lot of rules and examples.
For a website style guide, you can keep things simple to start with. And you can evolve it as you keep making changes. As a starting point, you can use the list below. List contains the basic elements you will need in a website style guide
Logo on white, black and colored backgrounds.
Typography / Fonts
Headings – H1 to H6
Paragraph text
Links
Font Weights
Font Colors
Font letter spacing
Font line spacing
Buttons – primary, secondary and outline styles
Colors – List of permitted colors
Lists
Bullet styles
Ordered and Numbered
Indents
Icons styles
The above list is just a reference. There is no hard and fast rule about what needs to go in your style guide.
But, remember to have a central style guide that is accessible to everyone who makes changes to the website. There will be times when the styles defined in the style guide isn’t sufficient. When that happens, just add the new style in this document and continue working.
When maintained well, a good style guide will
Save hours of your time
Increase sales and conversions on your website, by giving a consistent user experience to all your customers across the website (and other channels if done right)
Make the homepage first
Okay, so when you start either a new website or redesign an existing website, always make your homepage first. In fact, you can design the homepage from everything you’ve put together in your style guide.
The home page becomes a great first implementation test for your style guide. Also, you will see what works and what doesn’t. (So be ready to make changes to the style guide you made before)
A great homepage should have as many of the following elements
A great StoryBrandstyle headline about one of the following
What can you solve for your customers?
What promise do you make to your customers?
A clear bold primary call-to-action that is visually distinct and easy to spot.
A good low-risk secondary call-to-action that offers them free value in terms of content. This needs to be connected to your mailing list so you can contact them later.
A easy-to-memorize tagline below the fold that describes two things
What do you do?
Who do you do it for?
Testimonials and other social proof (certifications, awards)
Additionally, a way for them to give feedback easily (this tip is from the book – Making Websites Win). You can easily implement this with a service like hotjar.com
Building the other pages
When you start building the pages, you need to make a decision. Do you want to use Mode 1 or Mode 2 (as described above)?
My personal preference is to use Mode 2 for the following reasons
It allows less room for errors as the styles are inherited already
Thereby enables clients to create beautiful pages with design skills
I don’t have to recreate a header/footer in Thrive Architect and maintain two copies
So most general website pages will be created in Mode 2
That being said there are reasons why you might want to use it in Mode 1
When you create a template that might be used in multiple websites that belong to your business.
When you want something distinct from the website’s existing style.
You want to make use of Thrive Architect’s templates to create campaigns/automation fast. This can be webinar pages, mailing list pages, etc.
Key points to save (a lot of) time
Keep an image optimization plugin installed as early as possible. (E.g. Shortpixel, Smush, etc). This saves a lot of time, space and generates more money for your business. How? Because images are the #1 reason why websites become slow. And we often forget to optimize/resize them before uploading. Slow websites mean, lost visitors. Lost visitors mean lost revenue.
Redesign your existing pages, instead of re-creating them. This helps you retain your old permalinks (URLs) easily. Think about plugins like Yoast SEO. All those settings will also be retained. Otherwise, it would be a nightmare to record them and replicate them on the newly created pages (especially if you have a lot of them).
For more technical tips on preventing most disasters and saving time when using thrive architect, click here.
Mobile Optimization Tip
It is a shame that after all these years, they still haven’t set up a default padding/margin to make mobile optimization easy. I really hope someday they fix it.
For now, every first-timer goes through disappointment when they preview their newly built page in mobile view. It looks ugly with text touching the left and right edges of your mobile screen.
To prevent that
Always put all your content into one or more background sections
Remember to set up a left and right padding for these background sections so they automatically apply to mobile as well.
Amateurs and hobbyists do not test. If your business has customers dependent on it, you need a test plan or your visitors will be disappointed, confused and you will lose revenue/new customers. Depending on the amount of time and people available you can try to do as many things as possible from the following checklist.
Top traffic pages from google analytics
Important marketing automation pages
Pages that you think are important
All publicly crawl-able pages
Test them using your browser’s tablet and mobile simulator
Chrome
Edge
Safari
Other browsers if any is popular among your visitors (you can get this from google analytics)
Test them using the most common tablets and phones
iPads
iPhones
Top Android devices
Find most used mobile devices (again from google analytics) and test on those
Test your purchase flow pages
Test your marketing automation pages like mailing signup, confirmation nudge page, and confirmation success pages. If you have other automation like webinars, test those pages too.
2) Get performance benchmarks
Get an idea of how well your new website performs. Remember that you will still test using a staging server so things won’t be as fast as the production server. But some web hosting companies help you temporarily switch on optimizations on your staging so you can test.
Use the following websites to test your website
Google page speed
Pingdom
Webpage speed test
GT Metrix
These websites give you a lot of data. So you will need a professional to make sense of it. Sometimes it is not worth it to get everything higher (e.g. google page speed numbers don’t always reflect real-world effects)
Here are some basic recommendations that apply to most sites
In general, always have your pages load within 2-3 seconds to have the best user experience and not lose revenue.
Enable lazy loading for images, so the page doesn’t have to wait.
Enable script minify/combine for HTML, CSS and JS
Use a CDN to deliver most static resources. Cloudflare is a famous free CDN. MaxCDN is a paid option. A free Cloudflare account also takes care of many security threats and performance optimizations automatically.
3) Setup Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
It’s 2019. There is no way you can survive without google tag manager and google analytics.
Google Tag Manager
The tag manager can help you save loads of time. Today every website has at least a handful of third-party code snippets inserted inside them. Esp from companies like Facebook, Google, Chatbots, Marketing platforms, etc.
Inserting and removing them can be a painful process. Some companies still have to ask a developer to insert and remove them. Not to mention testing after that.
Google tag manager makes this process so easy. You can do it all from a single portal, test before deploying within your own browser.
Google Analytics
Google analytics has become the default analytics platform whether you like it or not. If you prefer alternatives go for it. But make sure you have at least one analytics platform integrated.
Here is an odd-but-useful google analytics tip
Use the annotations feature on google analytics to note important events. Eg. new site launch, marketing campaign launch, SEO optimization activities, new backlink gain, etc. These will be overlaid on your timeline so you can understand your data changes better. For instance, if you mark your website changes, it will be easy to track when the traffic started dropping and work on reversing it to see if you can get it back.
The most important thing of all
It is your web hosting company. It can leech your productivity and revenue without even your realizing it slowly like a latent virus. A great web host will help your site load faster, assist you in times of need and help you generate a lot of revenue. The best hosting companies have so much automation and technology setup to prevent security attacks/losses and accelerate your growth.
Siteground is an extremely reliable and fast web hosting company for all businesses. This website is hosted on their servers too. I’ve been with them 2+ years now
If your business is bigger and you don’t mind paying a bit more ($35-$50 a month), then I recommend WPEngine or Kinsta. Once you try any of these guys, you’ll never want to go back. Their support is top-notch.
I have personally tested all the above web hosting companies for my clients and can vouch for them.
(Disclaimer: Siteground link is an affiliate link, as I use them too. When you click and buy their plans, I might get a small commission. But your price will be same regardless of whether you click the link or not)
Chances are you have already filled in the NPS score for another business without even knowing. Have you ever seen a question like this asked to you before?
NPS SURVEY QUESTION
Unless you’ve just discovered the internet a few days ago, you have definitely been asked this question before.
I have answered this too.
But… little did I know the importance of this simple single question. Its used to measure what is called the “Net Promoter Score”.
Short history
NPS was devised by research strategist Fred Reichheld in 2003. He called it the “The One Important Metric You Need for Business Growth”. He said growth begins with the number of customers who will also be promoters of your product.
How to Read it?
Everyone who gives your business / product / service a rating of 1 – 6 are called Detractors. Let us called them haters. They damage your brand with negative reviews, word of mouth. You will have to work on repelling these customers / clients. They are clearly dissatisfied.
The ones who give 7 – 8 are happy, but are in a place where they might jump ship to your competitors. They aren’t loyal but won’t complain either. They are called Passives or Don’t Cares.
The ones who give 9 – 10 are your best customers. They are the promoters. Or in my words “Fan-Customers” for your rockstar business.
Your NPS score is the % of Fan-Customers – % of Haters.
How to Start Measuring It?
Find a point in your customer journey when they can be reached out for feedback. In some cases its instant, like an online software. In some cases, they might need time to use the product.
Earlier is better than later in most cases as people are highly likely to report how they feel interacting with your business / brand.
Here are some ways to start measuring it
Ask people to fill an physical printed feedback sheet
Setup a webpage with an embedded Typeform NPS Survey or Google form. Then automate an email X days after you’ve shipped the product linking to the page.
Is NPS really that important?
If you’re concerned about long term sustainable growth for your business, this is very very important. Its important than other metrics like cost per acquisition, which often can increase and is outside your control. Whereas NPS is certainly in your control and can lead to lower cost per acquisition of your customers over a long term. And this translates to extremely higher profits and efficient operations.
How are you going to incorporate NPS in your business / service? Let me know in the comments below.
