Let’s say you had a choice of two options:

Option #1: People who encounter you and your business trust you, like you and are extremely loyal to you.

Option #2: People who encounter you hate you, don’t trust you and have ZERO loyalty.

Which would you choose?

Stupid question. Obviously you would chose loyalty.

But here is a not-stupid question.

Why?

…

Why do you want people to trust you and like you and be loyal?

Here is why.

Loyal fans have conversations like this…

…or this.

Contrast that with the conversations that indifferent fans have.

Indifferent fans are… indifferent.

Loyal fans tell people about your business.

Loyal fans go out of their way to make sure others buy your product.

Loyal fans are the single best growth hack you can optimize for. Not email subscribers, not traffic to your website and not even crazy launch strategies. The single most effective way to grow any business, in any niche, no matter what, is to develop loyal fans.

Some nerdy stats for you…

86% of consumers trust word-of-mouth advertising over any other form of marketing.

Customers who hear about your product or service from a friend or family member spend 200% more than non-referral customers and make 2x as many referrals themselves.

What does that mean?

It means that our #1 priority should be creating loyal fans.

…

But how do you know if you have loyal fans?

How do you objectively measure that?

Outside of ancillary tweets and emails that people send in, how do you know if you have more loyal fans today than you did last year?

How do you know if the blog posts you are writing and the sales strategies you are using are creating a higher or lower percentage of raving fans?

I didn’t know the answer to that, so I researched it. And discovered this fun little framework called the Net Promoter Score, or NPS.

This is how it works…

Every so often you send out a one-question survey that looks like this:

The survey has 1 question on it.

“How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”

The person taking the survey answers on a scale of 1 to 10.

10 = Very likely

1 = You suck. Go away!

The intent of the NPS survey is to tell you where your existing customers and audience fall on that scale.

There are three main groups that your respondents will fall into:

Group #1: In the 9-10 range are your loyal fans who will tell everyone they know about you.

Group #2: In the 7-8 range are fans, but they aren’t so enamored with you that they’ll tell people about you.

Group #3: In the 1-6 range are detractors who will either passively or actively work against you.

So let’s recap for a minute…

Creating loyal fans is smart.
Loyal fans are like mini-salesmen who go around and tell other people to buy your stuff.
The more loyal fans we have, the more stuff we sell.
We should probably optimize around creating more raving fans and not ignore it.
NPS is a good way to measure how many loyal fans we have.
We’re not exactly sure what we do once we know where we are at on the NPS scale, but once we have the number we can try experiments to get the score up.

…

Since we’ve never objectively measured how much people like us and how many loyal fans we have, AND since that is the key indicator of our #1 growth channel (word of mouth), we’re going to do something fun.

We’re going to run a series of experiments over the next two months and report the results live on the blog.

Here are our plans.

We’re maniacally focused on creating loyal fans and customers because loyal fans are more likely to hit their goal and more likely to help us grow.

So, here’s our plan:

Step #1: We’re going to create our NPS survey.

Step #2: We’re going to send it out to everyone on the email list.

Step #3: We’ll report the results of the survey here in this blog post.

Step #4: We’re going to brainstorm an action plan to improve the score based on where it is at right now.

Step #5: I’d like to come up with a way to measure our score on a weekly basis so we can see the impact of our marketing and sales activity in a more real-time type of basis.

In this post, we’ll share everything we do: our score, the improvements we try to make and how this affects bottom line revenue for us and success rate for our customers.

PS: What do you think? What would you change or add to this process? Let me know in the comment section below.