Key takeaways
- Keep NPS emails short, clear, and personalized, with the main 0–10 recommendation question and an optional follow-up.
- Send surveys at meaningful customer touchpoints and avoid over-emailing by limiting them to every 3–6 months.
- Use a survey link as the default delivery method and ensure both the email and form are fully mobile-friendly.
- Use Jotform tools to build the survey, track responses, calculate your NPS, and automate follow-ups.
If you want to take the guesswork out of how your buyers feel about your products and overall customer service, you can ask them outright in a Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) survey email.
A well-crafted NPS survey email will get you the responses you need to understand the customer experience, identify areas for improvement, and strengthen your relationship with customers.
How to write an effective NPS survey email
An NPS survey email that actually generates valuable results comes down to a few key points:
- Choose the right moment to send the survey, such as post-purchase, at an onboarding milestone, or after the customer interacts with your support team.
- Keep it short: 1–2 sentences of context, the NPS question, and one follow-up question is all you need to get the job done.
- As a default, send a link to your NPS form in the email. Only embed the form directly in the message after you’ve thoroughly tested this feature.
- Personalize and brand your email to make it stand out.
- Make sure the survey looks great on mobile devices, since that’s where most web traffic occurs.
- Test your email subject lines, timing, and frequency to find what gets the best response from your customers.
- Don’t over-email customers. Aim for a new NPS survey every three to six months.
NPS email essentials at a glance
Goal: Collect quick, focused feedback about customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Core question: “How likely are you to recommend [product/company] to a friend or colleague?”
Scale: 0–10
Groups: Detractors (0–6), Passives (7–8), Promoters (9–10)
Email structure:
- Short intro explaining why you’re asking
- NPS survey, either as a link or an embedded form
- One optional follow-up “why?” question
- Thank you and optional call to action (CTA)
What is an NPS?
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that measures a company’s customer satisfaction and loyalty. You only need one question on an NPS survey: “On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”
Once you have your results, you categorize each respondent based on the score they provide:
- Promoters answer 9 or 10.
- Passives answer 7 or 8.
- Detractors answer between 0 and 6.
Then, calculate your NPS using the formula NPS = % of Promoters − % of detractors.
The NPS score helps you gauge what kind of customer experience your company delivers. You can use this information to
- Track and measure your progress over time.
- Jump on opportunities to ask follow-up questions for more specific feedback.
- Help get everyone in your organization on the same page, working toward improving the customer experience.
What is an NPS survey email?
An NPS survey email is a message you send to customers to collect feedback. These emails are most effective when they’re short, personalized, and optimized for mobile devices.
Can you send an NPS survey via email?
You can absolutely send your NPS survey via email — it’s the main channel companies use when asking customers for feedback.
Link vs embedded delivery
The question is whether you should add a link to your survey in the email or embed the survey directly. With a link, customers must click on the link in the email and complete the survey on an external web page. With an embedded survey, they can answer the question directly in the message without the need to click away.
When to use each
Add a link as your default. It’s a tried-and-true method that’s unlikely to suffer from technical issues that prevent customers from responding. After you’ve tested it thoroughly, you can embed the survey so customers can answer the question right from the email. Since it removes a step, embedding your NPS survey may help increase your response rates.
How to send an NPS survey email with Jotform
Jotform changes the game when it comes to collecting responses and calculating your NPS score. Follow these five steps to send an NPS survey with Jotform.
Step 1: Build your NPS survey
Instead of building your survey from scratch, start with a Jotform NPS survey template. The template includes the core question as well as some optional questions you can add and adjust as desired.
Make sure your NPS survey has a 0–10 rating. Incorporate an optional “why?” question if you want additional insights into the customer experience.
Step 2: Choose link vs embedded delivery
Next, decide how you’ll deliver your survey to customers: via a link or embedded delivery.
The default option is to simply share the survey through a link. Customers can click on the link and easily submit their survey responses on an external web page.
An alternative is to embed the NPS survey directly in your email message. Embedded surveys may get higher response rates because they streamline the response process and eliminate the need for extra clicks. However, if you’re considering using an embedded survey, make sure you test that the embed works across different email clients first. You don’t want to miss out on responses because the embedded delivery doesn’t function properly for some customers, depending on the device or email provider they use.
Step 3: Set up your send
Set up your message to send to customers. Jotform offers several email options. You can also rely on your email service provider to help segment and time your messages for the greatest impact.
Instead of sending to all your customers at once, consider sending the survey at individual customer milestones, such as
- When a new user joins
- When a customer renews their subscription or makes a repeat purchase
- After a customer interacts with your support team
Step 4: Test thoroughly
Before you hit send, test your NPS survey email across multiple devices and email clients. Check the message’s rendering, loading, and formatting to make sure everything works as intended. If you’re using a survey link, check the link tracking too, so you have access to those important metrics.
Step 5: Act on responses
As your survey responses roll in, use Jotform Tables to quickly calculate your NPS. In Tables, you can also filter responses to show only detractors or just promoters. Tables will help you count each, calculate the percentage of detractors and promoters, and make the final NPS calculation according to the formula.
Calculating your NPS isn’t the only way to use your survey responses, though. With Jotform Workflows, you can set up automated follow-ups or handoffs to support/success teams based on customers’ responses. By reaching out to customers right away, you may be able to convert passives and detractors into promoters.
Best practices for NPS survey emails
When composing your NPS survey email, try to make an impression while being considerate of your customers’ time. Apply the following best practices to maximize your response rate.
Brand and personalize
Customers like to feel seen and appreciated. Sending out a generic email that looks like every other company’s customer satisfaction surveys — and doesn’t even acknowledge the reader as an individual — isn’t the best way to get responses.
Instead, focus on branding and personalizing your NPS survey email. Incorporate brand elements like your signature fonts, colors, logos, and taglines. And if possible, personalize the email with the recipient’s name and other details. Personalized emails achieve much higher open and click-through rates than generic emails.
Update your email list
You only want to send your NPS survey to customers who are still active and engaged with your emails. Otherwise, you waste time and money sending messages that likely won’t reach anyone. Go through your email list and remove subscribers who haven’t interacted with your messages in a while. Delete any invalid or old email addresses too.
Ensure mobile friendliness
Many of your customers will likely open your email on their mobile devices. Make sure both your message and the external survey link (if applicable) appear on mobile as well as on desktop. Test extensively to ensure they load properly and function across different mobile devices and email providers.
Avoid over-emailing
Bombarding your customers with emails about your NPS survey is a good way to frustrate them — not get them to answer. Send no more than one initial message and one follow-up reminder asking them to complete the survey. Then, wait at least three to six months before sending out a new NPS survey to give them a breather.
Keep it short
Brevity is your friend when writing NPS survey emails. Stick to 150 words or less: just a quick intro, the survey itself, and a thank-you. Customers can read and interact with shorter emails more easily, so you may get higher response rates this way.
Test thoroughly
Before sending, test out everything you can about your NPS email. You want to find and fix potential issues before they affect your ability to collect responses.
Segment and set expectations
You can gain deeper insights into the customer experience if you segment your survey by customer groups. Use Jotform email integrations to send personalized and segmented NPS campaigns.
Add a thank-you and CTA
The final part of the email should be a CTA directly prompting the customer to take your survey, either via a link or embedded form. Use plain language.
Even though NPS surveys are quite short and shouldn’t take the respondents very long, you’re still asking them to give up some of their time to help you. Thank them for their consideration, whether or not they choose to answer the survey.
NPS survey email examples
It’s easier to write your own NPS survey emails when you see what they can actually look like. Consider these two examples, one for surveying customers and one for surveying employees.
Customer example
Subject line: Got a minute? Tell us how we did.
Hi [Name],
Your honest feedback is essential to helping us at [Company] improve our products and services. Would you mind answering one quick question about your experience with [Company]? It should take less than a minute.
[Link to NPS survey]
We appreciate you taking the time!
Employee example
Subject line: Tell us about your experience at [Company].
Hi [Name],
Here at [Company], we want to be the best employers we can be, and we need your help. Your honest feedback makes all the difference. Will you take a moment to fill out one question about your experience working here?
[Link to NPS survey]
Thank you so much for your time and for being a valued part of our community!
NPS email subject line best practices
The subject line is arguably the most important piece of information customers use to decide whether to open your email. If you craft a compelling, attention-grabbing subject line, customers are much more likely to open your NPS survey email and respond. Otherwise, you risk low response rates from customers simply ignoring your message.
When writing your NPS email subject lines, apply these best practices:
- Keep subject lines short (around 40–50 characters) so they don’t get cut off in recipients’ inboxes.
- Use questions like “How did we do?” to intrigue readers and convey the purpose of the email.
- Stress urgency, such as “quick one-minute survey,” to encourage customers to respond.
- Personalize the subject line with the recipient’s name or the product/service they purchased from your business.
- Offer incentives for responses, but only when appropriate. Overpromising or using misleading claims like “Open for a huge reward” will only sour customers’ impressions of your brand.
Try variations of these sample NPS email subject lines:
- Hi, [Name], how are we doing?
- Got a minute? We’d love your thoughts.
- How’s your new [product] working out?
- Have 60 seconds? Tell us what you think!
- Where can we improve? Take our quick survey.
- It’s your time, [Name]! Share your thoughts.
Understand the customer experience with NPS survey emails
In just a few steps, you can create, send, and manage NPS survey emails that provide crucial insights into how your customers view your business. You just need the right tools on your side, like Jotform’s Form Builder and Tables.
Try building your first NPS survey form with a Jotform template today.
FAQs about NPS emails
Your two main options for delivering an NPS survey in an email are adding a link to the email or embedding the survey directly in the message. Using a link is quick, easy, and less prone to compatibility issues than embedding a survey.
However, embedding the survey in your email makes it very easy for customers to see and answer the question. It’s a streamlined process right in their inboxes that may lead to more responses.
Send your NPS email when your target customers are most likely to be online and available. The exact timing will depend on the types of customers you’re targeting. A business-to-consumer (B2C) brand with mostly 30- to 50-year-old professionals as customers might get the best response rate by sending the email in the evening, for example.
Look at the data from your other emails to customers to see which sending times yield the highest engagement rates. Those will be the best times to send your NPS email too. You can always send a reminder follow-up email at a different time to see if that helps bring in more responses.
It’s important to send NPS surveys regularly rather than just once. At the same time, you don’t want to overwhelm your customers by sending them too many surveys in a short period. Try to strike a balance between getting useful, updated data and respecting your customers’ time. A good cadence could be sending NPS surveys quarterly or semi-annually.
Yes, you certainly can and should segment your NPS emails for different groups of customers. Segmenting your NPS survey ratings will help you understand how customer satisfaction varies by factors such as demographics and which products or services customers use.
This guide is for marketers, CRM owners, CX and support leads, product managers, and e-commerce or SaaS founders who need fast, mobile-friendly customer feedback.
Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
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