Word-of-Mouth Virality

When something has word-of-mouth virality, its users love it so much that they talk about it. To friends, family, maybe even strangers.

Word of mouth is organic. The people spreading the word aren’t getting any incentive, and they’re not being asked to do it.

People think this type of virality is largely out of their control.‌

That’s partly true. You can’t force people to talk about your product. To get word of mouth, your product has to be so good that people want to talk about it. It has to be “remarkable”—in that someone would remark about it to a friend.

But there are some things that are under your control when it comes to making your product remarkable.‌

We’ll provide a few examples:

• Add a personal touch to your customer journey.
• Respond to negative reviews.
• Find out what customers are saying about your brand.
• Collect NPS data.

Add an insanely personal touch

Make your customer journey as remarkable as possible.

A few examples:

Minerva University: To let students know they got in, Minerva, a startup university, shipped every accepted student an iPad. It automatically opened a live video chat with the CEO to congratulate them.

Vanhawks sells super high-end bikes. What worked for them? Sending TaskRabbits into offices, with bikes for employees to ride on the spot. Think people weren’t going to tell their co-workers about the free bike ride they had that day?

Netflix: Check out this clever variation on a cease and desist.

Messaging like that could convert users—and even prospects—into brand advocates. Netflix subscribers who get the references and inside jokes will delight in the connections they feel.

Each of those is remarkable. Each strengthens brand-product fit and brand-market fit.

The constraint on offering a personal touch is how many resources you can reasonably pour into doing it. Don’t exceed your target CAC.

Here are some ideas for making it personal on a reasonable budget. These would work for a B2B company with the goal of increasing lead conversion through sales outreach:

• Selling to a CMO who runs a food blog? Use Postmates to deliver high-end treats to them.
• Send leads a handwritten letter using handwrite.io.
• Send them a book you know they’ll like.
• Have your team deliver each purchase by hand.

Those types of initiatives aren’t directly baked into your product. In that sense, you have less control over them. But they may inspire leads to become customers—and to tell their friends about your company.

Respond to negative reviews

Go on Yelp, Trustpilot, the App Store, Amazon, etc.—anywhere people review you.‌

Find every four-star review or lower within the past two months. Respond to them. Address their concerns with clear next steps.

Don’t say: “We hear you! This is a known problem with our app.”

Instead, say: “Yes, X totally is/was a problem. We’re currently doing Y to fix it, and it’s scheduled to go live on October 8th. Super sorry this happened to you. We’d love to follow up through email about what we can do to make you feel better.”

In-progress fixes, timelines, and personal follow-ups go over much better than canned responses without solutions. Think about everyone reading the review and your response. Do you want them to think your app is bad? Or do you want them to think it’s getting better and there’s a human on the other end?

Thoughtful responses don’t just show that you’re invested in your product and its constant improvement. Just as importantly, they also show that you’re invested in your audience. Readers will appreciate your openness, honesty, and willingness to listen—and they might go tell their networks that your brand is the real deal.

Go undercover where your customers hang out

Log in to the Slack channels, forums, and Facebook groups where your customers hang out (or pay a friend, TaskRabbit, or Upwork freelancer to do it). See what people are saying about your company. If you’ve enlisted a friend or freelancer, have them ask, “Has anyone here used {your company}? Curious whether you’d recommend it.”

Second level: Find individual people in the group who seem knowledgeable about your space. Have a friend send them a message saying, “Hey, saw in the group that it seems like you know a lot about {product space}. I’m thinking of trying {company name}. Know anything about it?”

The goal is not to spread the word about your product.

The goal is to measure whether people like your product enough to talk about it.

If people talk about negative experiences, it’s directly affecting your revenue. Fix the issues.

Use an NPS score to figure out if your product needs to improve

What it is

Your NPS—“net promoter score"—is how likely people are to refer your company to a friend or colleague. You can find out your score by distributing a customer survey.

There are precise words to use in your survey. You’ve probably seen them in a bajillion emails. Like this:

The reason every company on earth uses this messaging is that there’s a ton of industry data on what the answers mean if you word the question that way. To get an accurate read on your NPS, avoid deviating from the standard language.

Calculate your NPS by subtracting the percentage of respondents who are detractors from the percentage who are promoters.

If 50% of your customers are promoters and 10% are detractors, your NPS is 40.

An NPS above 50 is considered excellent. From 0-50 is average. Below 0 is a really bad sign—you’ll need to fix things.

How NPS affects word of mouth

Your NPS is helpful as a benchmark. It gives you an idea of how remarkable your product is now, compared to its norm. We generally recommend setting up a dashboard to track NPS every couple of weeks.

For bootstrapped companies (meaning: the founders have funded the whole thing themselves), NPS is particularly important. You’re probably already relying on word of mouth, and you may be competing against much larger, better-funded companies. If your word of mouth suffers, things get a whole lot more expensive.

For example, Tuft & Needle, a bootstrapped mattress company, started off by running Google ads and posting on Reddit, then accelerated that with amazing word of mouth. This let them compete with VC-funded companies that spent twice as much on marketing. Within five years, they grew to $300 million in annual revenue.

They religiously measure their NPS to make sure their product stays great. And recommendable.

How to implement an NPS survey

Don’t send an NPS survey until users can form an in-depth opinion of your product. Usually, this means waiting until after a purchase or free trial.

There are two places to ask the NPS question:

• In your app or platform
• In an email

Do both.

In-app, you tend to get more responses, but you’re interrupting users’ workflow. Make sure the question doesn’t add friction. It should take only one click and two seconds.

Ask the question after the user has seen the value of your product: after their purchase, booking, trial, etc. We recommend adding it to a thank-you page, with an incentive for filling it out (such as a future discount).

In an email, you’re not interrupting people as much. You’re also reaching customers who are less active in your app, making your score more accurate. Send the email in plain text, with a short link to the survey. Gmail tends to filter out emails with a ton of logos, color, and structure as “promotions” or spam.

Here’s another example of an NPS email.‌

Subject: Feedback?

We like Delighted and Promoter.io for setting up NPS surveys. Typeform and SurveyMonkey are also good survey management tools.

NPS hack: Conditionally ask for feedback‌

After someone fills out an NPS survey, you can send them down different paths depending on how they answer.

If their answer is between 0 and 8, ask them what it would take to make your product better. If they fill out a 9 or 10, ask for a testimonial (or, if you’re an ecommerce brand, an Amazon review).

Note: If you have an iOS app, you may get banned for asking for an App Store review after a high rating. But it’s fair game on your website.