Engineering

How to send an NPS email to app users

Using Customer Lists to get feedback from subscribers

Sending an NPS Survey to App Subscribers
Ryan Kotzebue

Ryan Kotzebue

February 17, 2021

At RevenueCat, we pride ourselves on providing developers with the best infrastructure for building in-app subscriptions and purchases. However, until recently, getting valuable data out of RevenueCat required a third-party integration or custom server code that wired together APIs and webhooks. 

No longer! With our new Customer Lists feature, you’re just a few clicks away from analyzing custom metrics directly in the RevenueCat dashboard. We’ve also made it easy to export your data for offline analysis or uploading into another system. 

Customer Lists lets you answer important questions about your app business:

  • How many lifetime customers started with a free trial?
  • Do customers that provide their email address spend more than those who don’t?
  • How much revenue comes from customers with Limit Ad Tracking enabled?
  • Which active users haven’t started a free trial yet?
  • And more!

In a previous post, I showed you how easy it is to send real-time cancellation surveys to customers using Zapier + RevenueCat webhooks. Today, let’s walk through how to manually send a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey to new active subscribers. 

Create Your First Customer List

If you already have an app set up in RevenueCat, sign in to your account and navigate to the Customers tab in your dashboard. If it’s your first time opening this page, you’ll see the default list “Active Subscribers”.

For this tutorial, we’re going to create a custom list. To get started, click the + New button in the left sidebar.

We’ll need to use filters to narrow down all of our customers to just the ones we want to send the NPS survey to. 

Let’s select everyone who made their first purchase in January and was last seen sometime in February. For this survey, we want to make sure we’re collecting feedback from customers who are actively engaged with the app. 

We should also add a filter to make sure the $email attribute is not null, since we’re planning to send the survey via email. If you don’t collect customer emails, you can send your survey through SMS, push notification, or in-app messaging. 

Check out the Customer Lists doc for the full list of available filters. 

Here’s what the filter settings for my list look like: 

Let’s save our list and name it “Jan 2021 NPS Survey”. 

Click Create new list, and the Cat Factory will start crunching the numbers.

Customer Lists infrastructure hard at work

Voila! We have our list of customers. If you want to see more information about any of the individual customers on your list, click their app user ID to see a detailed customer view.

Next, we need to export the list from RevenueCat so we can send our customers an email. Click the Export button in the top right of the page.

You’ll be asked to confirm the export, and after a few moments you’ll receive an email with a link to download the file. Open it up! You’ll notice there’s a lot more data available in the export than what’s shown in the RevenueCat dashboard. To learn more about all the different columns in the CSV, head over to the docs

Sending the NPS Survey

Now that you’ve exported your customer list from RevenueCat, you can use your preferred email tool to send your customers a survey. In this tutorial, I’m going to use MailChimp (because I like chimpanzees and it’s free for your first 2000 contacts). But you can use whatever you like — the steps will mostly be the same.

The first thing we’ll do is create a new audience in MailChimp from our exported list.

MailChimp lets you upload a CSV file, which is exactly what we want to do here. 

Choose the CSV file you just exported from RevenueCat, and upload it. You’ll be able to map the columns in the CSV file to the appropriate fields in MailChimp in a later step — all we really need right now is the email addresses.

Now that we’ve created our audience in MailChimp, we can create a new email to send to these customers.

For simplicity’s sake, we’ll create our survey right in MailChimp. Not only is this easier on us, but it can also lead to higher completion rates, since our customers won’t have to click through another link to a separately hosted survey. There are some great resources out there on how to write an effective NPS survey, but in general, shorter is better.

With our email written and our audience selected, the only thing left to do is click Send and wait for the feedback to roll in.

What’s next?

I hope this gives you some inspiration for how to get started with Customer Lists. Now that you’ve sent an initial NPS survey, it might be interesting to make another list for customers that are active but haven’t started a trial yet and hear what they have to say. 

We’d love to hear about any helpful lists you come up with in our community or on Twitter. As always, we’re here to help you in any way we can, so don’t be shy about reaching out.

To get the latest updates, tips, and tricks, follow us on Twitter!

In-App Subscriptions Made Easy

See why thousands of the world's tops apps use RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, analyze subscription data, and grow revenue on iOS, Android, and the web.

Related posts

Engineering

How to use offering metadata to A/B test your paywall with Experiments

Even if you’re using a custom paywall, you can run experiments with RevenueCat

Charlie Chapman

Charlie Chapman

August 31, 2023

Engineering

How to use StoreKit views to build a subscription app paywall with SwiftUI

A guide on Apple’s new StoreView, ProductView, and SubscriptionStoreView APIs for building native paywalls for your subscription app.

Charlie Chapman

Charlie Chapman

August 25, 2023

Engineering

How we replicate a write-heavy Kvrocks dataset in real time

Discover how we transformed our data architecture to manage write-heavy datasets

Tony Cosentini

Tony Cosentini

August 21, 2023

Want to see how RevenueCat can help?

RevenueCat enables us to have one single source of truth for subscriptions and revenue data.

Olivier Lemarie, PhotoRoomOlivier Lemarie, PhotoRoom
Read case study