When calculating NPS, what do I do with users who experienced but did not buy?

Without a doubt, these are important users to hear from. Their insights can be insightful, but remember that they come from a different place than paid/paying customers to be sure to consider that when reviewing feedback.

In other business models, like SaaS, these users would be considered the same as trial/free customers.

What you’re capable of doing with these users is dependent upon the tool you’re using to measure NPS. Since I don’t know what that tool is, I’ll tell you what can be done with our tool, Promoter.io.

With this particular group of users/customers the score is less important than the insight that you can gain. While it’s true that they don’t serve as a good benchmark for identifying promoters and detractors, they DO represent a great opportunity to improve your on-boarding, conversion rates, marketing and sales process, etc.

Since they didn’t purchase your product/service, your instincts are correct in that they should be considered separate from your paying users.

So how can do that? With Promoter, here are some options:

1. Treat them as a separate campaign — In fact, this is how we do it ourselves. We’ve created two separate campaigns — one for paid customers and one for trial customers. This allows us to clearly isolate our true NPS score and more importantly it helps us better segment our trending data.
   Note: If you’re interested in seeing the full picture of how we run our own NPS campaign, we’ve documented our process in a recent post.
2. Use customer attributes to create different segments — An alternative to creating two separate campaigns would be to filter your overall results by attributes which define separate customer segments.
3. For example, in your database, you would simply add an additional column with a header such as, “Purchased”, indicating “yes” or “no” for each contact.
4. In Promoter these become filterable fields you can use to get granular with your data. Theoretically, you could drill your NPS score down to purchases made within a specific region within a specified age range. The filter possibilities are endless.

Ultimately what it comes down to is what you’re attempting to measure and gain. If you’re only looking for a score, these non-paying customers won’t bring much value to you.

To get the most value out of measuring NPS, I’d highly recommend continuing to survey these users using one of the methods I’ve described above, start engaging in meaningful conversation with them and leverage every insight they give you.