How you can Increase Mobile App Reviews and Ratings?

A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it.- Danielle Steel (An American Best Selling Author)

Apps rating and reviews work just like the same. App development includes a range of processes, including app designing, coding, testing, and deployment, for which you can select probably the best app development practices to make it successful. However, a bad review can ruin everything. A bad review is no less than a nightmare for app proprietors.

35% of a company’s customers leave after reading a negative review. – Fan and Fuel(A Digital Strategy agency)

Ratings and Reviews are vital for the brands, working as the cornerstones of improvement. Being a crucial element to app success and profit, reviews and ratings can be both the strongest asset as well as biggest liability for the brand. Hence, the app proprietors should be very careful about reviews they receive from the customers.

Customer reviews on the App Store are the feedback of their experience with the application, which proves to be very helpful for others to decide which apps they should try. The customers tend to read the review before they buy a product or indulge in a brand. Here are some stats that show the power of online ratings and reviews in the success of an application-

• Online reviews tend to impact 67.7% of buying decisions of the customers.
• 85% of customers go through more than 10 reviews before buying from a brand.
• 74% of customers state that positive reviews enhance their trust in the businesses.
• 84% of customers trust online ratings and reviews as much as personal suggestions and recommendations.
• Every one-star increase in a Yelp rating increases the revenue by 5 to 9%.
• 86% of people avoid doing business with a company with a negative online review.

Still not convinced? Consider these compelling reasons why you should take the application ratings and reviews more seriously.

How can Ratings and Reviews Benefit your Business?

• Drives the purchases.
• Impact App Store rank.
• Improves brand visibility and reputation.
• Contributes to App branding.
• Strengthen the customer’s trust in your brand.
• Expands brand reach.
• Contributes to customer decision-making.
• Improves brand revenue.
• Give the customers a channel to communicate with the brand.

Now that we’ve laid the foundation for why reviews are prominent to the business/brand, let’s acquaint you with some of the extremely effective ways to improve and increase your iOS and android app ratings and reviews.

5 Smart Ways to Increase Mobile App Reviews

1. Ask your User for Apps Ratings and Reviews

If you don’t ask, you will never get the reviews, especially the positive ones. The users have the tendency to share their negative reviews more often than positive ones. So, if you want your app to rank better on the app store, you should make efforts to take reviews from the users.

Ed Batista, a contributor at Harvardbiz, states that as a leader you should not sit back waiting for the feedback to come automatically. If you want it to take root in the culture, you have to ask for it explicitly.

Be careful while asking for the reviews, though. Choose the right timing to pop up your review window on the user’s device screen. Always ask the user for reviews when he is most likely to be satisfied with the app, for which you should keep an eye on his actions. For instance, if the user has been consistently using the app for quite some time now, or completed a level or something, this can be the most favorable time to ask for reviews.

2. Respond to your Customer Reviews

Along with taking the reviews from the customers, you should also be active in responding to them. It not only boosts the users’ ratings by an average of +0.7 stars, as per Google, making them feel counted and respected but also leaves a good impression on the people visiting for the first time.

Hence, you should address the reviews of your customers. If you cannot respond to all of them, make sure to address the low-rated reviews. Once you fix their problem and release an update, do not forget to notify them about the same. This way the customers feel they have been heard, hence they take time to review the apps in the future.

If you want to address all of the reviews, however, you don’t have time for that, you can automate the responses. Reach out to a competent mobile app development companies, who can help you with the same. You can provide the content for the responses that you want to automate. Draft the content that is concise and comprehensible. Also, make sure your responses are respectful and have a friendly tone.

3. Simplify the Reviewing Process

Imagine you are in the middle of the task on an app, and a pop-up appears asking you to go to the App Store and give your reviews. Will you ever leave your work and do that? None of the users likes to do it, hence leaving the app unreviewed.

If you don’t want to let this happen to your app, it’s better to simplify your app reviewing process. Instead of asking the users to specially go to the app store to drop reviews, you can enable them to do this from the app itself.

Include the in-app review prompt feature within your app. With this, the user can award you stars or for that matter give reviews while remaining in the app. If they want to give a detailed review they can visit the app store.

Source: Incipia

4. Allow your Users to Share Experiences through Direct Communication

Along with asking the users to rate the app, you can ask them to share their real experiences with you. Instead of tying them to 3 usual options- ‘Rate Now,’ ‘Remind me Later’ and ‘No Thanks’, you can include an option for “Send Feedback”.

The “Send Feedback” option works like a 2-way messaging window, through which the users can chat with you and raise their concerns. Once you address it successfully, you can ask them to review your app. This gives you a better insight into the customer experience, hence helping you to serve them better. To employ this feature in your app, you can integrate the Helpshift SDK within the application.

Source: Helpshift

5. Conduct a Contest or Event

You can conduct a contest or host events on different forums to collect reviews from the users. The contest helps you engage with your customers longer and also creates social proof of your brand. And the best part is that the users enjoy it, as they find it interesting and also get to meet people like them.

There are various websites and platforms which allow you to do the same, for example, Touch Arcade- a website that provides you a section where you can run contests to collect customer reviews for your application. To entice the users to participate in the contest, you can offer various gifts or a certain amount to the winner.

You can also host events related to the topics concerned with your users, which helps them in some way. The users find these kinds of events and conferences very useful and hence participate in them. Post such events you can ask them to review your app as at this time they are more compliant to give reviews to your app.

Are you ready to increase app reviews and ratings?

“Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.“– Theodore Roosevelt( Ex-President of the United States and a Writer)

The quote holds true for the Apps ratings and reviews in a way. Application ratings and reviews work as a catalyst in driving your app downloads, thereby boosting your business profit. The reason is the trust the customer places in word-of-mouth marketing.

Apps with more customer reviews (stars) are considered more credible as well as usable and have a better chance of being downloaded than those that have negative reviews or no reviews at all. In fact, the apps with only one or two reviews(even if they are positive ones) are also treated the same as the non-reviewed ones and are least downloaded.

Your customer reviews are key factors to Increase App Downloads, helping it become successful, and the app’s performance plays a major role in improving those reviews. Hence, be sure to consistently update your application’s performance, as this could drop your app ratings immediately.

Ace is a top-notch mobile app development company that offers the best custom application development services to its clients. We have experts who can vet your needs and help you improve your app performance by building the app updates, thereby adding value to your customer experience. So, wait no more, hire our mobile app development team and make your app journey a successful venture.