How to Get More Positive App Reviews & Ratings

5 minutes read

Mobytelab Team

Posts a few seconds ago

Why is Mobile App Reviews Important?

In the digital era, mobile technology is booming drastically. As of the first quarter of 2021, there are around 3.48 million Android apps on Google play, while the Apple App Store was the second-largest app store with roughly 2.22 million available apps for iOS.

Among millions of apps, reviews and ratings play a huge role in users' decisions to download a mobile app. A greater level of importance on ratings and reviews is placed by the App Store and Play Store than ever before.

Some studies illustrate the impact of mobile app reviews.

• As Apptentive, 90% of users go through reviews and ratings before installing an app
• As Tune.com, 47% iOS users and 53% of Android users found mobile apps through search engines

According to the 2018 Online Reviews Survey, 94% of customers avoided a business due to negative reviews.

The higher rank of apps ratings and reviews, the higher in search. There's a better chance of it being found and downloaded for an app high ranking. App high ranking will be maintained with more downloads.

Getting positive reviews and ratings for your mobile app is a difficult task. However, here are some Tips you can take to get better reviews.

Tips to Get More Positive App Reviews & Ratings

Therefore finding ways to get more app reviews and ratings is extremely important. You’ll need more positive reviews than others to give your app the ranking boost it needs.

App reviews just don’t happen by themselves, and you shouldn’t expect waves of people to head back to the app store on their own accord just to write a review of your app. In fact, probably the only people who will do so are the ones who have a really bad experience with your app!

Keep Your Product Usefull and Updated

Before we move to any Tip, please take the number 1 rule is Your App should be Usefull and Always Updated. Why it's important? Because no one wants to use old-fashioned apps being updated many years ago.

It also shows you, as a product owner takes care of your app, also your users.

The quality of a product decides the success of application development in the future. In the long run, a good app always attracts users to explore the app’s features and functionalities. The application should bring an important benefit to the user and motivate users to download it and use it.

The new updated features can make existing users happy and attract them to leave organic reviews. Users sometimes also ask the app builders to implement new functionalities or UI designs. These feature wishes are precious to your app development roadmap. It guides your application development in the direction that serves your audience. It means to help your app get more positive app reviews and ratings after those updates. The app developers or programmers can use some bug tracking tools to automate the messiest and most tedious parts of your phase in developing an app. This gives more time to focus on fixing errors and refining the app.

Furthermore, the updated latest version helps application developers to convert all the negative reviews to positive ones as it generally resolves the bugs and issues identified in the previous version. After fixing bugs and re-publishing your app, you reply and ask users who gave a bad review to reconsider their rating on Google Play.

Encourage and Respond to Feedback

1. Ask the Most Engaged Users

A lot of reviews and ratings can help to improve in search and app store top charts rankings. Thus, don’t expect the users to leave feedback – ask them for it! You should focus on the most engaged users who really care and enjoy the app. This will help to increase the number of positive reviews.

Users who engage with your app on a regular basis obviously see value in it. You've already won their loyalty. By targeting only your most loyal users with review requests, you're narrowing the chances of receiving a negative or uninformed review. The app, or uninstall it by approaching them.

There are some ways to identify your engaged users such as using a form of temporal engagement metric. From there you can:

• Calculate engagement rate by month, week, and day
• Analyze engagement rate by channel
• Measure engagement rate by feature

Furthermore, by analyzing user’s reviews and scanning for feature wishes, app development companies prevent the app developers from wasting time on developing app capability and mobile app developers can maintain a bug-free app by finding bugs faster.

2. When to Ask?

A common mistake that app developers often make is asking users to rate the app too soon with pop-us each time they enter the app. This looks obsessive and can become quite annoying for the users.

For most users, a short time is not enough to navigate through your app, learn how to use it, and start enjoying it. It turns out that if you ask users to rate before that special moment, you are more likely to get a negative rating.

Therefore, you should consider finding the right time to ask users to rate the app. After users have used the app for a few weeks and checked items off their to-do list, app builders will ask for a review through several tools. At this moment, users are feeling happy about how productive they were, and are willing to share their positive feelings about the app.

3. Respond to Feedback

Google saw that mobile developers who reply to their user reviews experience a +0.7 boost in their app rating. Also, users tend to change their initially negative rating into a positive one when they get a developer response to their review.

Hence, responding to user’s feedback is also one of the ways to get more positive reviews and ratings from app users that app development companies consider. Sometimes negative reviews can have great ideas about new features that you would like to include in your roadmap.

Show the user that you understand the inconvenience from their point of view, and try to compensate for their bad experience. Providing excellent customer support can actually make these users change their negative rating to positive and turn bad reviews into good experiences.

Reviews & Rating Tools

The list below will try to cover which essential tools you can consider to apply to your application to boost your reviews and ratings.

1. App Review Plugin

People tend to be quick at throwing negative feedback, but the ones who find your app users often forget to leave some comments. You want to receive those positive reviews, you must remind them of your app.

You can do this in a drop-dead simple and quickest way by implementing turn-key plugins. There are many of them that are available for iOS and Android and some of them take you no more than a few minutes to be installed. Those plugins will prompt users to review your app after a certain number or period of time. As an example, users will be sent to the appropriate app store where they can leave their review if they love the app by sliding the point mostly to the right, as the image is shown below:

You can check out our curated list of tools you can add to your app based on how effective it is.

Appbot.co Link

App review & ratings tools to level up your whole customer experience

Apptentive.com Link

Measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across your mobile customer journey.

However, be careful when setting up these plugins. You don’t want to display the review pop-up at the wrong moment.

2. Push Notification

Push notifications are alerts shown on user-interface (UI) designs that are designed to catch users' attention on mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, and even wearable devices. It is a great marketing tool for anyone with a mobile app because they help you stay in contact with your users and can be sent by app developers at any time and on any day.

A recent study showed that mobile users receive an average of 63.5 notifications per day, with most automated notifications coming from messaging and email applications. Among a variety of apps installed on mobile, it’s difficult for users to remember what apps they even have on their device. Push notifications help these services deliver timely and relevant information to users, and in doing so, staying top of mind.

Credit: WebEngage

This application development tool typically consists of a title, a message, an image, and a URL. Choose an image that adds context, and emojis that communicate your message in fewer words. It will increase revenue through monetization and enhance your user experience.

App builders use push notifications to message their users when they might need a reminder about something. People find great value in receiving push notifications that alert them of updates or changes to their upcoming travel plans, reservations, deliveries, and other time-sensitive topics. This helps partly to get more positive reviews and ratings for the applications.

3. Review Pop-up

App developers can create a message inviting users to review your mobile application after they have performed a specific action, like making a purchase. Users are more likely to rate you positively after successfully completing a task.

If they like the app you ask for a review, users just need to tap the number of stars inside a pop-users of application design, they’re then asked if they want to leave a detailed review. Since the user has already put in the effort to choose a rating, you’re more likely to get them to follow through with the next step.

Besides, programmers need to choose a proper prompt time to display a pop-up review and get users’ feedback during building apps. Give the user time to explore the app first. You have to wait until positive moments that users have achieved something within your app, or they extremely feel pleased by some certain features.

4. Showcase User's Ratings and Review

Users enjoy feeling helpful and being a part of something big. Remind them how important it is for you to get their feedback, and show the benefits that it can bring to the app or game and even to themselves: more content, updates, new levels, new functionalities, or even new products.

Rewarding as collaboration in return for reviews is also one of the popular ways to earn reviews such as more content, updates, new levels, new functionalities, or even new products.

With Android devices and other wearable devices, if app builders own an app for games on the app store application or web app, then Android app developers can offer virtual currency, powers, special characters, etc. to the users and encourage them to leave a good app review in the app store.

For non-game apps, you can offer some premium content for free. You can also think of other innovative ideas to incentivize users. We are quite sure that this strategy will work positively as happy users tend to leave compelling app reviews.

However, iOS app developers should note that Apple has been banning apps that incentivize mobile app reviews.

5. Conduct Contests

Another great way to increase app reviews is to run a contest on various forums. The popular blog, Touch Arcade, has a section on their forums where app developers run contests and giveaways to entice other members to leave reviews for their apps.

When running a contest, you can give away an iTunes gift card, or you can PayPal the winner. Reviewers will leave their iTunes or Google Play usernames as replies within your thread, and then you can select the winner randomly.

To be completely transparent, it’s important to highlight who the contestants are and how you selected a winner. You can put all usernames into a spreadsheet and associate a number for each user. Then use the Random.org website to generate a number and show the screenshot to prove you were not favoring any one reviewer.

While running a contest does require you to manually manage the entire process, from checking iTunes and validating the reviews to selecting a winner, it can jumpstart your app’s early and important reviews and ratings.

Conclusions

App reviews and ranking can be vital to the success of the app development process. In fact, users pay much attention to your app ratings and they do read your app reviews.

So mobile app development companies make sure that users see your app’s best side so they can go for a download and install it. App reviews are crucial for the survival of your mobile app. App Stores keep observing their databases to find the worst apps and remove them based on considering one of the main factors which is app feedback.

Now, some mobile strategies that we discussed above are useful for leveraging more positive app reviews and ratings.

Mobytelab focuses on software consultant, product design, UI/UX design, web & mobile application development and ASO.

Do you need help on building a custom software. Leave a message to us.