Tracking, managing, and answering App Store reviews can be time-consuming. We get that. Unfortunately, app developers are unaware of how crucial it can be to take care of your app's reputation in the App Store.
This article will cover how you can increase your app downloads by simply managing your App Store reviews. But first, let's see how reviews and ratings impact a user's decision to download the app using some stats. Let's start.
Table Of Contents:
- How Do Ratings And Reviews Affect Downloads And Usage?
- How To Increase App Downloads By App Store Review Management?
- FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
How Do Ratings And Reviews Affect Downloads And Usage?
A report by Apptentive found the following:
- 50% of mobile device users will not consider an app with a 3-star rating.
- The number drops to 85% for a 2-star rating.
- 77% of users read at least 1 review before downloading a free app.
- The number jumps to 80% for a paid app.
- App reviews influence about 70% of users to install the app on their Apple devices.
- Going from an average app rating of 3.9 to 4.2 will increase your conversion rate from 36.56% to 47.85%. This would result in a 30% improvement in conversion rate.
How To Increase App Downloads By App Store Review Management?
- Encourage App Reviews
- Understand Your App Users Through Reviews
- Respond To Positive Reviews
- Analyze, Measure, And Optimize
- Take Care Of Negative Reviews
- Build Your Online Reputation
- Use A Review Management Tool For Ease
Encourage App Reviews
If you don't invite your users to rate and review your app in the App Store, some will only go to your Page only when problems emerge or just to rant out.
For this reason, most apps tend to prompt users with pop-ups to rate it after spending some time on the app.
However, you should avoid asking for a review right after a user installs the app. Such users don't have any opinion yet and will ignore the pop-up mostly. Or worse, it will annoy them, and they may send a negative review or low rating or stop using your app altogether.
Hence, it's better to monitor user behavior on the app. Then, find a moment where most users' happiness and excitement are at their maximum level and ask them for that gentle, selfless review/rating of your app.
Suggested Read: 10+ Ways To Get More Reviews For Your Business
Understand Your App Users Through Reviews
App Store reviews help to get a deeper understanding of your audience. You should identify the essential features that your audience mentions the most in their reviews and act on them.
Such reviews will bring you valuable feedback to improve your app. You can improve your retention metrics, get higher conversion rates, and boost your organic growth in the App Store if you work and improve upon the issues pointed out by user reviews (especially the negative ones).
Some reputation management tools can even show the sentiment of the user's reviews, making it easy to identify positive and negative keywords. Tracking those keywords will help you understand your app's direction.
Respond To Positive Reviews
App developers only take out the time to answer users' negative reviews, while most positive reviews remain unanswered.
But, if you take the time to attend to your positive reviews and respond to them, you increase the chances of getting featured in the "preview" widget.
This way, your target audience will see encouraging positive reviews instead of negative ones and will be encouraged to download your app.
Suggested Read: 14 Best Practices To Respond To App Store Reviews
If you find it difficult and time-consuming to filter positive reviews and respond to them, consider using a review management tool like Statusbrew. It allows you to filter all positive reviews by sentiment, create an inbox and address them using a ticketing system.
Book a free demo of the platform to experience it yourself?
Analyze, Measure, And Optimize
In this tech-savvy era, it's essential to constantly analyze how your users connect with your app and whether they remain engaged with it. Once you explore all the aspects, you will know whether your users are using your app correctly or not.
Plus, you will get to know if there are any roadblocks that your users might be facing while using your app. You can then optimize your app according to these insights. Once you know the areas where your app is lacking, you can redirect your efforts to make it work for you in the best way possible.
Some factors to track and optimize are:
- Uninstall rate
- Retention rate
- Session length
Take Care Of Negative Reviews
65% of app users write reviews when they are unsatisfied with the app functionality, but only 49% give feedback for satisfactory services.
No app developer likes to read a negative review of the app they have worked hard on. But you learn more from negative reviews than you can from any positive feedback.
App users tend to give negative reviews when the app cannot provide them with the services it promises or when the app does not work correctly. Such reviews tell what you could fix in your app, which could help improve the user experience in the future.
Unattended negative reviews are a nightmare for app developers. When your app gets negative reviews, you should do the needful to fix it and ensure to revert to the review as soon as possible.
Monitoring user feedback to drive future testing, bug fixes, and design is important. Use the negative reviews to learn what your users really want out of your app. Keep in mind that every disadvantage has its own advantage.
Review management tools like Statusbrew can help you tackle and outsmart negative reviews in the best way possible. It allows you to route negative or bad reviews to a particular inbox automatically.
You can auto-assign negative reviews to specific team members. To prevent negative reviews from razing your brand reputation, it's important to respond to them timely. Statusbrew helps you get back to irritated customers by notifying you of all negative or fake reviews received.
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Build Your Online Reputation
Do you think just managing App Store reviews is sufficient to survive in the cutting-edge competition? You will have to put a lot of effort into getting your app noticed by your target audience.
Getting thousands of downloads every single day is not enough for your app's success. There is a strong need to build your brand reputation and take care of it. Having a strong brand reputation not just helps you in increasing the downloads regularly, but it also helps to defend when someone tries to drop fake reviews about your app.
Popular apps in the App Store are not downloaded because of great marketing but because of excellent brand awareness. You need to have a strong internet presence in order to encourage more App Store searches and downloads.
So, you should invest in strengthening your online presence. Get ranked on Google SERPs for your focus keywords to make your app more discoverable.
Suggested Reads: The Complete Guide To Online Reputation Management & 5-Step Online Reputation Management Strategy
Use A Review Management Tool For Ease
While managing different kinds of reviews and responding to them in a timely manner might seem daunting, review management tools like Statusbrew can make the task easier for you.
Statusbrew helps you manage and promptly reply to reviews from Google Play Store, App Store, Google My Business, and more from a single dashboard. Here's how Statusbrew can help you to ease out your App Store review management:
- Using AI-powered sentiment analysis to understand your customer's emotions at a scale.
- Automatically route reviews of a specific category to a particular inbox/team member.
- Keep track of all your customers posting reviews across platforms using inbuilt CRM.
- Use controlled team member access and no password sharing to mitigate compliance issues.
- Collaborate with your team members in real-time to handle customer queries quickly.
- Auto-hide spam and troll comments across your social real estate.
- Get in-depth brand reputation insights and share dynamic reports with your team members and clients.
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Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even Google My Business.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Here are some commonly asked questions on increasing app downloads by App Store review management:
Does App Store allow fake app reviews?
The App Store does not allow fake reviews on its platform. You can report it if you spot one, so it's taken down. In some cases, Apple even inspects and removes fake App Store ratings.
How to increase app installs organically?
Go for App Store optimization, enhance your user engagement by effective onboarding, use referral programs, and invest your time and efforts in organic social media marketing if you want to increase your app installs organically.
How do I increase App Store reviews?
Respond to existing reviews, solve the problems of genuine negative reviews, know how to spot a fake review and remove it and ask your app users for reviews if you want to increase App Store reviews. If possible, you can offer your users incentives like free subscriptions in exchange for reviews.
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