Diary of a growth team 3: The impact of app reviews
Read this to learn how asking for reviews can multiply their number by ten, improve your rating by one star and ultimately double your app store conversion.
Managing our legacy
TuneMoji for iOS has been around for a long time, in many different incarnations. As a consequence, our app store ratings were a lukewarm 3.5. App ratings have a huge impact on app store conversion: jumping from 3 stars to 4 stars can mean an increase in app store conversion of almost 90%, as illustrated here by Mobile Action (link).
The latest version of the app has a great design, improved speed, features, and content. It totally did not deserve the relatively low rating it had on the store. The obvious thing to do was to start prompting users for a review once they had the opportunity to evaluate it. As a starting point, we decided to ask all users who had the app installed for longer than 10 days to rate our app on the third time they launched it. The prompt says:
“Welcome back! Tunemoji needs your support to grow and spread in the world. If you like it would you mind giving us a rating on the store?”
“Yes”, “Not now”
If the user presses Not now, the prompt is shown again every 4 months, as Apple has a 3/year policy. We also thought of using priming in a similar way to how it is usually done for push notifications, but decided against it for now as it would require extra work. We were sure the experience could be further refined, but it seemed good enough for a first test, so we shipped, waited, and measured. With iTunes Connect it is possible to calculate the amount of ratings the app receives per day, as well as their value.
The results
Here is the data as of Aug 5th
Note: bear with me, as European, I like dates in a dd/mm format
And here are the reviews for 4.1.4: 21 reviews in 10 days, at a stellar average of five stars!
Lessons learned
This quick hack to ask users for reviews worked great:
- It cost very little to implement.
- The ratings we are getting are significantly better. In the past, most people leaving a review were dissatisfied users or those who wanted to leave a feature request, like a user who left a 3 star review saying “the app is great but I wish there was an iMessage app”. Under the new approach, we are engaging users which are having a positive experience which yields more positive scores.
- We just multiplied by TEN the number of ratings we get per day, yay!
#MovingTheNeedle
The journey continues, because growth is never done…
