Our App Rating Helped Us Sell More
TL;DR: The higher your app rating, the easier it is to sell.
App ratings can help separate you from the competition because of how much social proof you have to back your claims.
"Nearly nine out of ten consumers read reviews before making a purchase" - Online Review Statistics.
As people, we read reviews before making a purchase. When we sell, we need to sell the way we buy.
How Do I Get 5 Stars?
Ask For Reviews
Just ask for a review. No, really. It's sometimes that easy.
Most of the time, users submit reviews to voice their frustration. Reviews are the easiest way to get your attention. What that does is that it lowers your review and doesn't necessarily reflect how most of your users feel.
We want reviews to be accurate and positive. So what that means is that we should ask for reviews after some positive interaction in our app!
Let's say you're a FinTech startup that lets your users make payments with cryptocurrency. There may be one user whose transaction fails because of bad network connectivity. That's not a great experience, and a user may leave a negative review out of frustration. Well, that isn't an accurate representation of the app. Leaving a positive review isn't on the minds of happy users. We all live busy lives.
We need a strategy to get happy users to rate the app.
We can prompt users to rate the app after some successful transactions. A successful transaction is a positive interaction in our app. Interactions like these are when users are most likely to give favourable reviews!
We've used this strategy before. It took a 3.5-star app to 4.8 stars in a month. Not only did the rating jump dramatically, but the sales team also had an easier time selling the app. We were closing 30% more sales per month.
Respond to Reviews
Getting negative reviews isn't fun, but we need to address them. Valid complaints like crashes should be added to the backlog and prioritized appropriately. Respond to them, let them know a fix is coming up soon and what version to expect. It's helped us convert some 1-star reviews into 5-stars. Users started to refer their friends and sold for us. Get them to sell for you too.