How To Get More Positive Play Store Reviews

How To Get More Positive Play Store Reviews

It has been proven that most of users check reviews and ratings before downloading an app, and it is also a fact that users are more likely to leave a review after a bad experience than a positive one. So positive app reviews will make your application more visible to customer. 

Reviews are more prominent for business on platforms like Play store, Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. In fact, I myself trust the reputation of a brand by looking at their positive reviews on Facebook and Google local listings, also before downloading any app from Play store I always check their reviews. The reviews important, besides boosting app ranking, it can also boost the app downloads.

Why are reviews so important?

Application reviews really matter for users when they need to download any application because the opinions of others are a crucial social indicator of your app’s good or bad features.

Obtaining positive reviews will increase your app’s discoverability.

How to Get More Positive Play Store Reviews?

Starting a conversation with personalized message is 10 times more effective than asking for a simple rating. It steps up your positive reviews by filtering negative reviews

1. Respond to reviews: Ensure the reviewer knows a real person is behind your reply by thanking them for something specific they said also respond to negative reviews as well because you should not just ignore a bad review until it goes away.  In fact, ignoring an unpleasant review can make things worse! The best thing to do when you receive a bad review is reacting quickly and strategically.
2. Utilize Display Plugins: There are a million and one plugins that we can use to help us promote our businesses. Most of these plugins let users easily navigate to your site to view the recommendations; when combined with a CTA, these tools can help you get more reviews fast.
3. Place CTAs on Your Site: This is another form of “it never hurts to ask.” Many sites now have social media widgets or plugins somewhere within them where they display UGC and customer reviews. Place a CTA next to them that specifically encourages users to “Leave us a Review” can be extremely effective. Direct, clear, concise CTAs are used in marketing for a good reason, and they can work just as well here as everywhere else.
4. Ask for Them One-on-One: This is the most effective way to get reviews: to appeal to someone that you have an actual relationship with and just ask. You’d be surprised how saying “hey, it would really help me out of if you did this” will be the most effective way to get more reviews.
5. Offer to Trade Recommendations with Coworkers: If you have coworkers, see if they’d be willing to trade LinkedIn reviews, benefiting both of you. Ultimately, if you (or the company you work for) have employees listed under the company page and multiple employees have great recommendations, this benefits everyone involved. And sometimes, seeing a review on your profile can be enough to let your clients know they can leave one, too.
6. Rank Positive Reviews as Helpful: You can give comments a boost by labeling them “helpful.” Anyone can do this, but you can get a head start by labeling the most positive reviews as helpful. Not only will this help you prioritize the most positive comments, which will help your business, it will show other users that people are reading the reviews—and can encourage them to jump in, too.
7. Encourage Users to Leave Feedback: How you are asking for feedback to increase the number of reviews is important. Don’t just make them feel appreciated for their support, but also make them enjoy seeing your message. Tell them just how important their review is to you. This is possible when you place importance on the current feedback with your replies and actions. Care about them and take them seriously. Use them as a channel of communication to make your app better. When you show them how important their opinion is, it will be a lot easier to persuade them.
8. Give Incentives: If you are an avid gamer, you are most likely familiar with the popup videos that arise when you are using apps. Most of the popular game apps use rewards like “20 free coins if you watch the video” to display the ad. Naturally, because people love free things, you can use this to increase your reviews. Reward them in return for their feedback by adapting these incentives into your app.
9. Gamification: Just like incentives, gamification is another beautiful way of increasing your reviews. Contests and promotions are amazing options to do so. You can give discounts and gift cards for your app or for app store usage. It doesn’t have to be a big prize; you just want a review. Try to find a good promotion or contest format and use it for your app. You can look at Touch Arcade’s forum section to see such contests by app developers.

10. Time the Prompt: Nobody wants to be interrupted by the app itself while using it. A top-notch user experience should be your basic unchanging rule when you attempt to increase your reviews. Think about this: You downloaded an app and when you launched it, a popup asking for your feedback emerges. This is one of the most common mistakes among app developers while asking for a review. So, try to create a clever algorithm. Find the most appropriate times to ask for their feedback or let them fulfill some conditions you determined before sending the review request. 

    Never forget that it is all about your app. What you need is reviews discussing the best features of your app, and this is only possible if your app is worthy. And again, don’t forget that what people think about your app is an amazing help in developing it further.

11. Review Prompt: Review prompts is a great way to remind users to leave a review, it’s also important to time the prompts properly within the user experience. Many apps make the mistake of asking for reviews upon the user launching the app. 

    Unfortunately, this makes for a poor user experience, and users are less likely to leave a review because the app is interrupting the normal user flow. Prompting for a review when users are feeling good about the app makes it a win-win situation for both the app developer and the end user.

12. Run a Contest: Another great way to increase app reviews is to run a contest on various forums.
    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. 

    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. 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.

13. Leverage Helpshift to Provide Direct Support to Your Users: The best route to a good app review is to provide exceptional customer service. It’s common for apps to include a “Send Feedback” button that just pops open an email form. But for very little effort, you can integrate Helpshift into your app and communicate directly with your users through a live two-way instant messaging window.

    Helpshift provides you with a web-based dashboard that lets you exchange one-to-one messages with your users directly inside of your app. So, the next time a user needs help, you can go way beyond a pre-populated mail form and deliver a great customer support experience with Helpshift. 

    Once you have helped your user, you can ask them to review your app and send them the link! It’s free and simple to integrate, plus Helpshift comes with its own app review popup plugin that minimizes negative app reviews by giving users a “Send Feedback” button. When pressed, the user will be taken to a live chat window (instead of the app store) where they can directly air all their grievances about your app!

Final Thoughts

Getting more positive reviews on play store can take a little effort, but it’s an investment that will pay off.

To get started, choose The Grow Apps that will benefit you most. Then ask your most loyal, engaged customers to leave reviews “as a favor.” Third, optimize all your platforms to make it easy for every user to get in touch with you.

By interacting with reviews and utilizing them as part of your marketing strategy, you’ll be able to generate more positive reviews in an upwards cycle that will benefit your business. You’ve just got to get started—and ask.