If you can get more reviews for your apps, your apps will be ranked higher on the Shopify AppStore. When your apps can rank higher, you will definitely get more traffics.
If you are a solo founder / bootstrap founder, I believe this is the best marketing tactics. $0 marketing budget, persistent traffics for a long time, high conversion rate for installs, what tactic is better than AppStore search optimization (ASO)?
Now the question is how you can get more authentic reviews. Paid reviews are strictly forbiddened by Shopify. Recently, there are more random strangers selling reviews. And I never consider this shortcut. If your competitors report these fake reviews to Shopify, you are going to lose your business easily.
Imo, there is no “hack” to get many reviews in a short time. Here are the notes when I try to get reviews for my Shopify app BYOB – Build Your Own Bundles
- Treat your customers as live people.
- Be sympathetic to customer complaints. Sometimes, you make a trouble and the customer is unhappy. Reasonality just doesn’t help. The customer isn’t a developer. Try to use emojis or text to express appology. Write a longer email. Believe me. Length is the key
- Reply customer requests in a reasonable time (<= 1 workday)
- Have a problem solving mindset to answer customer requests
- Since my timezone is a disadvantage (UTC +8:00), try to reduce the response time with automated replies
- Reduce the time to wait for basic information from the customers, e.g store name, user data, etc
- Try to build a relationship with the user all the time
- I notice when there are 10 – 30 back-and-forth emails. Users are more likely to write reviews. I guess the time spent is a key. When you spend a longer time to deal with customer requests. The trust is built between us
- Don’t be too aggressive to get reviews. Otherwise, it may cause a backfire. The customers may write a negative review if she feels offended.
- Use both in-app pop up and manual emails to ask for reviews
- Design a good timing to ask for reviews
- Slow is better fast. All 5-star reviews is much important than occasional 1-star review.
- Large companies can provide real time support with a larger team. But it doesn’t mean the customer experience is great. Because the cs staffs can’t code like you. They don’t know the technical details of the app. Think about Shopify Partner support and the useful answers you ever get. It’s not difficult to outperform large players
- Stability is more important than new features. When the service is down, the game is over. You can miss a nice-to-have feature for your app, it doesn’t matter at all. But you can’t take risk to fail the peak season like BFCM
- Don’t know how to deliver good customer service experience? If you are a developer, you may feel painful to deal with customers. Nevermind, contact your current SaaS service providers. Learn from their replies. Personally, I learn a lot from HelpScout and Digital Ocean.
After launched BYOB for 6 months, there are 8 reviews of average 4.9 rating. My app stays within the top 20th for my category – product bundling. This is satisfactory, right?
