Ratings – Quality or quantity?

The first question you should ask yourself when planning a review campaign is whether you're prioritizing quality or quantity.

This will depend on a few different factors:

• What's your current review score?
• How does your review score compare with your competitors?
• How many reviews do you have compared to your competitors?
• How many negative reviews are you getting per week or month?

It's natural that you'll want to prioritize quality. But if you only send review campaigns to your most satisfied users, there will be a limit to how much you can move the needle.

We'll look at this in a little more detail below.

How to approach reviews for old and new products

When it comes to review campaigns, old and new products come with different sets of challenges.

Here are some common examples:

• Old products: If you have a product with 1,000 reviews and a score of 2.6 stars, you'll need a lot of positive reviews to pull you back up again. This can be a difficult task, so you may even be better off creating a new listing for your latest product version. 
• New products: If you only have two reviews and a score of 5.0, you should focus on volume to get to 100+ reviews, even if it brings your score down to 4.1. 

How to calculate what you need

Before starting your review campaign, you should look at the state of play and set some targets.

Let's look at a step-by-step example:

1. You look at a breakdown of your review scores and find that you have an average of 4.13. On your storefront, your score is rounded down to 4.1.
2. You work out that, to increase your score to 4.2, you only need to reach an average of 4.16.
3. You know that X users leave a negative score per month, so you can calculate how many five-star reviews you need per month to reach your target.

Always start with quality

Sending review campaigns out to your whole user base is a big risk. You may get lots of reviews, but you have no control over their quality.

Instead, select the top 1% of users based on customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and usage. Then target this segment and see how much the needle moves.

Over time, expand this audience to find the sweet spot between quantity and quality.