This One Question Drives Higher In-App Response Rates and Product Engagement

July 14, 2022

It all starts with a simple question: “Do you love our app?” This phrase is proven to drive higher in-app response rates, increase product engagement, and ultimately improve the customer experience.

We’ve always preached that using the word “love” is key to driving in-app product engagement with customers and keeping a pulse on the overall customer experience. At Alchemer Mobile (formerly Apptentive), we’ve even gone so far as to coin this strategy the “Love Dialog.”

But why is this? And why do our customers see such high in-app response rates using this verbiage?

Alchemer Mobile (formerly Apptentive) Love Dialog

What is the Love Dialog

The Love Dialog® is a simple, powerful starting point for understanding customer sentiment throughout their lifetime. It’s a simple question: “Do you love our app?”. Depending on the answer you receive and who you receive it from, you can learn so much about your customers’ experience.

If a customer says “yes,” they do love your app, you know they’re happy and will likely be willing to leave a positive app store review or perhaps join a beta program for engaged users to test products. If you’ve tied their response to their customer ID, you can follow up with them at a later time with a ratings prompt or a call-to-action.

If a customer says “no,” they don’t love your app, you have an opportunity to gain valuable feedback on how to turn the in-app experience into something they do love. You can do this by asking for more feedback, either in a follow-up survey or by starting a conversation in your message center (or equivalent two-way messaging system).

Why the word “love?”

“Love” is a strong word people may not associate with most products or experiences. We use the word “love” rather than “like” because it’s an emotional stop word. By that, we mean it literally stops people in their tracks when they see it and elicits an immediate, emotional response. It causes people to take a stance: Are they a fan of your app, or are they at risk of not using it again? Based on their response, you can begin to build a feedback journey. For example, you can be confident that the individuals who respond “yes” to your prompt will likely leave a positive review.

Ways to use the Love Dialog

Measure sentiment over time

By asking your customers regularly, you can track over time the percentage of customers who love your brand. It’s the key to keeping a pulse on your overall customer experience. When you regularly track Love Dialog responses from the same people over time, you can quickly and easily identify when shifts in sentiment occur. This allows you to immediately take action.

→Download the eBook: How to Measure, Analyze, and Use Mobile Customer Sentiment

Respond to negative feedback at the individual level

Using the Love Dialog, ask those who don’t love your app to complete a short survey or connect with your team directly via a message center, so that problems can be quickly addressed. Tying this question to their customer ID also equips you with the ability to follow up with previously unhappy customers once their problem has been addressed and/or resolved. For example, if you fixed the cart checkout bug they shared with you, send them an in-app message to let them know the bug was fixed.

Identify testing cohorts

If people are pleased with your app experience, they will likely be more engaged and invested in your brand. Given this, they generally make fantastic candidates for beta testing. Send an invitation to customers who respond “yes” time after time to join a beta program, and you’ll see that cohort give more valuable and actionable feedback.

Drive product engagement and increase in-app survey response rates

The best decisions are informed by an abundance of data from a representative cross section of your customer base—not just the unhappy ones. When you use the Love Dialog, you can qualify people you’re targeting with surveys based on their sentiment. Send different surveys to these different cohorts in order to dive deeper into their individual needs. When surveys are more personalized and specific to that target audience, response rates will skyrocket and overall product engagement increases. 

Increase 5-star app ratings and reviews

When a customer says they love your app by answering “yes” to the Love Dialog, you can follow up with them at a later date to ask for an app store rating. Since you already know they love their experience, you know they will likely provide a positive review and a higher app rating.

Since this is the most common use case we’ve seen with our customers here at Alchemer Mobile (formerly Apptentive), let’s dive into this piece a little bit more.

We recommend using an app store rating prompt in conjunction with the Love Dialog. A rating prompt (which we call the “Rating Dialog” at Alchemer Mobile (formerly Apptentive)) is flexible and can be set up in many ways. For example, it can be presented directly after a customer says “Yes” on the Love Dialog, several days after the customer says “Yes”, or at a totally separate time and place.

We see best results when the Love Dialog and Ratings Dialog are decoupled, but still shown sequentially. This is especially true on iOS, where there is a strict limit of only showing the Apple Rating Dialog 3 times per 365-day period. For more on those limits, please refer to the Apple rating guidelines.

For most apps, the best initial approach for the Rating Dialog follows this pattern:

  1. Present the Love Dialog. If a customer says “Yes,” show them a simple thank you message. If “No,” take them directly to a Survey or Message Center to collect their feedback as soon as possible.
  2. Set up separate targeting on your Rating Dialog that prompts only those customers that tapped “Yes” on the Love Dialog as well as have completed additional actions. The goal is to show the Rating Dialog to those that are most likely to take the time to leave a rating and review — your power users. This allows you to maximize ratings and reviews without burning through your rating opportunities or spamming your customers.

But remember: Ratings and reviews aren’t everything!

→Download the guide: Great App Ratings and Reviews Aren’t Enough

In conclusion

Essentially, the Love Dialog is a fast, high-volume pulse check on a customer’s sentiment and increase product engagement. With over one billion people who have answered the Love Dialog question in over 22 languages across 40 countries with a response rate of 93 percent, the Love Dialog helps product teams garner fast, pinpointed feedback and CX teams to predict and prevent churn before it happens. Marketing teams benefit from the easy identification of evangelists, resulting in higher ratings and reviews.

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