What Is Decoupling?
Decoupling refers to targeting customers for ratings separately from an audience that sees the Alchemer Digital Love Dialog®, or showing the Rating Dialog at another point in your customers app journey that is not immediately after the Love Dialog.
Why It’s Important
Apple limits their in-app Rating Dialog to be shown to each person a maximum of three times per 365 days. The in-app dialog is incredibly powerful—our customers saw their average rating increase by 20%—however, who you show it to, and how frequently, become even more important.
The Google Play Rating Dialog is relatively new, so we are still gathering data. Google has stated they will impose a limit on how many times it can be shown, but have not made it clear what the limit will be.
In light of that, we advise you to target conservatively to ensure that you have customers to rate you with each upcoming release. If you ask for too many ratings up front, when the new dialog releases, you will not have enough customers to keep your rating high throughout the year. Google Play also weighs recent ratings more heavily, so it becomes even more important to decouple and use your rating opportunities carefully.
Decoupling the Love and Ratings Dialogs on both platforms ensures you stretch out your rating opportunities over the year to keep your rating consistent. It also allows you to track the pulse of your customers’ sentiment over time and ask a simple question of “Do you love?” more frequently. It’s lightweight (with a 94% response rate), and your customers can go back to what they were doing quickly, while affording you the opportunity for direct, frequent feedback if things are not going well.
Continue to redirect those “No’s” to a Survey or Message Center, which you should update at a regular cadence of every three to six months. Be sure that the feedback you receive is staying fresh and your customers don’t see the same questions repeatedly.
How To Set It Up
Tip: Use Date Annotations to track when you decouple your Love & Ratings Dialogs.
Recommendations By Industry
The below suggestions will require you to pass Alchemer Digital either custom data or events as part of your SDK integration, and are designed as a jumping off point to help you brainstorm how you can get creative with your decoupled Rating Dialog.
Think of times when your customer is likely to have had a positive experience, and areas that show a deeper level of engagement with your app or website.
You can find additional Events tips here.
Food and Beverage
Consider asking your rewards members, or a certain rewards level, to leave a rating. If customers can set favorite items or locations in your app, this level of engaged customer would also be great to ask to rate your app.
Retail
Target your Ratings Dialog based on frequent purchases or those who have set a favorite location. This is another area where rewards memberships could be useful, or alternately if someone is a credit card holder.
Travel
Frequent travelers/bookers are an obvious segment here to ask to rate you, as are those at higher levels of frequent flier programs and customers who use the app to check in, for their boarding pass and to manage their travel.
Finance
Customers with direct deposit set up, those who pay their bills using your bill pay setup or someone who has opened an account digitally are all good examples of potential segments to ask for ratings.
Media
If you have a “favorites” feature for a topic, show, movie or channel, if someone shares articles or content, or if someone uses the app to record a show, those are examples of a more engaged customer set to show the Rating Dialog to.
Lifestyle
Apps in this category can vary wildly, however, favorites set is a great example—whether you are a real estate or workout app. Rewards or membership levels could apply here, and just as described above, are a great cohort to ask for ratings from.
Optimizing Your Setup
You should aim for at least 20% of your monthly active customers to see the Love Dialog. We recommend you use the App Summary dashboard to monitor the percentage and adjust your targeting accordingly.
Once you’ve shown the Love Dialog, you want to plan to ask about 10% of those who “Love” you to leave a rating. Keep in mind your ratings should be spread out across your audience throughout the year to ensure that you have customers to ask with all of your releases and to keep your rating stable and/or increase it over time.
In the below example, the Love Dialog has shown to approximately 8% of the overall monthly audience. This is calculated by dividing the total Love Dialogs (204,724) by total MAU (2,659,211). Keep in mind you should look at a 30 day time period of Love Dialogs to make a meaningful comparison.
In order to expand that to more of their customers, in this example, the customer can add additional segments with new event or custom data targeting, and/or make their targeting somewhat less restrictive.
Because they are decoupled, they can ask more of their customers this simple, lightweight “Do you love our app?” question and get quick, frequent feedback.
Meanwhile, they are asking 41% of those who “Love” them for a rating in a given month. This is calculated by dividing the total Rating Opportunities (56,095) by the total who tapped “Love” (137,519)
At this rate, they will run out of customers to prompt, as evidenced by the high “Not Shown” bar in the chart below.
“Not Shown” on iOS means that the device has hit their limit of Apple Rating Dialogs in a 365 day period, or disabled it in their app settings. On Android it means that the device has hit its quota (Google has not specified what the actual quota is) or the device is on a Google business account, which does not allow for using the Google Play Rating Dialog.
In order to avoid such a large percentage of customers hitting their limit, we recommend spacing this out to show every 90-120 days, with additional WHO segments as described above.
Best Practices
- Show the Love Dialog every 30-60 days to get a frequent pulse from your customers.
- Show the Rating Dialog every 90-120 days to spread out those opportunities and keep your ratings consistent.
- Your Rating Dialog segments should be more restrictive, and we recommend always targeting those who have said that they “Love” you recently, using “Has seen interaction” targeting.
- Be sure to leverage events and custom data in both your Love and Rating Dialog segments to ensure that people have had enough time to experience the app before being asked for feedback. Need more ideas? Here are some additional event and targeting tips.
- Your Where events should be natural stopping points like back buttons, close buttons, or completed actions. This will encourage people to take the time to give feedback.
- Update the Survey attached to your Love Dialog every three to six months to ensure customers are not receiving the same questions repeatedly. You can also routinely refresh what you ask in Message Center if you are using that instead of a Survey.
