If you’ve ever looked at your response rates or App Store score and thought, something feels off, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common conversations the Alchemer Customer Success team has with mobile app teams. And it’s exactly what Alchemer’s Kailey Beller (Senior Customer Success Manager) and Mackenzie Shoemaker (CSM, Strategic Accounts) tackled in their recent webinar: “Your App Has Changed. Has Your Feedback Strategy?”
Watch the on-demand recording or read on for a breakdown of everything covered.
Why app ratings matter even more than you think
Before diving into the specifics, the presenters zoomed out to make the stakes clear: App Store ratings aren’t just a vanity metric. Moving from 3 to 4 stars can drive an 89% increase in conversion, and 79% of users check ratings before downloading. If your score is sitting below 4 stars, a meaningful portion of potential users have already decided against your app before they ever open it.
As Kailey put it:
“Love dialogues and rating dialogues are the primary lever you have to influence that number — but only if they’re set up well. That’s really what today is all about.”
Love Dialogs and Rating Dialogs: Know the difference
The webinar starts with a clear breakdown of these two core tools:
- Love Dialog — Your internal sentiment check. A simple “Do you love our app? Yes or no” prompt that tracks sentiment over time and serves as a jumping-off point for other interactions.
- Rating Dialog — The external prompt that asks users to leave a star rating and optional review directly in the app, feeding your public score on the App Store or Google Play.
As Mackenzie explained: “The love dialogue is for you — internal data. And the rating dialogue is for the world — your public score.”
They’re related, but they’re distinct. How you connect them — or don’t — has major implications for your data.
Resource: How to Use the Love Dialog and Rating Dialog
To couple or de-couple?
This is, as Kailey described it, “probably the question we get asked most often.”
- Coupled: The Rating Dialog fires immediately after a user taps “Yes, I love this app.” Simple, effective for building early volume — but your rating dialog reach is capped by your love dialog reach.
- Decoupled: Each dialog operates with its own independent targeting logic. Opens up your audience, spreads rating opportunities throughout the year, and gives you a broader, more representative view of sentiment.
There’s also a compliance dimension worth understanding. The FTC has issued guidance discouraging teams from systematically routing only happy users to public review prompts. Alchemer’s decoupled approach — which routes users who don’t love the app to an internal survey instead — is designed with this in mind.
Kailey’s rule of thumb: “If you’re just starting out and your rating is low, coupling is a reasonable place to start. It’s simple, gets you moving. And then once you’ve hit a rating you’re happy with or you’ve maxed out your love dialogue reach, that’s when decoupling becomes the right move.”
Resource: Decoupling Love & Rating Dialogs
Volume impacts data quality
Here’s a thought that may change how you think about your setup. Mackenzie made it plain:
“When your rating dialogue reach is low, your sample size is low, which makes your App Store score more volatile. A handful of negative reviews can move the needle significantly when you only have a few hundred total ratings.”
And decoupling has a compounding benefit: users who don’t love the app get routed to an internal survey instead of a public store prompt. That turns a potential negative review into actionable product intelligence — a direct line to what needs improving.
Targeting: The critical foundation of your digital feedback program
If there’s one concept the webinar drives home, it’s this: targeting isn’t a setup step — it’s the foundation your entire feedback program runs on.
Targeting controls three dimensions:
- Who — User attributes, event history, and segments
- Where — The specific app event or screen that triggers the interaction
- When — Frequency, timing, and cool-down logic
Get it right, and your response rates go up, your data is actionable, and your team makes decisions based on signal. Get it wrong, and you’re collecting a lot of data that doesn’t tell you anything useful.
As Kailey put it: “If you leave with nothing else today, leave with this: targeting isn’t just a setup step — it’s the foundation everything else sits on. Your response rates, your App Store rating, the quality of your data — it all traces back to whether your targeting continues to work as your app evolves.”
Resources: How to Use Targeting | Alchemer Mobile Targeting
Why targeting goes stale
Most teams don’t ignore their targeting on purpose — it just fades into the background. You configure it at launch, it works, and you move on. But over time:
- App updates change which events are relevant
- Business priorities shift and aren’t reflected in old configurations
- Criteria like “count is at least X” can permanently include or exclude users, especially if those events are tied to deprecated features
The webinar offers clear guidance on when to audit your targeting:
- After a major app release
- When ratings or response rates decline noticeably
- When feedback starts to feel off-topic or irrelevant
- At minimum: once a year as a routine hygiene check
Resource: How to Use Events
Watch the full webinar
Whether you’re a mobile app PM, a CX leader, or the person who owns your Alchemer account, this webinar is a practical, no-fluff audit guide for bringing your feedback strategy back in line with your app as it exists today.
Watch the On-Demand Recording →
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Questions about your setup? Reach out to your Alchemer Customer Success Manager or contact our team.