One of the most common questions we get is “what’s a good review rate”. There's a short answer & a long answer to this question.

The short answer

Anywhere between 2-4.9% is pretty good. If you’re in that range & just wanted a quick gut check, you can kind of stop reading now.

The breakdown is roughly:

Bad: <.49%
Okay: .5%-1.9%
Good: 2%-4.9%
Great: 5%-10%
Incredible: 10%+

The long answer

Whether you're doing good, great or terrible can all be traced back to the “1 / 9 / 90 theory”

1 / 9 / 90 (or “Participation Inequality”) has been used as a model to understand behaviour online since the 1990’s. The model fits people into three buckets (Super Posters, Contributors, Lurkers) that describe how they act online, with the buckets representing 1% / 9% / 90% of people respectively.

Lurkers (90%) — even if they have something to say, they probably won’t say it

Contributors (9%) — if they have something to say & it’s easy enough to say it, they’ll say it

Super posters (1%) — they always have something to say & they will make sure they say it

Across millions of reviews on Junip, these buckets hold roughly true for people reviewing products as well.

Our Super Posters (1%) respond to basically every review request they see. Our Contributors (9%) will leave a review if it’s a simple process & they have something they want to say about the product. Our Lurkers (90%) are pretty unlikely to leave a review.

The variables upstream from “request they see” are marketing opt-in rates (for regions were opt-in is required to send a request) & open rates, as well as any other methods you’re using to let people know they can submit a review.

How Nuenew Gathers Reviews

To see how this plays out in practice we can look at the (fictitious) brand Nuenew, which sells antique lamps (avg 4.8 stars!). 10,000 customers purchased a Nuenew antique lamp in April of 2024.

64% of these customers opted-in to marketing & they have an average open rate of 46%, so they can expect about 29 Super Posters, 265 Contributors & 2650 Lurkers to see their request for a review. Seeing a request requires someone to be sent the email (in this case, opted into marketing) + open the email.

If Nuenew receives fewer than 29 reviews, something is probably broken somewhere in their review submission process. Not even the Super Posters are leaving a review. If they get more than 294 reviews they should be ecstatic. That would mean 100% of the Super Posters & Contributors submitted a review & they got some of the Lurkers as well.

Want to try with your data? Grab this template here.

In future posts, we’ll be trying to understand how to improve your submission rate using the 1 / 9 / 90 framework with things like the following:

• How to get more marketing opt-ins
• How to get better open rates on your emails
• How to get more people to leave reviews outside of email: https://junip.co/blog/7-unique-ways-to-ask-customers-to-leave-a-review-with-junip/
• How to make sure Super Posters submit more reviews
• How to get Contributors to submit reviews for your products
• How to get Lurkers to submit reviews (and is it worth trying)