The Importance of Udemy Courses Reviews – a quick reminder
Udemy courses with more reviews rank higher in the Udemy search results and are more likely to be promoted by Udemy. Reviews are what makes a Udemy course more believable especially for aspiring students that are still wary about Udemy. Udemy is becoming increasingly focused on reviews due to the sheer volume of courses and students on the platform.
Potential students look at Udemy course reviews to help inform their purchase decision. In general, courses with few or no reviews rank much lower and will attract little or no additional students. Positive reviews will encourage students to enrol in the course while negative feedback will turn away many potential students.
How many Udemy course reviews for your online course is enough? This is one question every Udemy instructor asks themselves. The answer is, you can never have enough reviews for your Udemy course. Positive reviews are an ever-moving target. Maximizing their impact requires constant effort if you want to grow your Udemy course sales.
A Udemy Reviews Checklist
Because maximizing your Udemy course reviews requires ongoing effort, we’ve created a checklist containing 10 tactics that you can use over time to ensure that you are doing all that you can to get the most positive Udemy reviews possible.
1. Publish a Quality Course
We’ve mentioned this countless times, but just in case it hasn’t sunk in: You will never get the reviews you need – not even with a free course and by giving away lots of free coupons – to be successful on Udemy if you are offering a poor quality course. A Udemy Online Course review is, of course, dependent on the experience of the student. So, if your reviews on Udemy are lacking or lacklustre, then that means that you should improve the quality of your course.
2. Ask For Reviews In Your Course
You can prime students in your introductory video with a “soft sell” by nicely asking them to leave a review at the end and thanking them in advance for doing so. Mention also that it is easy to leave a Udemy Course review.
Udemy will then ask for a review about 10-12 minutes into your course. Not all students will review your course at this time. So it makes sense towards the end of your course to make a polite plea for feedback in the form of a review so that you can improve the course.
This now brings us to the next item on the
3. Answer Student Questions And Provide Real And Proactive Support
If your course is free or you are not making big sales, it can feel unrewarding to spend yet more time on it in the form of answering questions, reaching out to students and such. But if you are unwilling to do this actively and often, then you should reconsider why you created a Udemy course in the first place and if you are serious about building an online teaching business. Just like with a regular business, it takes a lot of time, patience and effort before your Udemy course takes off.
Reach out to students with added assistance in the form of links, helpful content or suggestions, ask them if you can help them progress in the course or their learning goals. Respond to questions promptly and clearly and when you do, offer more help in the future. This creates a connection to you personally as an instructor and helps to build your brand as well. Aside from the Udemy Courses Reviews, there will also be Udemy Instructor Reviews that will be pouring in.
4. Track and Manage student course completions
This is a critical component to getting quality Udemy Courses Reviews. And yes, it takes some work, because you will have to monitor student progress via your dashboard, check to see if they have left a review, and send direct messages to each student. That can be daunting if you have hundreds who have not completed your course – but what’s the alternative? A good formula would be to contact each student and:
- Congratulate them on progress (if they have made any), or, ask them why they have not made any progress and offer help
- Offer to answer questions, provide assistance in completing the course, and encourage feedback
- Encourage them to complete the course and leave a review
Then don’t forget to reply to any responses, be it a statement of thanks or questions! This makes your students think that you care for them.
5. Keep track of students who leave good reviews and ratings
You can export your Udemy course reviews from the instructor dashboard and then sort them by names and review count. Make a note of which students have left good and/or a lot of reviews and be sure to try and engage with them when possible and put them on your promotions lists.
6. Send out educational announcements
On Udemy you are allowed to send out four educational announcements per month. We don’t suggest that you send out four requests for reviews every month (that’s not allowed by Udemy Reviews policy anyway), but you can use this tool here and there.
While you can’t broadcast blatant requests for reviews in educational announcements, you can incorporate a soft request for reviews with other information about your course, course topic, additional course resources or an upcoming course, etc. Many students will feel more amenable to leaving a review once you’ve established a rapport with them.
The simple act of sending announcements with genuine content will remind people of your course and perhaps encourage completion and reviews.
For more information on how you can use educational announcements on Udemy, click here.
7. Ask friends, family and colleagues to review your course
This is a tactic often thought of at the time of course launching, but it can also be a way to get more Udemy reviews over time, for instance, when you have a lull in enrollments and reviews. Send a free coupon to your inner circle, and/or ask for genuine feedback from people in your industry by asking them to take your course and review it. A Udemy Course review from a well-known professional of the field will also have an impact.
Reach out to your LinkedIn connections and Facebook groups. Just keep requests respectable and avoid spamming people. This often leads to negative Udemy Instructor Reviews
8. Manage poor Udemy reviews
One school of thought about poor Udemy Courses reviews is to not respond or engage with the reviewer. On Udemy, it is generally better to address poor reviews in some way, if anything, to ask how you can improve your course. Instead of viewing poor course reviews as criticism, taking them personally and shedding a few tears over them, take the feedback onboard.
It’s always a good idea to contact the reviewer directly, apologize for their poor experience, ask what they were unhappy about, and see if you can do something to honestly improve their review. If they are responsive, you can also ask for suggestions as to what you can do better. Wish them well.
In the end, if you get the student to change their review from a 2 star to a 3 star it is worth it. DO NOT BEG OR ASK THEM TO IMPROVE THEIR REVIEW OUTRIGHT.
Some questions to ask yourself after a bad review…
For good measure, and in case your bad reviewers are non-responsive, here are some questions you should be asking yourself when you get a poor Udemy review:
- Is your course living up to student’s expectations?
- Are you overpromising and underdelivering?
- Are you delivering something slightly different
to your course description? - Have you presented a course for one level, but it teaches to another?
- Have you left out content that is relevant to your promise of learning?
- Is the structure confusing?
- Are parts of your course boring?
- Does it have technical issues such as broken links and spotty audio?
- Does your course require knowledge or skills that your students don’t have?
- And so forth..
9. Watch out for fake Udemy reviewers or self-promoters
Occasionally, someone will leave a 5-star Udemy Course Review (i.e. a competitor) in order to promote their own business by leaving links, marketing messages, etc. You should ask Udemy to remove these reviews because it makes it look as if you are getting fake reviews.
10. Create a course series
This is an oft-overlooked tactic because it requires long term planning. But once you have a captive audience in your course niche, offering a second or third course is bound to engage many of your students. By buying into your particular course series, they are more apt to finish the courses and leave meaningful and honest reviews which will help greatly to boost ratings and rankings.
Need more information on the Udemy Reviews process? Here is the link to Udemy’s Review policies.
