How to get in touch with the users of your WP7 apps?

This is a problem that every deve开发者_如何学Cloper will face when building their apps: how to contact the reviewer of your app to notify them of an update, new release, help topics, etc?

Some things I am thinking:

1. Include an RSS feed in your app which you can update to notify the users of the app.
2. Include a twitter feed regarding your app. How to go about this?
3. Include a way for the users to subscribe to a mailing list. This way, I can send a mass-email to the users who opted-in? Any suggestions here?

Any other ways that you think this can/should be done? Any existing solutions you can point me to will be great. Thanks in advance.

One way, for contacting a specific user who created a review of an application is to go to Zune Social (at http://social.zune.net/home) and create a new message. You can then enter the Zune Tag of the user who created a review.

Personally, I'd try to do all three - have a web page/site, with an RSS feed, and a subscription link (so they can subscribe to the RSS feed via email) and then post any updates to your twitter account as well.

You can't really force a user to do any of these, but having the options available, and linked from inside your app on the about page is probably good practise.

You could also include some kind of "Update Available" feature inside the application. Try to make this as unobtrusive as possible obviously. Obviously if they've still got the app installed they'll get an update notification from the marketplace anyway.

Sam

Besides the suggestions made by samjudson, I'll also recommend having a support-page with a direct option to send a email to you. Here's a example of a support-page from one of my applications. I've received lot of emails with suggestions for improvements, or complains about bugs. And since it's by email, it gives you the option to respond directly to people.

Another thing about reviews. Don't take them to serious. Most people only rate negatively (since humans like to complain), and by such a lot of reviews are often misinformed, outdated, or the users just been plain ignorant.