Module 1, Lesson 4: Designing beautiful social proof widgets

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Course content (19 lessons)

This lesson will go over the importance of branding and consistency when it comes to displaying your social proof and reviews. We’ll cover exactly how you can ask your customers for high-quality reviews and what you should consider before posting widgets to your site.

Everything has to be on brand when showing your social proof. You want to make sure that your reviews and social proof widgets don't, for a better word, look ugly on your site. Because that's going to turn your visitors off, and it's going to make your brand very inconsistent. So that means simple things like changing the star colors or avoiding hideous grid-style photo reviews that look the same on every site.
You want to make sure that you are differentiating yourself from your competitors. Make sure that your brand shines through when you're showing your reviews and other social proof. Because brand consistency is going to help you gain customer trust. Staying on brand also matters when you're approving or declining reviews that your customer sent. You want to make sure that you ask your customers to resubmit reviews that are of poor quality.
And poor quality can mean from bad lighting to bad sound in the video or horrendous spelling and grammar. Posting these types of reviews can reflect poorly on your brand, and you don't want that to happen. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't post reviews that you don't like or decline negative reviews. What I'm saying is that if you're incentivizing a customer for a video, so for example, if you are offering them $10 for a video, you want to make sure that it's going to be a high-quality video.
And the other thing is that your shoppers are not going to trust reviews that are riddled with spelling mistakes. It makes the customer seem untrustworthy and, by extension, your brand untrustworthy.

Make sure that you have branding guidelines in place like color consistency and image style before you start adding social proof widgets to your store. If you don’t have a branding guideline, start making one now!

Check out this Shopify post on how to build a great brand.

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Module 1, Lesson 4: Designing beautiful social proof widgets

Course content (19 lessons)

Module 1: How to show social proof on your site

01 |Module 2: How to show social proof off your site

02 |Module 3: Growing your reviews & social proof

03 |Module 4: Using social proof in your social media

04 |Module 5: The tools you’ll need

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