A tip for online retailers out there:
If you want to increase sales on your e-commerce website, try adding a security trustmark in your site header — not just in your shopping cart but for the whole site. We tested it, and it works.
Not familiar with the term “security trustmark”? If you buy or sell anything online, you have certainly seen them. Trustmarks are those small icons that typically appear in online shopping carts to validate that the merchant uses the appropriate security to protect buyers’ private data.
The merchant pays a fee to the provider of these trustmarks, and in return the provider’s security bots check the site every day to make sure it is still secure and reliable. It’s an easy way to communicate to new buyers that your business is above board, professional, and safe to buy from.
We have used security badges in our shopping cart on www.paloalto.com for years. But a while back we wondered if displaying a trustmark on our regular product pages — before visitors have added anything to the cart — would have any effect.
So we tested it using Google’s free split-testing tool (Website Optimizer). Website Optimizer makes it easy to test different variations of a web page (or part of a web page) to see which one performs best. For this test, we did a simple test of our standard sitewide header against a variation that was identical except for the addition of a McAfee Secure trustmark.
Somewhere in their marketing materials (I can’t find the specific reference now), McAfee says that their tests have found that the inclusion of their trustmark can increase conversions by a modest but notable amount, somewhere in the single-digit percentages.
How did it do in our test? Better than that. The header variation with the trustmark did a whopping 23% better than the plain original version. That is a pretty incredible difference for what seems like a minor variation.
Hard to believe, isn’t it? Give it a test for yourself, and let us know how it does in the comments.
Josh Cochrane
Director of Online Marketing
Palo Alto Software
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t know what you mean by “put it in the header”. I think others might find this confusing as well. Do you have a page you can refer to show us have you’ve included it? Thanks.
Sure, Scott. Thanks for the question. It’s easy to slip into jargon; I should have provided an example.
If you look at our store site at http://www.paloalto.com, you can see specifically what we did. Rather than just appearing in the shopping cart view, the trustmark is included in the upper-right corner of every page.
Typically the header area of the site is built as a separate HTML file and then included automatically on the rest of the pages. That enables you to make header changes in a centralized place, rather than having to edit that content on every page.
It’s hard to predict what effect sitewide changes like this will have, and every site is different. We tested several header variations on Bplans.com recently, and none of them did as well as the original.
In this case, though, the variation with the trustmark did surprisingly well. It’s certainly worth putting on your list of ideas to test.
One additional note: if you are interested in website testing, a great resource is http://www.marketingexperiments.com.
Good luck!