Adding seals and badges to your e-commerce or lead generation site can provide an instant boost in conversion rate.  In this post, we’ll take a look at a few of the most common, highlighting a site that uses each one.  As always, it is important to test whether these help or not for your given site- and to determine if they give you a ROI.

Equally important to testing the presence of seals, is to test where you position them on the page.  In most of the examples below, the seal appears below the footer- which is possibly the worst place on the page if you actually want people to see it. These site owners would be smart to try moving the seals around, and in particular- put them near the call to action or checkout buttons.

1. Sitepal Talking Character – http://www.sitepal.com/

What it does:

SitePal is an easy-to-use and affordable speaking avatar solution that enables small businesses to enhance their web presence and improve business results with virtual speaking characters. With its ability to engage site visitors and reinforce a call to action, SitePal has been proven to increase site traffic, conversions, loyalty and sales.

2. McCafee Secure Site Seal – http://www.mcafeesecure.com/

What it does:

The McAfee Secure™ trustmark appears on more than 80,000 websites worldwide. Certified McAfee SECURE sites include some of the largest brands in retail ecommerce and brick and mortar retailing; as well as financial and non-profit institutions, manufacturers, universities, Fortune 500 corporations, and government agencies.

McAfee Secure certification is achieved by passing rigorous daily network security audits. The certification process is completed in six steps. The first three steps are the vulnerability audit itself; comprised of Dynamic Port Scanning, Port-level Network Services Vulnerability Testing, and Web Application Vulnerability Testing. The fourth and fifth steps are alerts whenever vulnerabilities are detected and remediation management using our extensive vulnerability management portal. The result is highly effective, pro-active security.

3. ControlScan Seal – http://www.controlscan.com

What it does:

ControlScan is an PCI compliance and security solutions company dedicated to understanding and meeting the needs of smaller merchants.  Controlscan provide several different security seal products, including their “Verified Secure” and “GeoTrust” seal.

4. BBB Seal – http://www.bbbonline.org

What it does:

BBBOnLine’s mission is to promote trust and confidence on the Internet. BBBOnLine allows businesses with Web sites to display the BBB Accredited Business seal online following confirmation of their adherence to the BBB Code of Business Practices, including its online standard.

5. Verisign Secure Seal – http://www.verisign.com

What it does:

VeriSign is the leading Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate Authority enabling secure e-commerce, communications, and interactions for Web sites, intranets, and extranets.  The VeriSign Secured Seal is part of the VeriSign® SSL Service. SSL helps you deliver a secure and convenient way for your customers to interact with you over the Internet. When you display the VeriSign Secured Seal, your customers will recognize the most trusted security mark on the Internet and gain the confidence to complete their transactions with you.

6.  Liveperson Chat - http://www.liveperson.com

What it does:

LivePerson humanizes the online experience, increasing sales, customer satisfaction and loyalty. More than 7,000 companies, including some of the largest and most-recognized global brands, use LivePerson’s real-time chat platform to communicate and build relationships with their customers on the Web.

7. Green Certified Site – http://www.co2stats.com/

What it does:

People want websites they visit to be eco-friendly.  CO2Stats helps you attract and retain those visitors.  CO2Stats is the only service that automatically calculates your website’s total energy consumption, helps to make it more energy efficient, and then purchases audited renewable energy from wind and solar farms to neutralize its carbon footprint.  CO2Stats is easy to set up, and works with your existing web host!

8.  Truste – http://www.truste.com

What it does:

Build trust and drive revenue with TRUSTe programs and services. Displaying the TRUSTe seal demonstrates that your site complies with our privacy best practices. Sign up and let consumers know they can trust you more than other businesses when it comes to online privacy and trust.

9.  BillMeLater – http://www.billmelater.com

What it does:

Bill Me Later is a convenient and secure way to pay on the web or over the phone. Bill Me Later lets users pay without using a credit card. At checkout, provide your birthday and the last four digits of your social security number, accept the terms and your purchase is complete. It’s that easy! There are no codes to find or account numbers to remember.

If you are selling a complex business to business product or looking to increase considered B2C sales, a “next steps” widget is a great way to reach across the sales cycle and offer something for people at any stage.  The goal of the “Next Steps” widget is to give users a road map of options, typically from least commiting to most.  This could be things like signing up for a newsletter, requesting a white paper, or even asking for a call back from a sales person.  Sometimes you can even ask people to sign up online.

To illustrate my points, I decided to take a quick tour and grab a couple examples from around the web:

Search marketing software company Acquisio uses the following unit to make users aware of different options available to them.  Although they have done a fine job, I can’t help but wonder if asking for a trial first isn’t putting the cart before the horse.  For me, I would probably want to look at the demo and case studies before signing up for the trial.  This is definitely worth testing.

Acquisio.com

Customer Relationship SAAS vendor Salesforce.com uses the following widget to promote three possible actions:

Salesforce.com

Their ordering makes a little more sense- starting with the demo, followed by a contact request.  If you are not ready for either of these things, you can always take the non committing option- to view the resources on the site.

These widgets work well for B2B companies, but can also cross the boundary and appear on B2C websites.  Here is an example from Cruise ship line Carnival:

Carnival.com

It is a little different, instead of focusing on next “steps” the unit simply is giving a couple options to get started.  I think it would be smart for Carnival to also have a “request information” option, where people could sign up to get a booklet in the mail.

It is important to present options for differing levels of interest- from information gatherers, to those on final approach to completing a purchase.  You would be well advised to test what you include, what the thing looks like, and the order different steps are presented.  Here is a mini overview of possible test options for a “next steps” widget:

• Size
• Look and Feel
• Title (ie “Next Steps” or “What to do Next”
• Number of Options
• Ordering of Options
• Colors
• Placement on your pages

It’s been quite a while since I last posted any testing ideas. The funny thing is that I went in and edited one of my old posts, and now the “improved” Blogger application thinks it’s a new post

Hence… I decided to write a real new post this morning. Coming up with ideas to test can be difficult, particularly if you have already done quite a bit of optimization work on your pages. But have you ever considered finding a few key phrases in your sales copy, and applying a yellow highlighter like background to them?

This can be a real eye grabber and can really improve response in some circumstances. Most times we’ve tested it, it works well.

The key is to identify the main value propositions in your copy and apply a highlighter type style to them. Use something like this in your external style sheet to create the above effect:

.highlighter {
background-color: yellow;
}

Remember, your mileage may vary, so always test this with either a split test or multivariate test to confirm that it actually helps.

Warm Regards,

Scott Miller, CEO

Author of “The ConversionLab.com,” The worlds first “How to” guide to testing and optimization. Visit http://www.conversionlab.com/ for a special offer!

Bob Bly had an interest post to his blog, reporting that the best headlines may no longer involve strong benefits. Since we strongly advocate the importance of testing headlines, this should definetly be food for thought.