“Good words are worth much, and cost little.”

Those are the thoughts of 17th Century Welsh poet George Herbert, and undoubtedly the thoughts of our client for this week’s installment of Website Testing Wins.

While Herbert was probably talking about the worth of words in a poetic context, an IR 500 apparel retailer found the small change in wording can lead to improved conversion.

Originally, the retailer had listed women’s dresses in their website navigation using the term “silhouette.” It’s standard fashion industry lingo, but was it the right word that would help shoppers locate the type of dresses they wanted? To find out, the retailer decided to test the word “style” against “silhouette.”

The result? The version of the website that used “style” saw a 1.2% lift in conversion, a good response to a test that’s not going after low-hanging fruit.

The best part of this test is the word literally cost them nothing. All they needed was the intellectual capital to come up with this idea and minimal effort to execute the test.