violet blog 1 pic-1

Copywriting tricks: What does 99.9% actually mean?

Posted by Matthew Stibbe Picture of Matthew Stibbe on 30 March 2006
Matthew is founder and CEO of Articulate Marketing. Writer, marketer, pilot, wine enthusiast and geek. Not necessarily in that order. Never at the same time.

Saturn V RocketI read today in New Media Age that "unreliable and slow sites resulted in etailers losing £84m in the final three months of 2005." My web hosting company boasts that it has 99.9% server uptime. This means that they expect at least eight hours of downtime a year. Some clever copywriter made a deal with the marketing analytics devils there. That 0.01% has a real money cost.

In MoondustCopywriting tricks: What does 99.9% actually mean?, Andrew Smith's fascinating book about the moon missions, it says that the Saturn V rocket had six million parts, "meaning that, even with NASA's astounding 99.9 per cent reliability target, roughly 6,000 things could be expected to go wrong on a good flight."

There are two points here. First, impressive-sounding numbers are often not so impressive on closer examination. Nobody says "our servers fail for at least eight hours every year" because 99.9% uptime sounds better but they mean the same thing.

Second, this ambiguity is why genuine guarantees are so valuable in business writing. For example Symantec.cloud promises "100% protection from both known and unknown malware."

When it comes to e-commerce, space rockets and virus protection, there's a big difference between 100% and 99.9%.

New call-to-action

We recommend reading these articles, next...

A marketer’s take on ChatGPT and the applications of AI marketing

Discover the evolving world of AI and its applications in marketing. Explore the risks and...

5 ways to get your business blog in front of a rapt audience

5 ways to get your business blog in front of a rapt audience

From SEO best practices to sharing on social media, use these tips to attract a huge audience to...

7 expert tips for producing high-quality marketing content for business

7 expert tips for producing high-quality marketing content for business

Writing marketing content is easy, but writing high-quality marketing content is much more...