One option is to create "vanity urls" that we expect people to remember and then type correctly, never mind just googling (or Binging?) the company and campaign key words.  The result is that many successful outcomes will end up being attributed to Mr Google simly because people can't be bothered to type things into address bars any more! If you want a comprehensive run-down of all the multi-channel tracking options then Avinash Kaushik has several posts that cover it admirably.

Here are a couple of examples from the world of retail.  

One quick (old and quaint?) way is to simply stick up a poster and ask people to email somebody.  It ticks most of the registration boxes...its quick, uses universally accessed media and has a simple "value exchange".  You could have different email addresses for regions of retailers, or for different incentives and there is no marginal cost of acquiring a new contact. Its easy to measure the success of these tactics and develop better versions over time. Maybe texting in your email address to a short-code number could tap into a medium that people may hold in their pocket/handbags rather than relying on people jotting down an email address on a scrap of paper and finding it when they got home.

However, Facebook has muscled it's way onto my High Street (Reigate, Surrey, England) with an altogether more robust proposition.  A clothes retailer has created a Facebook group (free, takes 10 minutes), has built a simple value proposition (20% off if you join our group), and now has the chance to push people back in store AND develop a longer term relationship.  In these difficult recessionary times I applaud any retailer who is brave and smart enough to look at exploiting a multi-channel relationship. And with the lovely people at Facebook still blasting out emails to your group members for free, its a pretty cost-efficient way to beat the credit-crunch.  

It's not getting any easier or cheaper to drive traffic to your site and so you need to be working hard at making them register when they arrive.  It's then much cheaper to draw them back through the RSS/email route, so building a "prospect database" is critical.   Now with a pool of prospects you can use email and RSS (or phone or direct mail?) to convert them.  All you have to do is work out how to convince people to register and every day you will harvest a list of red-hot leads! So let's look at the business case for building the best possible registration process on your site in more detail...   

Registration and Acquisition

In an earlier post I looked at how the really smart companies are working hard on getting expensive new site visitors to part with some personal data, giving you another chance to market to them.   If I'm paying a dollar a click and 1 person in a 100 converts that's costing me 100 dollars a customer.  If I can get 20 of them to register and through follow-up emails get 2 more of them to convert I've made 3 sales at 33 dollars a customer.  No contact details, no control, no more sales...unless you're really lucky and they come back by themselves.  Too risky!

Registration and Retention

I've written plenty recently about the need to stay close to your customers in the bad times and how valuable email marketing can be...even generating the best sales day in one company's history.    Suffice to say, DONE WELL, email has the capability of getting you new clicks, leads or sales for a fraction of the cost of "traditional" sales routes.  Put simply, if I needed to generate 1 more sale to stay afloat today I could pay 100 dollars to Google (see above);  but wouldn't life be better if I could email "abandoned "Product X" shopping carts " or "people who clicked on the "Product X" link in an email", or "people who opened but did not click on the product X special offer" email, or even mail people who "bought Product Y because it goes well with Product X".  Cost of mailing 100 people?  One tenth of a cent.  Cost per sale with a 1% response rate? One tenth of a cent.     

Get it right! 

I have spent the past 20 years of my life getting terribly excited about databases.  I now feel it is time to share what I have learned so that more companies will make it through 2009...it's that powerful!  So, as my "Magnum Opus", I will use the next 2 posts to share the best web registration techniques I have seen. We'll pick off "The Business Case for Registration" now and then move on to the finer skills of "Visibility; Value; Ease" later.  So before we start knocking up web forms we have a few BIG battles to fight internally

Do the Math...

Trouble is, a registration form is seen by many people as a big fat waste of prime web site real estate.  That means you need to work out the VALUE OF AN EMAIL ADDRESS or a REGISTERED SITE VISITOR in order to convince people to get the registration form on the best part of the high traffic pages. 

Value is a function of cost savings and increased revenue.  A UK high street bank put the value of an email address at well over £200:  Imagine over a 5 year lifecycle being able to "turn off" paper statements and direct mail in exchange for electronic communications...that would be about 20 mail campaigns a year at about 50 pence a pack...£10 a year and £50 over 5 years.  Then factor in the ability to cross or up-sell one product, maybe based on triggers from web content viewed, or speedy executions of topical campaigns...a single £50 up-sell every other year and BINGO...an email relationship is worth £200.  I can think of no better use of a 200x200 plot of your web pages than building a registration device and earning £200 every time somebody converts.

Another way to look at VALUE is through the OPPORTUNITY COST.  If you did not have a registered site user to ping with a "we've got new content you like" message, how would you go and find another visitor?  Probably by paying for it.  But if you want page views, or daily visitors, isn't getting last week's visitor back for not much money better than paying lots for a new one this week?  So you could begin to model the revenue generated and traffic costs saved by, for example, getting 15% of last weeks visitors back through some RSS/Email pull technique. 

So, how much is an email address worth to you?  And how much would you pay for somebody to create a web profile, or sign up for RSS feeds from the site?  You can just do it on cost savings..less Ad Word clicks and affilaite PPC deals, less direct mail, less outbound telemarketing.  An electronic relationship is virtually free!  And then factor in all that ad revenue, or those incremantal sales just by drawing people back for fractions of a penny.  Once you have a basic fix on these you will be able to determine the right registration strategy.

Be Bold.  Be Brave.

I'd like to finish with what I think are the most exciting, amd maybe the most successful registration devices...roadblock registrations.  Some companies have done the math, had the big arguments with the "customer journey princess" and decided that everybody who comes to their site gets a great big, in your face, REGISTER NOW screen.

I love this one from Marketing Sherpa.  It is dripping with reasons to join, it is short to complete, and if you don't like it then you can just step on through.  But here's the business analysis...I recon they know the "value of an email address" and they will also know from their analytics the following key data:

• Total Roadblocks Served
• Total Email Adresses Gathered
• Total Roadblocks clicked through
• Total Bounces.

They could get even smarter from here, understanding what source gives the highest bounce rate (so we can choose not to serve to these people) and then allow more people through to the site where other registration devices will be lying in wait.

For instance, here is a lovely one from Trip Advisor.  They serve a registration page that is contextually relevant to the content you are looking at.  Not quite a roadblock, but not a passive bit of web real estate either.  Given the relevence and low-impact nature of the solicitation, this could be deployed successfully all over the site, reaping yet more registrations

So the conclusion here is that you cannot afford NOT to get good at registration.  You need to do some big sums to work out the value of these registrations and then you have the option of being really bold to make it happen, safe in the knowledge that everything can be monitored and amended.  Armed with the knowledge that you need to get good data gathering, my next post will break the experience down into the 3 critical "customer experience" components of visibility, value, and ease.  In the meantime, watch out for sites trying to seduce you into registering! 

Of course that statement comes with a raft of qualifications.  First up, I may not be there tomorrow (as I wasn't there yesterday), and I am not even there all the time today.  Maybe Google is giving everybody 15 minutes of search fame to keep us happy in these recessionary times, but in truth it is seeing whether people validate their search algorithm by clicking on my link.   Second, it has taken 4 years to navigate to the top of the page by following all the usual tips about key word density and consistency and linking and so on.  Thirdly, I built the site 4 years ago with a clunky design package and it's looking a dated site that doesn't render well in today's larger screen resolutions automatically, so my quality score will suffer as people click back to the search page.  And also, the "Description" meta tag I crafted is not being pulled from my clunky design and so I am not compelling enough to encourage more clicks.

Anyhow, for the moment I am up there with the Big Boys, looking down on the IDM, E-Consultancy, CIM and even the mighty Dave Chaffey!  But I won't be there for long. 

So in the meantime I have a new site ready to roll - I've been building it over the past few months and its got all the Web 2.0 bells and whistles every digital consulting Johnny needs..shiny buttons, drop shadows, acres of lovely white space.  Trouble is, once I switch to the new site I'm probably going to wave goodbye to my new found "Topagoogle" status.

Yes, the tech brigade say that it is easy to use the right re-directs to carry all the old stuff to the new, (here is Dave Chaffey's thoughts on the 301/303 debate), but I've just seen what has happened to E-consultancy...they launched their lovely new site a few weeks ago and have dropped out of the search rankings for key training phrases.  Two months ago e-consultancy was top for all digital training searches but the new site has let pip-squeaks like me into the rankings. 

So, in the immortal words of The Clash, "Should I stay or Should I go".  Stay, with a naff site, or go, and lose my "Top Banana" status? 

You'll know I went when I drop off the edge of the search cliff! 

But I should have known better.  Despite spending huge amounts of money on the shiny shiny new site most of the critical tasks that support car sales are still dreadful. Oh yes, the home page is fantastic - they must have spent a fortune on it. In these times of credit-crunchery I'd have thought it was time for Ford to get back to basics and make their site support processes that make the till ring - brochure requests and test drive appointments.  But oh dear, they seem to have forgotten to do that.

When I blogged about the aggregation of marginal gains last year (focus on doing 1000% things 1% better), I got this precient response from Avinash Kaushik.  He said:

This is a fantastic post!

Just yesterday I spoke to 2,400 people in the Auto industry and each and everyone of them was trying to move the ball by "1000%". Yet they have horrible landing pages for even the simplest of keyword searches and their paid search ads.

So there we have it.  Automotive marketers across the globe are spending bucketloads of money (they don't have) on the least important parts of their business process.  

So, just how bad can it be.  Let's pretend I want to get a brochure and, as I have owned 6 Fords in my life, we can assume my "reservoir of goodwill" (from Steve Krug )is filled to brimming as I approach the lovely new Ford site.

First up, what do we think of a home page that is 460K in weight?  To be fair, if the site is great then maybe you have to pack it with features, but this is a pretty big home page, according to the lovely web site optimisation site.  Here is the page size analysis for the shiny shiny new Ford site: 

And here is their report for the "Classic" Google homepage, perhaps the most successful page in web history:

So, the new Ford home page comes with a range of "health warnings" that are probably quick and easy to fix for a speedier (and maybe better) customer experience, again from web site optimisation  

• Warning! The total number of objects on this page is 132 which by their number will dominate web page delay. Consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Above 20 objects per page the overhead from dealing with the actual objects (description time and wait time) accounts for more than 80% of whole page latency
• Warning! The total number of images on this page is 115, consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Recommend combining, replacing, and optimizing your graphics.
• Warning! The total size of this page is 466330 bytes, which will load in 119.34 seconds on a 56Kbps modem. Consider reducing total page size to less than 100K to achieve sub 20 second response times on 56K connections.
• Warning! The total number of external script files on this page is 9, consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Ideally you should have one (or even embed scripts for high-traffic pages) on your pages. 

But anyway, lets say that the page loads and I'm keen to press on with my brochure request.  The navigation has been tucked down in the bottom left hand corner but with a bold heart I click on the right link and come to a REALLY important page.  OK, it's had a lick of paint in the up-date but the page looks awkward, dull and out of keeping with the home page.  It's a few check boxes - where's the passion, the dream of owning a new car - Volkswagen show you pictures of cars - how nice is that?!

Worst of all Ford insists on restricting it's "soon to be customers" to only 2 brochure requests.  Given that the Ford car portfolio often has 3 or 4 cars that overlap a persons needs this has to be a mindless barrier to purchase.  Not only that, we now come face to face with the 1 million pound error message (follow the link to my prevoius post with all the maths) 

So, there we have it - site with a fantastic new home page and vritually no money invested in the key checkout processes that turn visitors into prospects.

So to Avinash's "horrible landing pages for even the simplest of keyword searches and their paid search ads" we can now add "horrible check-out processes".  With customers so thin on the ground shouldn't we all be trying to convert the faintest of nibbles on our site into qualified leads?

Value Proposition:  

A long, awkward sentence that demonstrates management's inability to think clearly

Looking around the UK marketplace it seems retailers are falling back on slashed prices as their only proposition as they try and soak up the small amounts of cash in circulation.  Sorry to be banging on about retailers right now but they seem to be throwing up a rich seam of email marketing experiences - some good, some bad.

It worked when Howies did it in an "out of character way"...their 20% proposition was a surprise because this is not what they normally do.

Great Little Trading company just sound a little bit desperate and in too much of a me-too way, (In My Humble Opinion)...  

Boden are not shy in leading on price...all their on-line propostitions start with at least 10% off.  However, last week Boden showed a glimpse of quick thinking and quick actions to mask the recent reduction in Value Added Tax from 17.5% to 15%.  It's done with a light touch and a patriotic heart... 

So maybe the companies that will survive will be those most able to respond to opportunities, as we have seen this week with the Howies case study.  Aside from the "biggest single day in Howies history" quote I want to share something else with you.  Our man at Howies also said to me... 

So yeah, it went really well.. and I think the success made us realise we have to be a lot smarter and a lot faster about marketing in the future. Especially in the current climate.

Meanwhile I was chatting to another retailer, this time a big traditional retailer, about being quick off the mark.  He wanted them to go with an email campaign the other day -  a swift, tactical response to market conditions.  But no, it was all too much for them.  (Reminded me when I asked a UK high street bank team how fast they could get an email out the door...the response was "6 weeks")  Howies said in their email to their customers...

We didn't need a board meeting, we didn't need to get the idea signed off by loads of departments. We didn't even have to get the calculator out. We just decided whilst we were walking over the bridge to work. 

Maybe that's the difference between success and failure.  Not just having the ideas, but having the process efficiency and corporate mindset to "just do it".  So the challenge for 2009 is to create a way of working that allows you to dream up great propositions and also execute them swiftly.  And in the next post I'll outline 10 ways to speed up the time taken from "thinking" to "doing"...which may just keep your company afloat in 2009!

I emailed a link to my blog to the lovely people at Howies asking them if they could share any feedback on the success of their email.  Without giving away too many trade secrets here is what their marketing man, Ruben said...

We literally made the decision to go to sale on the Thursday morning, and by Friday lunchtime, it looked like we were on for the biggest single day in Howies history!

Way to go, Howies.

And if you really want to know, this is the jumper I bought that helped make a little bit of retail history in Cardigan Bay.

• Know what your customers are thinking – tap into forums, send them surveys and make sure you are in touch...are they deferring all spending plans for 6 months or just until Christmas.
• Remind people that you won’t be going bust – if it’s true.  Whilst other suppliers are engaged in ever-more desperate measures to get sales, maintain your dignity.
• Focus on existing customers – if they have loved you in the good times they may well be prepared to love you through the bad times. 

Interestingly, earlier today I dipped into an article from Lyris entitled “In this economy, its survival of the fastest”.  Here’s a thought from them:

“Don't assume the plan you created in September is still relevant. It isn't. Right now, any survey on future purchasing intentions that's more than a week old is probably obsolete.”

Now what is spooky about all this is that as John was speaking I received an email from Howies a company I have bought from before, that seemed to echo all the things he and Lyris were telling us we're supposed to do.  As a result I spent £50 with them 10 minutes later so maybe I should share the email they sent...talk about precient! (here’s the email on-line) 

So, there is an email marketer who got my £50 in a recession by being relevant, engaging and timely. Let's hope they thrive in a recession - as well as Screwfix.  And just as a compliment to John at Screwfix, here is a screenshot of a fantastic "persuasion device" he's put on their home-page...an offer with a countdown clock!  Who said we can't be a little bit cheezy as well in a recession if it makes the till ring? 

Some companies are recognising that they are wasting money on driving traffic just to harvest a small percentage of sales:  There are probably a lot of non-customers who will soon be customers, but sadly with your competitors because you can't get back in touch with them.  Avinash Kaushik in his excellent blog illustrates this with his usual elegent simplicity...

This suggests that as people move around your site they are seduced by your marketing and may gradually become tempted to convert.  But quite often there is no chance for people to register their interest and you cannot re-market to them. No email address means no future contact that you can initiate and there's nothing you can do.  What a waste.  How frustrating

That therefore means that we have a chance to introduce a second tier into our conversion programme, taking some of the non-converted customers and working hard at getting them to part with some personal data.  I've taken the liberty of amending Avinash's diagram to explain this.  It is not unrealistic to expect 5% or even 10% of your most qualified prospects to want to enter a permission-based email marketing programme.

Without this view we only have one way to convert visitors, so let's pretend we are looking at people who have arrived at our site via a premium search term.  Your only way to value them is via conversion rate...

All your acquisition marketing is invested into the “converted” visitors and they carry a hefty £16.70 cost per sale.  However, what if we could work really hard on converting some “suspects” into “prospects” so we can build a file to re-market to...

Now, let’s be realistic and assume that in the next week we can convert 20% through a follow-up email (or better still an email programme).  Now we can pick up sales for peanuts...

So, factoring in the new sales through a follow-up programme into the overall campaign cost we have a really staggering conversion rate that is almost 40% less than...

If we can create a “value exchange” that gets 10% of interested visitors to part with an email address we can therefore increase sales and reduce cost per sale for a campaign. This means that you can probably afford to pay more per click and generate even more sales or make poor-performing media cost-justify.  And all it needs is a couple of days working on your registration strategy.

I will talk about this in more detail in my next blog but for now here are 3 really quick wins for kick-starting your registration programme, all relating to the visibility of the registration form

Be bold.

Quite often the registration is a sad forlorn box tucked beneath the fold of the home page.  Ironically, once people leave the homepage they are probably more engaged and would have been likely to register...had they been able to see the registration form. 

MarketingSherpa is using a cookie-based “Roadblock Registration” at present so that every single visitor will see their email registration.  It may scare a few people off but it may also dramatically increase conversion rates...test it yourself and see what impact it has. 

Be seen

One client I worked with recently only had a registration form on the home page.  By placing the form on 4 pages they generated 4 times more email addresses straight away.  It’s that easy.  Failing that, have it on the primary navigation so that it is visible on each page.  Once you understand the immense value of prospect registration you will probably give your form access to much more valuable web site “real estate” at the expense of other weaker content. 

Be relevant.

Working for the fashion brand Kangol a few years ago we worked hard on making the “value exchange” relevant to where people were on their site journey.  It was not hard and it made the experience more relevant and boosted registration rates by 10% for every page...  

• If you were on the “Find Nearest Store” page the copy was “Want to hear when new stores near you stock our products?  Sign up for our emails”. 
• If you were on the “Spotted wearing Kangol” pages the copy was “Be the first to know what Kangol stuff the stars are wearing – sign up for our emails.”  
•  If you were on the “Products” pages the copy was “Hear about new products as soon as they’re launched – sign up for our emails” 

So, think strategically about why you should gather “non-converted” prospect details and work hard on making the process as efficient as possible.  Next blog we’ll look at what the US market calls “reciprocity” but what we in the UK still refer to as “bribery”...what ”value exchange” will make prospects part with their valuable personal data. 

“Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.”

Oh dear.  His point is that the blogosphere, “once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge”.   The serendipity of googling a subject and finding independent writers with a genuine passion for a topic is now a distant memory, Boutin claims.  These days, if you “scroll down Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs and you'll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.”

In November’s .net magazine Jason Calacanis, the founder of human search engine Mahalo has..

“...recently quit blogging altogether.  When it started, it was a very authentic conversation and I think it’s now more about marketing, promotion and link-baiting”. 

So there.

And in the UK Hazel Blears, the Government’s Communities Minister had a pop at bloggers at a political conference the other evening:

"Until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair."

But can they all be right?  Is there still a place in our lives for blogs and why should some of us continue?  Here are a couple of reasons why they are wrong.

Firstly, blogs still represent a fantastic digital marketing tool.  There are the Search marketing benefits – lots of lovely, frequently-updated text that robots love to crawl, lots of interlinking so that sites share their “google-juice” and lots of honest keyword phrases that consumers use when posting reviews (and when searching for products and services).  Here’s what Seth Godin says in Meatball Sundae...

"Let me be superclear here:  A post on a blog anywhere in the world could very well rank higher in a Google search than information on the same topic on your company’s web site. Which means your point of view disappears and the point of view of some blogger comes across instead.”

But secondly I think that the positioning benefits of blogging are even more important.  On my digital marketing courses I love to goad people into considering why a corporate blog is a fantastic idea.  First thing is to ask people if they have access to blogs at work – many people have their links to the blogosphere surgically removed by their weasely IT and HR teams...how un-trusting is that?!  Next up I show them blogs.sun.com and that great tag-line

Once they’ve picked themselves up off the floor and wiped the tears of laughter from their eyes, we try and dissect why this is such a brilliant positioning technique:  What words spring to mind about Sun’s corporate ethos?  “Mad” and “Reckless” soon gives way to “Transparent”, “honest”, “trusting” and “credible”...the kind of sentiment marketers cannot buy.  

The same is true for the housing charity Shelter’s blog from their CEO – it is not there to make you set up a direct debit and donate, it is there to show that Shelter is an organisation committed to fighting homelessness and Adam Samson’s blog talks about the work he does with the media, with the legal profession and with local and central Government.  It gives Shelter a brand position and a strong voice in a crowded marketplace.  Not bad for a blog.   

The other day I was trying to develop a “media displacement” model to justify blogs; if we all have the same amount of waking hours to consume news as a few years ago, what is it that would get thrown overboard to make way for reading a blog and the answer could well be, in a business context “trade magazine articles”.  I attempt to munch my way through Marketing, Marketing Week, Precision Marketing, New Media Age every week and also dip into monthly magazines like Marketing Direct and Revolution.  Yet a lot of the stuff is already several days out of date, some of it is not relevant to me and a lot of it is certainly not “best of breed” digital thinking. 

So ignore some 24 year old trade rag journalist trying to find an angle on a search news story and head for some of the great Search blogs out there for the really valuable content (look no further than Matts Cutts for SEO).  And for web analytics we should all be subscribed to Avinash Kaushik’s excellent blog that is better than any month old magazine article. 

So there is still a place for serendipitous search that yields a rich vein of independent thinking in digital marketing...despite what uber-cool Wired journalists think. And if anybody is reading this, I rest my case. 

It doesn’t take much to tip rational people (like me) into making emotional decisions.  One word did it for me the other day.  Walking past an optician’s shop I noticed (when I was close enough) a sign saying “Appointments Available Today”.   What was it about the word “today” that injected pace, excitement and a positive response from me?  Five letters on a sign and I’m a customer.  “KERCHING”.

I deeply enjoyed reading Brian and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results book and love the passion with which they talk about “persuasion architecture”.  It’s the little things that can make a huge impact on a customer journey, they say, and come up with countless strategies for improving web page successful outcomes.   In an earlier blog I talked about the value of short, succinct copy in digital marketing.  I also blogged about the “Aggregation of Marginal Gains” and how lots of little improvements can end up with one whacking great big business win.  So, armed with these 2 pearls of wisdom I have been impressed with a few little touches from our friends at the world’s favourite airline. So let’s fly.  “Cabin Crew, doors to automatic and cross-check...”

Recently the British Airways site has improved, although there are still a few painful moments as I’ll share in a minute.  However, it’s the small things they have been doing that I like (and fall for).   On a recent trip to Helsinki I was checking in on-line and up popped an up-sell.  “Upgrade this flight for £138.50” they enthused.  So I did.  “KERCHING” went the BA cash register.  How easy was that?  It goes to show that if you don’t ask, you don’t get.  Can’t we all learn to adapt that simple technique to increase average-order value?

Not only that, I loved the way that they took me to a page with the “riff-raff” fare crossed out and “Club Europe” now proudly displayed as if to confirm my new-found social status.  It’s not often that we get to play with “strike-through” fonts but this time it persuaded me that my action was a wise one. “Hello” Executive Lounge and “Goodbye” Post-Purchase Dissonance.

Later that day I had to book another flight and I was seduced again by the BA Persuasion Team.  Just recently they have unleashed into the booking process every salesman’s 3 greatest friends – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.   Looking at my fare options I was persuaded to take a positive action and generate a successful outcome for BA.  All because of 64 characters...

The word that hurt the most?  “Disappointment”.   How would I live with myself if I let this golden opportunity slip through my fingers, I wept.  ”KERCHING”

So, BA recognises the value of using every single character to their advantage and I’ve been taken for almost £400 as a result... not bad for a day’s work in the persuasion architecture team.  But there are 5 characters they still use to humiliate me.  Sometimes in my breathless haste to book a flight I miss one of their mandatory check boxes.  No chance of an “Ooops” Message or a “Sorry something didn’t quite work out there” Message, or even a “we sneaked an extra tick box that you missed” Message.  Nope.  It’s an “Error” message.  And of course it’s in red font just to ram the point home.  With an exclamation mark!   Might be enough to put me off one day, just as the 5 characters in “Today” made me become a customer for another company.   Maybe not quite as appalling as Ford's £1 million Error Message but it makes you think about every single letter, doesn’t it?

As a post-script to this blog I just came across another use of strikethrough font - the hugely impressive Avinash Kaushik used it at the end of his latest blog to display to everybody that a great offer (to upgrade to Clib Class Google Analytics) was at an end.  Oh Woe those who dithered - the offer is crossed uot before your eyes...take action next time it presents itself or you too will be disappointed.