They may be poorly written and totally implausible, but they hold a valuable bit of wisdom
I am a firm believer that you can learn something from everyone you interact with. It’s easy for us to learn from well-known geniuses and successful folks in the public eye.
But what about email spammers? What — if anything — can we learn from them? As it happens, those error-riddled, poorly translated emails can actually teach us an important lesson about deciding how and where to spend your time and effort.
The “Nigerian Prince”
Anyone reading this is probably familiar with the “Nigerian Prince” email scam. You get an email from someone claiming to be a prince or government official of some kind in an African country — like Nigeria.
The emailer insists that some wealthy person has passed away and that you have been selected to help transfer the money out of the country. For that service, you’ll get a sizable fee. All the person needs is some of your private information: bank account number, social security number, etc. Or they need you to send some money upfront to cover fees, and they will transfer a decent sum of money to you.
To many of us, it sounds like there’s no way that these scams could work, and yet they do — all the time. What’s more interesting is that, if you’ve ever received one of these emails in an English-speaking country, you have likely noticed that the emails prominently feature glaring spelling and grammar errors — not mere typos, but just plain poor writing in general. There’s simply no way a government official in charge of all this money is going to send an email like this.
But that’s the genius of these things. That poor writing and almost obvious implausibility — that’s the cornerstone of the whole plan. And it can teach us about how we in the content game should write for an audience.
The Benefits of the Blatant
Most of us who see these emails disregard them almost immediately. We just know from looking at it for a second that it’s bogus. As I said, the emails are terribly written.
So why don’t these scammers spend more time writing the emails in a way to make them look more professional? I mean, if the goal is to rope in as many folks as possible, shouldn’t you spend time making emails that are more convincing, and less likely to be deleted?
Not quite.
Here’s the thing: those “errors” — the terrible spelling and grammar — are actually done on purpose. And that is exactly the genius of them. The scammers aren’t interested in wide appeal. They don’t want people who are hard to convince — because those people would not make good customers.
As Libby Kane writes in a piece on Business Insider, Microsoft computer scientist Cormac Herley did some interesting research on this. The egregious errors that seem to ruin the scammers’ credibility with most people are actually a key part of the profitability of the scam:
…it’s in the scammers’ best interest to minimize the number of false positives who cost them effort but never send them cash. By sending an initial email that’s obvious in its shortcomings, the scammers are isolating the most gullible targets. If you trash their email, that’s fine. They don’t want you, someone from whom there’s virtually no chance of receiving any money. They want people who, faced with a ridiculous email, still don’t recognise its illegitimacy.
As Herley tells the book’s authors, “Anybody who doesn’t fall off their chair laughing is exactly who they want to talk to.”
Spam and phishing exercises purposely have spelling and grammar errors so that they don’t end up hooking fishes who are anything but gullible. By doing that, they eliminate nearly all of the most wasteful work that they’d have to do trying to lure in people who would require the most coaxing.
By sending terribly written, implausible emails, these “Nigerian princes” send a signal that clearly shows the people who are not their core audience: “this is not for you — go ahead and delete it.”
What this Strategy Can Teach Legitimate Marketers
This “Nigerian prince” strategy can be used in reverse for marketing and audience creation in general. Understand that there are people who are willing to get on board, and there are others who will — even after initially hopping on board — bee looking for reasons to jump off. Sure, it may feel great to get a whole lot of followers quickly, after a viral something-or-other. But most of those people jump off pretty quickly.
The real trick is to telegraph something about your product or service that makes it clear who your ideal client would be, but more importantly, who your ideal clients wouldn’t be. If you’re about to say but, EVERYONE is my ideal client! — that’s actually a big part of the problem.
Not Everyone is a Potential Customer
You shouldn’t want everyone to become your customer. That is not sustainable, nor is it (after all the work it takes) profitable. To try to appeal to everyone is a poor investment of your time.
There will always be a group of people that will require more work to retain that is worth it. Save yourself the costs of on-boarding them and keeping them by preventing them from buying in the first place. The idea that these Nigerian prince scammers use — sending “filtering-out” signals — is a great way to do that.
But what does this come down to when you’re not a scammer — when you’re selling a legitimate product or service? I think it might boil down to two things:
- Practice honesty and transparency about what you’re doing, and more so, what you’re NOT doing.
- Simplicity — a simple, non-wordy message about what your thing and brand are all about (and again, what you’re NOT about).
Doing those two things is NOT easy. The words you use, the designs you use, and where those things are published are all part of proper conveyance of your message — and properly vetting potential customers. But I think that focusing on those two things can help you to be more efficient in reaching the kind of customers that will really want want you offer — rather than ones who continually demand something they thought they were getting, but that you never really offered.