Have you ever received an email from a Nigerian prince, going somewhat as follows?
I’ve received a bunch of these over the years.
It’s a standard template. Someone in Nigeria or Congo or Dubai, is dying or is dead. They have several million dollars that they want you to help safekeep. They need you to make a small payment first for some ridiculous reason.
Would you fall for an email like this? Of course not. Come on, this is 2020! No one would fall for it.
But “Nigerian prince” email scams still rake in over USD 700,000 a year – and that’s from the US alone.
Well, you say, you didn’t mean no one. Of course there are some clueless people around. And 700K is not an astronomical sum.
In fact, if the scamsters could make their email even a little more plausible (a small business owner in the Mid West instead of a West African prince, for example), more people might fall for it?
And while we’re on the topic – we should also correct the spelling mistakes. Seriously, why do scamsters always make so many spelling mistakes! Even in subject lines!
Yes, these “Nigerian prince” emails could be more polished and plausible. But making them less plausible is precisely the point.
Hold that thought.
Marketers & Hungry Crowds
The #1 principle of Direct Marketing is – Qualify the funnel.
As Gary Halbert (“history’s greatest copywriter”) says in The Boron Letters:
One of the questions I like to ask my students is, “If you and I both owned a hamburger stand and we were in a contest to see who would sell the most hamburgers, what advantages would you most like to have on your side?”
Some people say they would like to have the advantage of having superior meat from which to make their hamburgers. Others say they want sesame seed buns. Others mention location. Someone usually wants to be able to offer the lowest prices. And so on.
After my students are finished telling what advantages they would most like to have, I say to them: “OK, I’ll give you every single advantage you asked for. I, myself, only want one advantage and, if you will give it to me, I will whip the pants off of all of you when it comes to selling burgers!”
“What advantage do you want?”, they ask.
“The only advantage I want, ” I reply, “is a STARVING CROWD!”
Find rotten eggs early
One of the key lessons from High Output Management is this:
Material becomes more valuable as it moves through the production process. So, fix any problems at the lowest value stage.
To quote from the book:
All production flows have a basic characteristic: material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process. A boiled egg is more valuable than a raw one… A college graduate to whom we are ready to extend an employment offer is more valuable to us than the college student we meet on campus for the first time.
A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest value stage possible.
Thus, we should find and reject the rotten egg as it’s being delivered from our supplier, rather than permitting the customer to find it. Likewise, if we can decide that we don’t want a college candidate at the time of the campus interview rather than during a plant visit, we save the cost of the trip and the time of both the candidate and the interviewers.
Let’s say you run an apparel factory. If the input cloth you received has quality defects, when would you rather find out? When the shirt is ready, or before the shirt goes into production?
Or you run a SaaS business. If your prospect is going to drop off the funnel next week, wouldn’t you rather find out today? Instead of after inviting them to an online workshop, doing a 1-1 free consulting call, and mailing them three times?
Or let’s say you have your team working on a complicated analysis. If they are making a basic assumption that’s wrong, would you like to find out once the analysis is complete? Or would you rather align at the start, and save a lot of time?
That’s why it’s always a Nigerian prince.
It’s easy to send that first email to thousands of people.
The next steps are more labor-intensive. A person has to talk to the target, persuade them to wire money, and cajole them to jump through other assorted hoops.
Labor = costly.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to spend time only on the most qualified customers (i.e., the most gullible targets)?
In fact, as the original research paper from Microsoft says:
Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.
That’s why phishing emails have spelling mistakes.
To self-qualify the funnel.
It’s not that the phishers struggle with English. That would be funny if it were true. Masterful confidence tricksters, but struggle to put together rudimentary sentences.
No, they speak English fine. It’s just that they don’t want people with high attention to detail to click on the link. If you notice such minutiae as spelling errors, then you’d notice other more suspicious details later and stop responding anyway.
They want only gullible prospects, with the least attention to detail.
They want to have a high percentage of such people pass through the next steps of the funnel. Share their passwords in a mindless fog. Click on executable links as an afterthought. Download Trojans in utter oblivion.
Fascinating. So is there a lesson in all this?
Yes, three in fact.
Lesson 1 – qualify your funnel as early as you can. And if possible, create a way for your audience to self-qualify. Don’t do sales calls with every visitor who stumbles across your website and shares their email. Instead, make them do the work of qualifying themselves. Have them join a webinar or download two white papers (both have zero marginal cost to you), before you do the hard pitch.
Lesson 2: Catch errors early. If your team is working on a complex analysis, first agree on the basic assumptions and logical flow. If it’s an investor presentation for next week, agree on the key messages and storyline today.
Lesson 3: Don’t click on emails from Nigerian princes.
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