One of our core business activities here at XCOM is sending emails. Lots of emails. In fact last month we sent over 20,000,000 emails on behalf of our clients. Thankfully we have an excellent deliverability rate. I would say it’s due to luck, but it’s not – it’s due to our diligent work to ensure that it is that way. So many of us in the office find it incredibly hard to believe that in the enormous volume of legitimate marketing emails (with our diligent practices), how does anyone actually fall for spam emails, and more importantly, do they actually work?
Truth of the matter is, while our office here is filled with mostly university graduates dedicated to email marketing, somewhere over in Nigeria you will find matching offices filled with dedicated university graduates dedicated likewise to email marketing. We have strategy meetings, planning the best ways of attack to increase open rates, CTR and engagement. They, likewise have the same. With not too dissimilar goals. They even have their own email conferences! (You MUST check out the breakfast offering!)
Spam unfortunately and rather surprisingly is a highly effective business model for organisations in less legislated parts of the world. To give an example some researchers took over a zombie network and sent 350m emails to receive 28 online orders. This factored out to a possible $7,000 in income a day – that’s $2,000,000 a year! When you consider that their overheads would be paid in Nigerian Naira, it’s clear to see that despite the incredibly low conversion rates, there’s definitely good money and people to be exploited!
Possibly the most surprising part of it is the range of the people who fall victim to these grand schemes. I dare say that most of us, myself definitely included, would have assumed that the vast majority of victims would be the elderly, those who weren’t raised on the lifeblood of technology and the internet, and that are perhaps far too trusting in their online activities. However it’s not just the uneducated getting caught out – there was a case of a Swiss professor several years back who was duped out of over $250,000.
In fact in a recent office discussion on the subject, it came to light that one of our dear colleagues thought she was moving to Nigeria when she was 20 to take a high paying job for Shell; A job that she had picked up from an unsolicited email. Thankfully she ended up calling the contact number and realised it for the scam it was before it was too late.
Beware the Nigerian prince, the unsolicited emails from Canadian meds pharmacy. You don’t want to end up like this guy.
