I don’t know about you, but I still have Yahoo email accounts.
They’re still reliable to use, but their spam filters are quite questionable.
More often than not, I see emails that I don’t want in spam end up in spam.
So from time to time, I have to manually move the emails back to the primary inbox, and hopefully, the spam filters will eventually get the hint.
But one day, I was going through my spam folder and saw an interesting email.
The From Name was Customer Notification and the Subject Line was Payment from Your Account No. so-and-so.
I was expecting an email saying I have a payment pending and I have to update my account info or something.
But nope.
Apparently, the sender installed a virus on my computer and saw that I supposedly visited a lot of rated R websites and recorded my webcam.
And if I want this evidence deleted, I have to send this person $2500 worth of bitcoin.
A couple of problems with this email.
1. The subject line doesn’t relate to the email copy.
2. The email was written with a combination of the English alphabet and Greek alphabet letters, which was weird.
3. My computer doesn’t have a webcam.
It may not seem like it, but this poorly written extortion email is, in one way or another, a sales email.
A sales email to persuade me to pay a stranger an insane amount of money. But it fell apart when it had inconsistencies.
i.e. Misleading subject line and copy that’s irrelevant to me.
And that’s what also happens when you write copy that has nothing to do with your target audience.
They get turned off and stop reading.
That’s why it’s important to do a lot of research on your ideal customer.
And that’s also why I dedicated a chapter in How to Become an Email Titan to doing thorough market research.
To get yourself a copy, go here: