Nigerian Princes and spear phishers teach us to reach target customers
If you are building a new product, you will have narrowed down your target market to a particular type of customer that shares common characteristics and that have a particular, unmet need. Once you have built the smallest set of product features that will meet that need for those customers, you will need to reach them with some form of marketing.
This early stage product release is a dangerous time, your early product will not satisfy many of the adjacent customers with different or greater functionality needs and may have significantly less features or capabilities than your competitors. If you reach and appeal to the wrong customers, it will cost you a lot of money. You will either lose a lot of people in a sales funnel with high transaction costs or after signing up for your product or service they will likely have a poor experience. When a customer has a poor experience, you have to pay people to support them until they leave.
So the problem is, how do you ensure that you bring in only your target customers, the ones that share suitable characteristics and will get value from your product in its current form? Well, this is where we can learn from a couple of great marketing campaigns.
The Nigerian Prince email scam
This is a well established technique, the marketing expert bulk emails a huge number of people. They make a pitch, for example explaining they represent a rich prince who wishes to move money overseas, he would like to temporarily move $43M through your bank account and in return you will receive a reasonable commission. If you are interested, you give them your number and their sales representative will call you up and arrange the details. Once the sale is made, you pay a transfer fee in order to take receipt of the funds and then the job is done.
The ‘customer’ for their service has to be incredibly gullible, naive and in need of money, however this only describes a small proportion of their marketing email recipients. This is problematic because their sales process has a high transaction cost. The sale involves actually speaking to each potential lead, ensuring they are committed and then getting them to pay up. To reduce transaction costs resulting from unsuccessful conversions, the emails are carefully crafted to only appeal to target customers. The vast majority of people who receive them can immediately identify from the language and message that they are not the target customer and simply delete the email.
If you cannot isolate your target customers, you need to carefully craft your message so it only appeals to them. This should also be true of the content and product descriptions on your website and any sales material. Remember, any customer that ends up in a high transaction cost sales funnel, but falls out due to being a poor fit for your product costs you lots of money.
Spear phishing
In spear phishing, the sales team scours websites, news articles and other information sources, carefully identify and selecting each target customer. After a target is identified, sales and marketing work together to craft a message that appeals directly to that customer and deliver it carefully. For example, a message might be an email appearing to be from a CEO, directing an accountant to make a wire transfer of a large amount of money to a certain bank account.
The Nigerian Prince email scam relied on reaching a lot of people with a message crafted to appeal to only a small percentage of them, basically it let your target customers identify themselves. Spear phishing is the direct opposite, it involves doing the work upfront to sort and filter large amounts of data to identify each potential customer. Both content and delivery of your message is then tailored to them.
There is a wealth of information available that can help you identify and direct your message to target customers. For consumer products, Facebook and Google provide exceptional ad-targeting. For businesses, you might find your customers on Angel List or Linkedin. The more you understand about them before you deliver your message, the more likely they are to be the right type of customer and for your sale to be successful.
Early products need to reach target customers
The people who run scams create a ‘product’ or ‘service’ with limited resources for a specific target customer. Their success depends on minimising wasted time and money reaching their market. This also happens to be true of countless legitimate product teams around the world.
If you practice iterative development, you start by building a small product with a limited feature set. You will then want to use that product to start delivering value to the customers it is suitable for. However, you run the risk of your product ending up in the hands of customers who have the wrong characteristics, greater needs or higher expectations. In order to ensure your early customers are suitable, product teams have to work closely with marketing and sales to ensure the message is clear and customers are either self-selecting or carefully chosen.
