Do Email Hoaxes Work?
By Anna Johnson on November 10th, 2008My mother sent me one of those email hoaxes today. You know the one that’s supposedly from Johns Hopkins University and warns against putting plastic containers in microwave ovens and freezers?
I thought I’d seen it before… and vaguely thought it might have been a hoax… but the emotive language and severe warnings managed to disturb me somewhat. What if it was true? Had all that microwaving and freezing in supposedly microwave and freezer safe plastic containers put my family and I at risk?
Fortunately, I wasn’t going to take the word of an email that had obviously been forwarded to me from my mum, who had received it from her friend, who had received it from her friend, and so on. I was going to check it out for myself. So I went onto the official Johns Hopkins website and guess what I found?
An article entitled “Email Hoax Regarding Freezing Water Bottles and Microwave Cooking” at http://www.jhsph.edu/dioxins
But it seems my action – verifying the supposed source of the email – is something most people don’t do. Presumably, that’s a key reason why we keep seeing all these email hoaxes: most people just forward them along rather than checking to see if they have any merit or truth.
Actually, let’s explore why email hoaxes are so effective in terms of viral marketing. Maybe we can learn something we can apply to LEGITIMATE email marketing:
1. They’re sent by people we know, like and trust, so we tend to open them. In this case, it was my mum. (Actually, I don’t always open my mum’s emails as she tends to forward email hoaxes and silly jokes… oh, the irony!)
2. They use emotive subject lines that appeal to most people. In this case the subject line was ‘Cancer update from Johns Hopkins’. In a society gripped by fear of the big ‘C’, that’s an email many of us are likely to open.
3. The email copy is also emotive. It taps into a fear many of us have, given our lack of understanding of the various technologies around us, our fear of cancer (nearly all of us have been personally touched by its horrors), our concern for how we live our lives, and all sorts of other fears.
4. The email copy is seemingly authoritative and trustworthy. As well as mentioning the respected U.S. hospital and medical institution Johns Hopkins, the email also mentions the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Dr Edward Fujimoto as supporting the content of the email. Notice how by dropping these big names the email piggy-backs on them to convey proof? In this case, it’s a lie… but there are perfectly acceptable ways to do this.
5. There is no apparent sales pitch, reinforcing the supposed legitimacy of the email. Although the call to action is obvious: to forward the email to others.
Now, go through that list of 1-5 again… has it sparked any ideas about how to boost response rates to YOUR emails? Just promise me one thing: you won’t send out a lie or hoax…
