Watch These Words is about how this architectural firm identifies emails to delete. There are “fashionable” words that are really just so much verbal junk these days, often used by online marketers.
Image by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
What words?
These top our list of overused garbage words used by online marketing robots and marketing people, to try to sound “hip” or otherwise try to make them sound like they know you (when they don’t):
Reach out (or: Reaching out)
Circling back
Follow up
Collaborate
!!!! (use of exclamation marks)
Website analysis
Last chance
Hurry now
Home Architects has found that an email message sent to you containing any of the above words or expressions are highly likely to be marketing claptrap and you should be okay deleting them before reading the actual message. That is of course, your choice and you may have just won a free vacation to Hawaii, but we doubt it.
We have seen an overuse of the top 5 words/expressions on our above list of the worst of useless jargon these days.
Anyone who is REACHING OUT to you, rather than emailing you or contacting you, or phoning you, is attempting, in a lame use of contemporary street language, to try to get you to engage with them because they are making a heartfelt entreaty to communicate with you. Really? Do you really believe that? Lame. Don’t trust them.
Even worse: ” I’m CIRCLING BACK to see if your prior deletion of my previous waste of your time in sending useless emails for stuff I wanna sell you that you don’t need or want to buy may have now changed your mind and that you will now give me your credit card number and send me thousands of dollars so I can exploit you.” Seriously? Might as well have phrased it that way. As if your previous lack of interest in their junk now warrants your good interest. Homey don’t play that. I don’t think so.
Ditto above, using the phrase FOLLOWING UP.
And now we have yet other online scammers saying: they want to COLLABORATE with you. How stupid do they think we are? Collaborate in what sense of the word? As in honestly work together on something? Like on a project? On which you actually do work and I do work together? You’ve got to be kidding me. I don’t think that’s their intention at all. More like: “I want to COLLABORATE with your wallet, by you handing it over to me so I can relieve you of its weight, whilst I remove your cash and credit cards and knock you down onto the street and kick you into the gutter while I haul butt out of here after our interesting COLLABORATION.”
And we have the ever-present exclamation points!!!! As in: “What I have to say is so lame and stupid that I have to try to draw attention to it because I’m not a very good online crook!!!!! Hey: come buy my junk!!!! Believe me because I use lots of exclamation points!!!!!” Once again, our friends from the 1980’s comedy show Living Color provide the best response: I don’t think so.
And these days, everybody knows more about what’s wrong about your website and that you need to immediately contact them to fix it. Hence: “Our WEBSITE ANALYSIS shows that a 747 is about to fall on your house, killing you and all of your family! You must contact us immediately to fix your website.” Yeah, right.
So: delete, delete, delete.
Disclaimer: if you do delete something that is important or of value to you, it is your responsibility to check your messages for content of significance to you. However, it has been our experience that the above words in messages coming from sources you don’t know, tend to be suspicious.