Broken Graphics and the 40/40/20 Rule

E-mail marketing executives talk incessantly about the importance of relevancy. And rightly so.

But they often also talk about relevancy like it's new and unique to e-mail. It's not. It's related to a direct marketing concept that's as old as, well, direct marketing: The good old 40/40/20 rule.

According to this rule, a DM campaign's likelihood of success is determined 40% by the offer, 40% by the list or target it reaches and just 20% by the creative approach employed.

The CEO of a business-to-business catalog firm I wrote copy for once mercilessly seared the concept into my brain, and I've never forgotten it.

“You know what the 40/40/20 rule means, Wordman?” He called me Wordman, sometimes as a compliment, sometimes not. This time, not. “It means that if I reach you with the right offer, I can present it to you written in crayon on a piece of toilet paper and I've got an 80% chance of getting you to bite. What do you think that says about your copy?”

Well, so much for agonizing over word choice.

I eventually was fired from that job. Go figure. That CEO — who I still think is a funny guy, by the way — also unwittingly helped me decide to go back into journalism, a profession where people don't tell me the very concept of my work is crap. Now they just tell me my work is crap, period.

In any case, during the rise of rich media in the late '90s and the then-ongoing debate over its worth to e-mail, I often recounted the crayon-on-toilet-paper story during panel discussions in order to offer perspective on creative's overall place in an e-mail campaign.

Bill McCloskey, before he became CEO of his own start-up Email Data Source, heard me tell the story so many times he began to gently chide me about it. I believe he occasionally reads this column. If he's reading this one, he has most certainly rolled his eyes by now.

However, McCloskey heard me tell that story in a different context. Today I'm telling it in reference to broken graphics.

As blocked graphics and links become the rule at most e-mail inbox providers, designers must craft their messages with worst-case graphics scenarios in mind, as in: “If all the images are blocked, what will recipients of this message see?”

Well, for one thing, they better see the offer and who it's coming from. After all, the company's brand is an integral part of the offer.

However, most marketers still don't even use ALT tags or HTML coding that instructs the e-mail to display wordingin place of broken graphics when the graphics are blocked.

Why this is the case is anyone's guess. But part of the reason must be marketers' and designers' collective drive to create the perfect-looking e-mail — a drive that results in focusing the vast majority of their time on the thing responsible for just 20% of a campaign's likelihood of success.

Oh, and the subject line? The first thing recipients see that can convey the offer? I'm repeatedly told marketers write them at the last minute.

Obviously, the main thing DMers can do to improve e-mail marketing in a world of blocked graphics is to start writing subject lines first. Heck, write a few of them, and maybe even test a couple.

There, that's 40% of the campaign. Now, what about the list? When print DMers speak of lists, they're referring to rented lists. Since most e-mail marketing goes to house files, the old direct marketing 40/40/20 rule can't possibly apply here, right?

Wrong.

Just swap out “list” for “target” and suddenly the 40/40/20 rule applies just fine to e-mail — even to house-file campaigns.

The value of e-mail file segmentation has been documented repeatedly in the marketing trade press. Suffice it to say that those who aren't doing it should start and those who are should do more of it.

The point is that in a channel where traditional direct marketers have been consistently derided as being out of touch with its inherent differences from postal mail, possibly the most fundamental old-school DM tenet has become arguably the most fundamental e-mail rule.

Only now we call it relevancy.

Nothing wrong with that, but the old-timers really do deserve a vindicating nod of recognition on this one.

This isn't to say e-mail creative is unimportant, but e-mailers really do need to assess how much energy they're spending on creative relative to crafting the offer and hitting the right target. I'd bet an evening's worth of cigars and vodka martinis that most are spending 80% of their time focused on the part of their effort that affects 20% of their chances of success.