Sustainable Email Marketing: Paving The Way For A Responsible Future
The carbon footprint of an Email is 0.3g of CO2e. That’s about the weight of a grain of salt. While email is far more sustainable than using paper, the impact that the 4.3+ billion email users have on the environment may shock you.
The average person produces 40 Kgs of CO2e per year through their email activities, this is the equivalent of driving a small car 128 miles. Now while this number may sound small, multiply this by the 4.3 billion active email users and that’s the equivalent of driving a car 550 Billion Miles. That’s the same as driving around the world 22 million times, so it definitely adds up.
Some interesting facts about the carbon footprint of emails:
- Over 64 million unnecessary emails are sent by the British public every day, about one for every single person. These redundant emails emit 23,457 tonnes of carbon per year.
- If each UK adult sent one less ‘thank you’ email per day it would save the same amount of carbon as 81,152 flights from London to Madrid.
- The average email travels a distance of 15,000km before it reaches your inbox, through data centres and other more powerful computers and communication devices.
Strategies For More Sustainable Email Marketing
Maintain Good Email list Hygiene
Maintaining good email list hygiene is just general good practice for your email marketing. Not only does it make your email marketing efforts far more eco friendly, but it will also improve the overall effectiveness of your email marketing as a whole. Sending emails to inactive, invalid and incorrect email addresses results in bounced emails, these ‘wasted’ emails never reach anyones inbox and they ruin your email reputation and domain health. Click here for our full guide on How to Maintain Good Email List Hygiene.
Every single email you send has to be processed and stored on a server somewhere so cleaning your email list and removing inactive emails will reduce your carbon footprint at no loss of value to you.
Better Segmentation
Dividing your email list into smaller groups of similar individuals based on age, gender, location, buying habits and behaviours is an essential part of email marketing. It allows you to send more personalised emails to specific people, rather than a one size fits all approach. Not all your subscribers are the same and some will want different things, so learning more about your subscribers and using this data to personalise your content towards those preferences will increase your conversion rate and overall success of your email marketing.
By utilising segmentation and targeted email marketing you are moving away from the batch/ blast email marketing models of the past, in which you send the same email to every one of your subscribers.
Send Links to Documents Instead of Attachments
By sending links to documents instead of attachments, this helps reduce the weight/ size of your emails. Reducing the weight of your emails means they will require less energy to send and take up less space in data centres servers. While email marketers usually refrain from sending attachments images, graphics and code are extremely common. Maybe take a leaf out of Inboxx’s book and utilise plain text emails. Click here to read our guide on Why Plain Text Emails are More Effective Than HTML.
By sending plain text emails, not only will this reduce your carbon footprint but your email campaigns will load faster on all devices, greatly improving the user experience for your email list and increasing your engagement.
How Will This All Help?
Green marketing has been trending for years now and many people have been quick to dismiss it as simple greenwashing, nothing less than a small drop in a huge pool. As the saying goes ‘every little helps’ and we should be doing everything we can for a healthier, cleaner planet, especially if it’s as easy as what we’ve described above.
Sustainable email marketing is not only a responsible choice but also a smart business move. By adopting eco-friendly practices, businesses can reduce their carbon footprint, while still enhancing their customer experience and contributing to a greener future.
As we have mentioned there are numerous ways to pave the way for a responsible future in email marketing. Embracing sustainability within your marketing will not only benefit businesses but also inspire others to follow suit, hopefully creating a positive impact on the planet.
