How to Go Green With Your Email Marketing
Your Digital Presence Has An Environmental Impact
The digital world seems to be inextricable from our lives these days, especially as it grows larger and more multifaceted. Yet, with increasing global access to the internet and its enormous growth rate (A source compiled by Forbes estimates 252,000 websites are built every day), it’s somehow still easy to forget that the digital world isn’t floating around in some ethereal space. In actuality, your digital presence has a physical home, a carbon footprint, and an impact on both people and the planet.
In a report on the invisible impact of the internet on the environment, WebFX concluded that the emissions produced daily from email (1.2 trillion grams or 4 grams of CO2 per email) is the equivalent of driving to the moon 12,000 times. To say that our use of email marketing is both important and impactful — even in ways we rarely realize — is an understatement.
Email is a powerful marketing tool. Fortunately, with today’s green marketing solutions, every marketer can now improve the environmental impact of their emails without sacrificing their email metrics and performance KPIs. Read on for 5 ways to make your emails greener and more impactful.
1. Switch to an Eco-Friendly Email Marketing Platform
For anyone looking to go green without compromising the effectiveness of their email marketing, we recommend EcoSend (not an affiliate). Their robust email marketing platform has all the features you need for your email campaigns, including marketing automation, list segmentation, real-time metrics, and in-depth analytics.
To achieve greener outcomes, they power their platform with renewable energy, automatically offset their carbon footprint, and continually optimize their platform to limit energy usage. Plus, you’ll find all the analytics you need to see how emails are performing, giving you the data knowledge to help you increase deliverability and win more customers.
2. Reduce the Size of Emails and Email Images
Smaller email images = Shorter load times = Reduced energy consumption and easier access to email.
Easier access that is achieved through smaller email sizes reduces the wait time for end users, making them more likely to stick around and read your content. This approach can also impact the deliverability of your emails by reducing the risk of an email landing in your target audience’s spam folder.
On a different but equally important note, reducing email sizes also improves global accessibility, particularly for users in regions or environments with limited access to high-speed internet. Regardless of the size of your global audience, this cutback strategy is a distinct advantage when you’re trying to scale your email marketing and outreach efforts.
Making as small of a change as sending more compact emails makes a big difference. The opportunity to expand your global audience with a green solution that’s faster and more efficient is ultimately a win-win for marketers and the planet.
3. Switch to a Green Hosting Provider
Access to the internet nowadays is easy and nearly instantaneous for most users in developed countries. Because of this seeming simplicity, I’d venture to guess that most internet users don’t fully understand how the internet works, let alone where the internet lives. Though the internet may seem intangible, it actually exists in physical locations known as data centers.
We’ve long heard the messages on carpooling, walking or biking instead of driving, and taking fewer flights to decrease our carbon footprint. But data centers — the internet’s home — produce more carbon emissions than the aviation industry, essentially negating these efforts. If the internet has no signs of slowing down, what can we do?
As a digital marketer, one way to decrease your use of data centers’ energy involves transferring your email and website hosting to a green provider, like GreenGeeks, to offset the impact of internet usage. Green hosting providers are reducing their carbon footprint by relying on renewable energy sources, offsetting energy usage, and partnering with other green organizations.
4. Implement Email Expiration Dates
The carbon footprint of emails (though a bit complicated to measure) has been estimated to sit anywhere from 0.03 to 19 grams of CO2 per 1 MB email. In simpler terms, researchers have highlighted that “the electricity required to store around 3,500 emails (of five MB each) produces around as much CO2 as that from driving a compact car a kilometer. As such, if we deleted 1,000 emails, its carbon benefit would amount to around five grams of CO2.”
But why is the impact so high, and what is the solution? For starters, many emails get left in spam or inboxes, never to be deleted. For some users, this may mean they are unknowingly storing tens of thousands of emails in their accounts, creating a significant energy drain that is easy to remedy.
Automatically setting email expiration dates, where applicable, reduces the amount of data stored on servers worldwide and helps users avoid the problems that come with forgetting to clean out their emails regularly. For more information and to support the Email Expiration Date initiative, click here.
5. Clean Up Your Email Lists For Better Email Segmentation and Higher Open Rates
Marketing is always evolving, and the latest changes to cookies and tighter email marketing restrictions have only contributed. Brands are working smarter, not harder, and emphasizing quality over quantity by focusing more of their ad spend on personalization and segmentation. According to HubSpot, “Segmented emails drive 30% more opens and 50% more clickthroughs than unsegmented ones.”
By regularly sifting through your CRM and removing contacts who aren’t engaging with your content, you reduce the number of emails you send and can better target and engage with those who are more likely to convert to customers. An easy way to implement this into your business is to create CRM processes moving forward for the types of lists you build and the contacts you add to your database. This helps ensure your marketing is specifically targeting the right audience. You can also work with a marketing team, like Mane, to help define your audience and the best ways to attract them. Spend time reviewing your email analytics to identify gaps in your marketing and analyze engagement patterns to build more impactful campaigns.
Marketing Strategies to Scale Your Business
Sustainable marketing doesn’t have to be complicated or drastically change things you’re already implementing. Contact us today to learn more about how you can go green while you boost the impact of your email marketing.