Emails must be better for the environment compared to their paper alternative, right? Not necessarily. Due to their online presence rather than physical form, it’s hard to comprehend that email marketing produces a carbon footprint, but it does, and this means that its impact often gets overlooked.
Email’s Carbon Footprint
Did you know that the carbon footprint of a single standard email is 4g CO2e? Additionally, an email with large attachments can span up to 50g CO2e (CO2 equivalent). When you factor in the number of emails sent and received daily, it soon adds up – in 2022, 333.2 billion emails were sent – amounting to a huge digital landfill.
Internet usage coupled with devices and supporting systems make up 3.7% of annual global emissions.1 This is because they use fossil fuels as energy in the manufacturing process and their daily use. Over 1% of the world’s entire energy consumption is data storage, and every single email that you send ends up on a cloud server.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great way to connect and reach your audience, creating a dedicated group of users who are involved in your business. It is a powerful marketing tool, but with hundreds of emails being sent from businesses every single day, email marketing has a huge impact on the environment.
Why You Should Be Worried
“But if every business sends hundreds of emails, what impact will I alone make?”. Whilst this is an understandable question, this is also what caused the climate crisis in the first place – by people thinking that their changes won’t have an impact. Alone, we may not be able to solve the environmental emergency, but if we all made small changes, this can and will make a change. It’s not just for our generation, but for our children, and their children, and their children and so on. Change needs to happen to ensure that they have a tomorrow, and the tomorrow is one of health and happiness.
How To Decrease Your Email Impact
Email is a core part of communication, and we should become aware of the impacts and make improvements to help with sustainability. Here are some ideas on how to reduce the environmental impact of email marketing.
Send Less Emails
We now know that people don’t want to receive a bombardment of generic emails – which is a good thing for sustainability. Ultimately, the less emails you send, the better for the environment. The best way to do this is to clean up email lists, utilise segmentation and simply send out emails less often.
To reduce the frequency of emails sent out, first analyse each email idea, looking at why, who and whether you need to send it. This will give you a more refined email strategy, allowing you to hone in on the reason for sending emails, meaning every activity that you do is with meaning. Be sure to explain to customers why you’ll be sending less emails out – this will help to increase brand recognition and will allow you to communicate your company values and the importance of sustainability, which people are more interested in now more than ever.
You can also clean up your email lists, by removing any inactive subscribers. Firstly, try to re-engage inactive subscribers by sending out a campaign that asks them to take action. Anyone that doesn’t open or click, should be cut from your list. This will also improve your open and click rates as your list will be made up of only active users.
Additionally, you can use segmentation to dial up efficiency. By sending targeted emails by dividing the list into smaller groups, it increases relevance for your users and helps to boost conversion rates, all whilst not saving you sending emails to users where it may not be relevant.
Switch To an Eco-Friendly Alternative
Many email marketing platforms are unfortunately not eco-friendly, however there are platforms available that do good in the world.
Ecosend or DotDigital both use renewable energy and are climate first, with DotDigital achieving carbon neutrality.
Additionally, by moving to a more eco friendly platform, it signals to other platforms that they need to buck up their ideas and start being more sustainability friendly. This could have huge positive impacts on the digital world.
Make Emails Smaller
Be mindful of how many videos or images you include in your emails, and optimise images to make them smaller where you can. By sending smaller/lighter emails, you are reducing the size of your email, which impacts storage on servers and also means your campaigns will load faster, improving user experience.
Outlook
Making small changes within your email marketing strategy can have big and lasting effects on sustainability and the climate, which not only helps the environment, but you can use it to your advantage to communicate your company values with users.