Sustainable email marketing: five ways to cut your footprint

What is the environmental impact of email?

Every email you send uses energy. The servers that handle it, the data centres that store it, the devices people read it on: it all has an ecological footprint.

To make that more concrete:

• The exact impact depends on the size of the email, attachments, images and so on.
• Now think about how many customers are in your database, and what that means every day, week or month.

The good news is that you can make a difference. Here are five simple but effective ways to make your email marketing more sustainable.

1. Quality over quantity

Focus on sending relevant, personalised content that genuinely matters to your recipients. That means responding to their preferences, behaviour and needs. Put the customer at the centre of every decision, and drop emails that are not relevant from your schedule.

One targeted, relevant email does far more than ten pointless ones. You will send fewer emails, and you will see your performance improve: higher open and click rates, and better engagement.

2. Segmentation and targeting

Segmentation goes hand in hand with relevance. You may already have cut a few emails, but wait: some messages are valuable to one group and irrelevant to another.

By splitting your audience into smaller, focused segments, you send the right message to the right people. That makes your campaigns more effective and more sustainable. A good marketing automation setup does most of this work for you.

3. Keep your database up to date

How many emails do you send to people who have not been active for months, or even years? That is a lot of wasted email that achieves nothing. An up-to-date database is essential for effective, compliant and sustainable email marketing.

Cleaning your database regularly keeps your campaigns focused on engaged recipients, which improves performance and saves money. Try to reactivate valuable customers, and remove the contacts who no longer add anything.

4. Size matters

The longer and heavier your emails, the bigger the impact on the environment and on your performance. Think about the length of your message, the number of images, hidden code and any attachments. What can you do?

• Optimise images and attachments to reduce their size without losing quality.
• Link to files or web pages instead of attaching large files.
• Follow good practice in email design and coding to keep the size manageable.

5. Put an expiry date on your emails

Adding an expiry date to your emails means outdated information disappears automatically. It keeps inboxes cleaner and fits the GDPR principle of not keeping data longer than needed.

An expiry date can also create urgency for time-limited promotions, which can lift conversion. Do tell recipients clearly about these dates, so they know what to expect.

Good for the planet and for your results

Follow these tips and you contribute to a more sustainable world while improving your email campaigns at the same time. Everybody wins.

So before you hit send, ask yourself: have I optimised this message? And what impact can my customers and I make on our planet together?

If you would like to look at this for your own programme, get in touch.