6 tips for environmentally conscious email marketing: sustainable and CO₂-friendly

At a time when environmental awareness is becoming increasingly important and sustainable practices are gaining in significance, the digital aspects of our lives are also coming under the spotlight. Email marketing, which appears to be a paperless and environmentally friendly method, also has environmental implications when examined more closely.

According to a Statista According to forecasts, around 333.2 billion emails were sent and received worldwide every day in 2022, a figure that is set to rise steadily in the coming years. By 2026, this figure is expected to reach around 392.5 billion emails per day – almost 49 times the world’s population.

What many people don’t realise is that every single email has a carbon footprint, which ranges from 0.03g to 26g of CO₂, depending on its size and content, as Mike Berners-Lee explains in his book „How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything“ has found. In this blog post, we’ll therefore share 6 useful tips for environmentally conscious and low-carbon email marketing.

1. Send your emails via a sustainable hosting provider

Data centres are large facilities that house servers and other IT infrastructure for processing, storing and distributing data. Data centres consume a considerable amount of energy. According to data from the German Bundestag In 2020, data centres in Germany consumed 16 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity.

The first step towards eco-friendly email marketing is therefore to choose a sustainable hosting provider for your email campaigns and your website. Find out about providers who are actively committed to environmental protection and use renewable energy sources to power their servers. The location of the servers can also have an impact on their energy consumption. Data centres in cooler regions require less cooling than those in warmer ones.

Once you’ve found a suitable web host, you should run not only your website but also your email marketing through their servers. With large email marketing providers, you usually don’t have full control over the sending process – so you need an email marketing tool that you can run via your sustainable hosting provider.

We can offer you our „Easy Newsletter Plugin“I highly recommend this for WordPress. It allows you to manage email sending directly from within your WordPress environment and sends all emails via your own server. Another advantage is that this also makes sense for data protection reasons.”.

2. Clean up your email list regularly

According to data from Statista, we can assume that half of all emails sent are spam. For the remaining emails, it is assumed that readers only need about a minute to read the messages.

That’s why, when it comes to email marketing, you should make sure to check your email list regularly and remove inactive subscribers and invalid email addresses. This prevents your newsletter from reaching people who aren’t interested in your news and products and who simply delete the emails without even opening them.

This is a sensible step, as according to information from the Futura-Sciences Magazine Even unopened emails generate CO₂. An unopened email produces around 0.3g of CO₂, as energy is still required to store the emails. The data stored in data centres consumes 200 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity annually, depending on its size, and is responsible for 0.31% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

3. Reduce the number of emails

Targeted and moderate email communication can not only make life easier for your recipients, but also reduce the environmental footprint of your email marketing. Instead of sending numerous individual emails, you should bundle relevant information into a single email. This minimises energy consumption and shows that you value your subscribers’ time and attention. Make sure to plan the frequency of your email campaigns carefully and take your target audience’s needs into account. You should also give your subscribers the option to easily unsubscribe if they no longer wish to receive emails from you.

Monitor and analyse your email marketing campaigns to continuously improve them and communicate more effectively. Regularly evaluating your email campaigns helps you understand which approaches are successful and which are not. By closely monitoring and analysing the performance of your emails, you can identify weaknesses and adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if you find that certain emails have a particularly high open rate, you can use similar approaches for future campaigns.

4. Use simple email templates

Graphically intensive emails containing lots of images and animations can increase energy consumption, as they require more resources to load and display. As mentioned above, larger emails containing graphics and image files can emit up to 26g of CO₂. You should therefore compress your image files so that they are as small as possible in kilobytes (kB) (guideline: under 200 kB). Choose lightweight and simply designed email templates that are more environmentally friendly yet still look professional. Smaller file sizes also mean shorter loading times and a better user experience for your recipients.

5. Promote online data sharing

By offering digital content and doing away with printed materials, you are promoting an environmentally conscious use of resources. For example, you can do away with printed catalogues or leaflets and instead make digital versions available via email or your website. This digital approach not only saves paper, but also printing, transport and postage costs. Encourage your customers to opt for electronic documents and make it easier to exchange information online.

6. Implement a sustainable newsletter strategy

Think about how you can make your email marketing campaigns even more sustainable. For example, you could plant trees or take part in carbon offset schemes to offset your carbon emissions. Choose your partners carefully and work with companies that are also environmentally conscious. Show your customers and subscribers that you are actively committed to the environment and that you take responsibility in your email marketing too.

Transparent communication about your sustainability efforts can not only strengthen your target audience’s trust, but also inspire other companies to incorporate green practices into their marketing strategies as well. By making sustainability an integral part of your email marketing, you help to make digital communication environmentally responsible and make a positive contribution to the environment.

Our conclusion

Environmentally conscious email marketing isn’t just good for the environment; it can also strengthen your relationship with your subscribers and boost your marketing efficiency. By putting these six low-carbon tips into practice, you can make a positive contribution to environmental protection whilst running a successful email marketing campaign.