Wait, digital marketing has a carbon footprint?
With the energy required to create, send and receive your campaigns - yes it does.
But all is not lost. Especially if you take the time now to understand the carbon footprint of your website and digital marketing as a whole, so that you can make improvements.
There’s no better place to start when it comes to lowering your carbon footprint than cutting your emissions generated from your digital marketing.
For marketers, business owners and all other climate-conscious folks - here’s how to make sure that the only thing you generate with your marketing is fantastic campaigns.
Switch To A Sustainable Email Marketing Platform
EcoSend is the world's first sustainable email marketing platform.
Like other forms of carbon emissions generated by our digital marketing efforts, most people don’t even realise that email has a carbon footprint.
Around 300 billion emails are sent every day, and emails can emit as much as 50g of carbon depending on their size.
With businesses relying on email marketing to generate revenue, emails are constantly being received and sent. Though there’s no need to give up email marketing altogether to reduce your emissions. That is if you switch to a sustainable email marketing provider instead.
Ditch the Chimp and all the rest and move over to EcoSend instead. You’ll still get all the tools you need to send incredible email campaigns. But, your email platform will run on renewable energy sources, and we’ll plant trees on behalf of your business.
With paid plans starting at just $49, what are you waiting for? Sign up for your free EcoSend trial today.
Optimise Your Web Design
Just like suitcases - the weight of a website can soon creep up on you.
If your website contains lots of pages, including pages with long page lengths or a heavy use of media, then it could be a huge carbon generator.
A slow page speed can sometimes indicate your website file size is huge. But sometimes, buggy code or plug-ins can also be at fault. Therefore, we recommend using a carbon calculator for websites to estimate how much carbon your website is currently generating.
As well as redesigning your website, you may also wish to use a CDN (content delivery network). A CDN redistributes your website in servers around the world to reduce the time and energy it takes to load, and in doing so is much better for the planet.
An added bonus: Your website bounce rate may also decrease with a CDN as your pages will be quicker to load!
Use Green Web Hosting
When creating a website, usually the only thoughts when selecting a hosting provider are related to the price, along with the amount of bandwidth you need. Plus a few security features.
But what about the green credentials of that hosting provider?
For some time now, it’s been possible to host your website on green hosting providers. This is also something that was important to us at EcoSend, with our systems being powered by renewable energy sources.
Research suggests that the average website emits 553 kilograms of CO2 per year. But for larger websites, this figure is likely much higher.
For such a simple switch, using green web hosting makes pure common sense for any business wanting to reduce its carbon footprint.
Segment Your Audiences
Segmentation isn’t normally associated with climate change. That is, sending the right message to the right person at the right time to improve your conversions (especially within email marketing).
However, by avoiding send to all email blasts, or even advertising to everyone on social media, segmentation will reduce the carbon footprint of your digital marketing.
If that wasn’t enough, segmentation can also improve your marketing ROI. After all, not everyone can be targeted with the same message and generate the same result.
Why waste money on marketing your products and services to those unlikely to convert, especially as it costs more money to do so?
Ultimately, segmentation makes your marketing more effective, and as we already know, efficiency and carbon reduction go hand in hand.
Use SEO Responsibly
If you don’t move in SEO circles, then there’s a saying you need to know.
Good SEO = gets people on a page.
Great SEO = keeps people on that page.
What does SEO have to do with reducing your carbon footprint? Well, if you optimise your pages so that they show what users expect to find on that page, you aren’t creating a wasted journey for them.
In contrast, misleading SEO, or a poor overall user experience means users will generate carbon by loading your pages. But they won’t find what they need. So they’ll exit, head to another website and repeat that carbon generating process until they do find what they are after.
So now is the time to review your SEO strategy and maybe even conduct an SEO audit.
Remove misleading content, broken links, slow to load pages and any other aspect that generates as much carbon as it does frustration for your users.
EcoSend - Reduce Your Carbon Footprint With Sustainable Email
Want to be ahead of the curve when it comes to lowering your carbon footprint as a business?
With EcoSend being the world’s first sustainable email marketing platform, you’re in exactly the right place for that.
EcoSend was created by the team at GoSquared. Having been in the email marketing space since 2006, we wanted to create a sustainable solution to email marketing that businesses like yours could benefit from.
Keen to get started? Check out our plans starting at just $49 per month!
Or have any questions about how EcoSend works, or how we can help your business lower its carbon emissions?
Please drop us a message via our main GoSquared help portal and we’ll be right with you.
