Your Email Campaigns Are Not Innocent At All
Do emails cause pollution?
Perhaps one thing that has never crossed your mind before is that a means of communication as innocent as the email– that has survived and thrived despite ceaseless assailment from an army of messaging apps– could actually harm our environment.
“Balderdash,” you say and fold your arms, “Emails are environment friendly. They are not written on paper and they don’t require trees to be felled.”
Yes, but…
Emails are typed on an electronic screen. And all electronic devices consume power. Cloud storage is not suspended in the clouds. Nor is the internet hosted in the air; it is based on a very physical infrastructure that needs energy to operate. And let’s not forget that more often than not the sources we derive power from < ಠ_ಠ fossil fuels> are well known antagonists in the sustainability story.
Mike Berners Lee’s oft-referenced book “How Bad Are Bananas” estimates that the average carbon footprint of an email varies from 0.3g to over 50g Carbon Dioxide Equivalent. This might sound small when compared to the 4.2 metric tonnes CO2 generated by a typical passenger vehicle. But 0.3g CO2e doesn’t seem so microscopic once you recall that there are nearly four billion email users. Nowadays everyone has an email id. Long gone are the days when only tech savvy nerds could shoot secret messages to likeminds half a world away. More often than not, we have multiple accounts that serve as the destinations of both important as well as junk emails.
Most of us are myopic to the far flung negative impacts of the virtuous email. The average Joe and Jane care for the environment, but not so much that they will swap their technological overreliance for neo-luddism anytime soon.
If you do a quick google search on how to bring down your email carbon emissions, you will come across a list of good practices similar to the following:
- Write short and concise emails without filler words
- Unsubscribe from irrelevant mailing lists
- Write emails only when necessary
- Delete emails
- Instead of sending attachments, send links to the documents
While well intended, good practices are just that–good practices. They sound wise, sure, but recommendations to ‘go out on a daily walk’ and ‘eat healthy’ also sound wise. As we all know, it is a scientific impossibility to part from one’s bed around sunrise, and who can escape the temptation of the bag of delectable crispy chips? Thank you very much, but modern Joe’s and Jane’s would rather opt for liposuction. Furthermore, not everyone is adept at explaining themselves in a few words. Shortform writing is an art in itself.
Articles like this one from the NYPost recommends not sending “Thank you” emails. But doing so may make someone feel unappreciated, especially if they took great pains to help you out at a crucial time.
Thankfully, it has never been easier for you to offset your email carbon emission, especially if you are involved in a business that needs to send frequent email blasts to engage customers.
Enter EcoSend →
EcoSend Case Study
A product of GoSquared, Ecosend is a newly launched email marketing automation platform launched that is giving industry giants like MailChimp a run for their money.
“This sustainable marketing idea is super exciting!…”
“… Love this, and definitely something we don’t see enough in the tech/startup space…”
“… I absolutely love the initiative. Until now I had no idea how big of an impact email marketing could have on the environment…” — some of the comments on Ecosend’s Product Hunt page.
There are many players in the mass emailing game, but what makes Ecosend stand out from the rest is its climate consciousness, as evident from the ‘eco’ in its name.
Ecosend enables businesses to lower their carbon emissions by planting trees for every 5000 emails sent. They go two steps further–their infrastructure is powered by renewable energy and they reinvest part of their profits into carbon removal. The result? They have become one of the rare carbon-negative companies.
“… Everything about Ecosend is about being climate conscious when it comes to our digital marketing and our digital activities,” says CEO James Gill in a Linkedin clip
I signed up for Ecosend and found it to have a very smooth interface. There are brief but comprehensive videos embedded into the dashboard so the learning curve is not steep at all, and EcoSend’s team is very responsive.
I tried out their carbon calculator and found it to be an excellent feature.
If you run a green business, Ecosend is your perfect partner complimenting your work by planting trees all over the world from Tanzania to Nepal.
As the climate crisis worsens (I can vouch this from personal experience as I have lived in heavily forested regions before and those green hills now look like heads of balding men), it is vital that companies strive to be kinder to Mother Earth and become carbon negative. What is great is that this can be utilized as a marketing tactic too, creating a win-win scenario for companies as well as Nature.
Furthermore, it is commendable that Ecosend is continually trying to improve, for example by partnering with Treeapp to make the tree-planting process more efficient. They also offer highly optimized templates to reduce the size of each email being sent.
The idea behind Ecosend is of an educational nature, which seeks to make customers aware of the impact of small activities on nature. Perhaps other companies too will be encouraged to integrate environmental responsibility into their products and services.
About the author: Akhoy Jyoti Chaudhury is the creator of Balding Green Hills (https://www.baldinggreenhills.com/). He grew up in the hills of North-east India, and couldn’t help but draw a parallel between the deforestation and the balding heads of people. He decided it was time he did something about the issue.
