How many times have you seen random notifications pop up in your email from brands that you might have shopped from or interacted with? Do most of them end up in your spam folder and stay there untouched? Do you make a conscious effort to delete these emails if deemed unnecessary?
Email Marketing: The Beginning
The global email marketing market was valued at $8.3 billion with a projected increase to $18.9 billion by 2028, reveals Statista. The report further projected a 287% growth by 2032. Email marketing’s roots can be traced back to as far back as 1978 when Gary Theurk sent out a mail to his customers informing them of a new product. Soon, businesses started leveraging this paper- less hassle-free way of marketing that could be utilised to effortlessly reach many customers in one go. This marked the beginning of what would become a cornerstone of digital marketing strategies worldwide.
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Types of Email marketing:
Essentially, email marketing can be classified into four broad categories.
Transactional Emails: These are emails you get when you purchase a product or a service. These are essentially used to promote purchases or engagement.
Promotional Emails: These include all emails you get which introduce a product, offer special discounts, sales or other promotional elements.
Newsletters: You read that right, newsletters too are a part of email marketing where insights into the market and other valuable content are provided to the users on an occasional basis in order to maintain customer retention.
Lead Nurturing Emails: These are motive-driven emails that provide you with the content of your interest in order to drive sales.
Is Email Marketing a devil in disguise?
An estimated 333 billion emails are sent and received daily, reveals a Statista report. This figure is reportedly said to increase to 392.5 billion daily emails by 2026. Studies suggest that an average email accounts for about 0.3 grams of carbon emission. Multiplying that with the 333 billion emails being transacted in a day, the carbon footprint of emails amounts to 99,900 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
Sustainable practice is the new talk of the town!
We might not be able to do much about the carbon footprints that are released with every email but we can certainly inculcate measures in order to keep them in check. Incorporating sustainability into email marketing begins with optimising sending practices. Adopting methods like segmenting and targeting email campaigns allows businesses to tailor their content to cater to specific audience segments on the basis of their behaviour, preferences, age and demographic. “Regular cleaning of our email lists so that inactive subscribers are constantly eliminated. These practices definitely help to improve not only brand relevance but customer engagement as well which in a way leads to better conversion rates but most importantly helps us avoid sending emails to people who aren’t interested. Also, we pitch digital minimalism to our clients and subscribers so we can create a cycle using email marketing only if they add value,” Mayank Vora, co-founder, Logicloop, shared how the company contributes to sustainable email practices.
Efficient content creation and minimalist design play pivotal roles in sustainable email marketing. Simple email templates not only make it easier for the user to read but also make the load lighter on nature to endure. By prioritising content relevance and value to recipients, we can bring down the likelihood of spam complaints and unsubscribes which again leads to wasted resources and higher carbon footprints.
Another way of sustainable marketing is to opt for email service providers that utilise free hosting solutions with renewable energy sources. These providers often implement technologies that optimise server usage and cooling systems, further minimising energy consumption during email transmission and storage. Finally, cleaning email lists and removing the inactive and disengaged subscribers will reduce unnecessary email traffic and will remove the associated carbon emissions too.
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