Why discuss the carbon impact of your CRM strategy? While the pollution generated by the digital sector is not directly visible, its carbon impact is nonetheless very real. Integrating sustainability into your digital marketing is no longer optional for modern brands.

Is email pollution a myth or a reality?

Let's look at the numbers. A study by ADEME (the French Agency for Ecological Transition) indicates that digital technology is currently responsible for about 4% of greenhouse gas emissions, which is as much as the aviation sector. Above all, it is an exponentially growing sector whose footprint could double by 2025.

Within this 4%, the distribution of emissions is as follows: about 25% are due to storage in data centers, 28% to network infrastructure, and 47% to equipment (PCs, smartphones, screens...). When we talk about digital, the manufacturing of your terminals carries the most weight!

And what about emails? While the carbon impact of emails is certainly the most talked about, statistical reality shows that emails account for about 1% of the digital sector's overall emissions. We'll let you do the math on what 1% of 4% represents.

It is therefore not just the act of sending emails that should be questioned, but rather the multiplication of our digital uses as a whole and their global relevance. To better understand this subject, we recommend reading Sami’s article: “Carbon footprint of an email: myths, realities, and solutions.”

More than just their conservation over time, the entire creation chain of an email has an impact: from writing it on a terminal to storage, through reading it, or its transport from sender to recipient. Tips exist to limit the weight of each of these phases. Here are our tips for a better-thought-out CRM strategy.

1. How to limit the number of email recipients?

Too many cultural and sports venues still send monthly or weekly newsletters to a large database built over the years, without taking into account their engagement and reactivity. Among these recipients, there are too many contacts who no longer open these newsletters.

The first essential best practice consists of implementing an inactive contact management policy, which can be done at regular intervals or continuously via automation. This involves identifying contacts who no longer open their emails (generally for 6 months). A final re-engagement email can be sent to them before setting aside all contacts who have not reacted.

This mechanism is implemented by Arenametrix clients. Besides the environmental impact, good management of inactives has an economic impact (reducing the number of email credits required for each send) and a definite performance impact, with an increase in open rates for future sends that can reach 5 percentage points in some cases.

2. How to design lighter newsletters?

A lighter newsletter is also faster to design and less expensive to store. You can use several levers to lighten the weight of your emails:

• Image weight: Reducing the weight of your images will have a direct impact on the overall weight of your emails. Beyond the carbon impact, correctly optimized images are more likely to be accepted by email clients that increasingly cut off emails that are too long. The number of images obviously also plays an important role.
• Email size: Beyond images, the length of your email will play a role in determining its carbon impact. Furthermore, the longer your email, the less likely it is to be read in its entirety. Designing short emails has a double benefit: reducing carbon impact while maintaining contact interest.
• Use of GIFs: Animated GIFs represent a sequence of several images. While they can increase interactivity, they should be used in moderation as they weigh more than a simple visual.
• Use of specific fonts: The font used can also influence the carbon cost: a common font will have less impact than a specific font stored on one or several servers.

In general, optimizing email weight is an objective to be achieved in any CRM strategy for three reasons: deliverability, engagement, and carbon cost reduction.

3. Why should you reason the use of video across your channels?

Online video is a great communication channel... but its use is not carbon-neutral. Here are two interesting figures:

• Video is responsible for 60% of data flows worldwide.
• Every minute of video has a carbon cost. For example, a short email emits 4 grams of CO2, while one hour of video emits about 400 grams.

Whether in your newsletters or on social networks, video must be used wisely. Do not integrate it systematically, but only when it is the most relevant medium to convey your message.

4. Why opt for SMS as an alternative?

Email has a definite carbon impact, but the good news is it's not the only communication channel in your CRM strategy. SMS is much less energy-intensive.

American researcher Mike Berners-Lee compared the impact of an email and an SMS in his book "How Bad Are Bananas?". While a short email produces 4g of CO2, an SMS has a footprint of 0.014 grams, nearly 300 times less. The main reason? SMS is transported by telephone network technologies rather than the internet. Note: this is based on a 160-character SMS without multimedia.

Last-minute info for your visitors? Not only will the SMS have a nearly 100% open rate, but your action will also have a lower carbon cost. Have you also thought about human chat or chatbots to replace certain emails?

5. How to extend the life of your terminals?

As mentioned, half of the digital carbon impact comes from manufacturing terminals. Beyond storage, the IT equipment used in your digital strategy has an impact (construction, depreciation, and energy usage).

Several practices can be implemented:

• Multiplying uses per equipment (e.g., using a data collection tablet for other purposes or replacing it with QR codes).
• Extending equipment life through maintenance and repair.
• Purchasing refurbished hardware (4 to 5 times fewer emissions than new).

6. How to communicate best practices to your audience?

As a company sending email campaigns, you have the power to raise awareness among your recipients about the carbon cost of digital technology.

You can add a note at the end of your campaigns encouraging recipients to delete emails once read and make unsubscription easy. You can also support projects like "email expiration date," which aims to automatically delete commercial emails after a certain time. Check out Zero Carbon Email for more info.

Conclusion: Sustainably reducing the carbon impact of your CRM strategy

Digital technology has a significant and growing carbon impact. Everything must be done to limit it.