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.
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.
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.
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:
In general, optimizing email weight is an objective to be achieved in any CRM strategy for three reasons: deliverability, engagement, and carbon cost reduction.
Online video is a great communication channel... but its use is not carbon-neutral. Here are two interesting figures:
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.
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?
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:
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.
Digital technology has a significant and growing carbon impact. Everything must be done to limit it.