Measuring the Hidden Carbon Costs of Enterprise Email Marketing
Large-scale email marketing to problematic and unresponsive audiences is a complete waste of resources – not to mention poor form.
With companies increasingly concerned with offsetting carbon emissions, measuring and taking action has never been more important.
So what’s your number?
We’ve collated the research on email carbon calculations to help you make an estimate. Components include:
- Creating the email and its assets: design, copywriting, and approvals process across multiple individuals on the team
- Sending: the servers and supporting infrastructure that support transmission, relay, receipt, scanning, filtering, etc.
- Reading and processing: If it arrives, whatever the human needs to do something with the email.
- Storing: Storage costs, even when it goes to “Trash,” “Spam”, “Archive,” etc.
Our own research has shown the average size of a marketing email is now ~75kb. This can translate into anywhere between 5g C02e and 20g C02e per email.
Corporate email lists and databases have an average of 25% of contacts at any time that are problematic: invalid, unreachable, fatigued, quarantined, unresponsive, etc.
Best practices and solutions:
- Run monthly monitoring for contact quality. Check out Dark Pool Cleanup.
- Actively suppress problematic contacts from sends, Check out Smart Suppress.
- Improve engagement and redesign or shut down low-engagement campaigns. Use Message Testing and Send Time AI.
