Affiliates and Sustainability: The Environmental Impact of Marketing Campaigns

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As the climate crisis worsens, marketing is another industry sector that is being criticized for the impact of its activities on the environment. As brands continue to shift their marketing spend from print to digital, amid environmental debates against paper, digital communication is far from being environmentally friendly.

Whether it’s a plane ride for a paid photoshoot, a product donation, or a link sent, digital marketing campaigns impact the environment in many ways. With that in mind, we’ve created this article to help you understand the environmental impact of marketing campaigns.

Digital pollution: a silent enemy
Digital pollution is the term given to greenhouse gases emitted by digital activities. Consumers often ignore this negative aspect of new technologies, but the digital world has significant ecological value. In fact, digital activities emit 4% of greenhouse gases, according to Mike Hazas, a researcher at Lancaster University, in an interview with the BBC .

In fact, data centers (which store and host websites) are the largest consumers of electricity in the IT world. The energy demands of data centers are enormous, as they need to power every server on the planet 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. According to Hazas, the energy they consume “is similar to the amount produced by the global airline industry, and these emissions are expected to double by 2025.”

Given this scenario, many wonder what the impact of digital marketing is.

The Environmental Impact of Marketing Campaigns
Did you know that email marketing leaves a huge carbon footprint, with the average email generating 0.3g of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent), rising to 50g for an email with large attachments.

Considering the sheer number of marketing emails that are sent (because they are seen as an easy and cost-effective way to reach the target audience) and the number of emails that are sent straight to the “Trash” or deleted without being read, it is clear that many of them are a waste.

That’s not to say that printing produces less carbon. By comparison, a printed letter has an average CO2 footprint of 20 grams, according to several postal service reports. However, most of that is not generated during production, but during transportation.

And while steps have been taken to reduce CO2 in print distribution, for example through the introduction of electronic media, there is still more that can be done. Having recognised that both print and digital marketing have an environmental impact, it is now a question of adopting more sustainable practices to reduce this impact.

How to do marketing more sustainably
Green marketing, also known as sustainable or environmental marketing, is a discipline that seeks to promote environmentally responsible business practices. Within this approach, there are a number of fundamental objectives that guide strategies. Here is an informative guide to these objectives and their relationship to environmental impact.

Reach the right audience
In the Web 2.0 generation, consumers are constantly exposed to an overabundance of digital telemarketing leads, turkey telephone number data content that is not always of interest to them and therefore ineffective.

The creation of irrelevant content produces enormous visual pollution in the digital ecosystem and also generates significant carbon due to the energy consumption of all the machines involved in its production, storage and dissemination.

Therefore, to produce the right content, you need to target the right audience with the right message. And to understand your target audience in more depth, you need data.

An important concept in this regard is data intent, which refers to a complex set of data that, when processed properly, can be used to predict the purchasing interests of potential customers.

The key is to use this data to discover topics of interest or information requirements, among other inputs that will allow you to create valuable content that will be useful for customers to more quickly find the solution they are looking for.

Ultimately, this efficiency translates into fewer ads, less server usage, fewer emails, and even less cloud space, which will ultimately reduce carbon emissions and achieve more effective marketing with fewer resources.

There are several tools (Bombora, Zoom Info or True Content, among others) that use data technology. True Content, for example, is a technology that uses data and artificial intelligence to identify the behavior, trends and interests of an audience and, based on them, create effective content marketing campaigns.

Reduce energy consumption of equipment
Create effective email marketing campaigns

If you want to minimize the impact of your mailings, it is important to create accurate email marketing campaigns and avoid unnecessary data storage.

One of the best options to reduce and avoid sending large attachments to many recipients at the same time. If you need to send large files, you can do so via a download link on platforms like WeTransfer, which deletes the data a week after sending. This reduces the weight of emails and the number of recipients.

Prioritize calls to action in your content strategy

The faster you convert your users into customers, the less energy you’ll consume. All content should have one purpose: to drive readers to take a specific action. To do this, include effective calls to action (“Buy Now,” “Last Chance,” “Learn More”).

Remove unnecessary content

Every now and then, audit your digital platforms to remove duplicate, outdated, or otherwise unusable content. Each step can help you avoid cloud clutter when it comes to digital sustainability.