Clean Email Lists and Campaigns: Developing a Sustainability Mindset
Can your business be sustainable and have great results with your email marketing? Yes, of course, it can. It starts with keeping clean lists.
Sustainability. Everyone’s talking about it. Google the term and you get 1.2 billion results. That’s a lot of keywords. The Oxford Dictionary defines sustainability as being “the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level.” And “avoidance of the depletion of natural resources to maintain an ecological balance.”
How can we develop a clean email mindset? In terms of our marketing and sales emails, a useful definition lies right in the middle.
Maintain the business of emailing at a profitable, balanced, and responsible level.
Avoid the depletion of resources – both natural and human.
Both sound like a tall order but think outside the box, erm, envelope for a minute.
Sustainability Means Thinking Outside the Envelope
Sustainable is not just eco-friendly. It can save everyone time.
Our sustainable mindset is almost always thinking in the direction of the environment. Food, fashion, housing, natural resources, recycling. It’s not often that we think about sustainable emails, websites, or social media. However, this is not science fiction.
The internet may be digital, but it carries a very physical cost. From image files to colors to coding languages to servers, the choices we make in our web work can eat up electricity and spit out carbon—and as the internet grows, so does the cost to the environment.
How can email and our email processes be made sustainable? How can we work towards a cleaner email? If we’re going to finish big, we are going to need to start small.
Sustainability Means Developing an Efficient Email Process
A clean email list is an efficient email list.
Keeping your email lists clean saves you time emailing people unnecessarily. That saves data, bother, and bounced emails. How many email addresses expire each year on average? 15%? 20%? That’s a lot of unnecessary emails. Take it upon yourself to clean your email lists at least before each new campaign.
Scenario 1
You only use a single opt-in to build your B2B email list and send your campaign weekly. The risk of collecting mistyped emails and having other emails on your list expire is so high that you may even need to check your list every two weeks. Who has time for that?
Scenario 2
You send email marketing campaigns to your B2C list every month. That list is built with double opt-in. You can check the validity of the emails every three months and your sender reputation should be safe from a high bounce rate.
“The email cleaning list is the most effective way to keep your database healthy and free of unwanted contacts that can taint the reputation of your IP, plus damage the relationship with who is really interested in getting content for your company.” EmailManager.com
Sustainability Means Thinking About Data
Keeping your emails fit, slim, and accessible.
Everybody loves an interesting email. With free and easy tools available to all, we can put together email marketing campaigns that include videos, images, and more. How many of these get opened? How many are opened on a phone? The average vanilla email consists of about 75kg of data. It is 100% accessible, and anyone opening it will easily read it without needing to accept or download images or videos.
What about attachments? Some of these can be larger than 10 MB! That’s a very heavy email. Keeping your emails slim and fit makes your campaigns not only easier to maintain, but easier for your recipient to read while jogging. Accessibility. In the end, that’s what really matters, right?
“Taking an average database of 100,000 emails, every EDM sent results in 85,000 wasted emails. Assuming an average retailer would send two EDMs per week, this equates to an EDM carbon footprint of 8.84 tonnes CO2e per year in unread marketing emails.” Echobahn
Sustainability and Your Email Marketing
Be a lean, mean, emailing machine!
Every day we get newsletters that go unread and probably go straight into the trash. (They may even end up in spam.) This is when it’s good to encourage your recipients to unsubscribe from your email newsletters. It doesn't hurt anyone. Their inbox looks much clearer afterward and your open rates go way up!
Too often we don't think when writing an email. We send it prematurely or reply with one word or emoji. Proofread your email campaign before sending it. Does what you've written make sense to your audience segment? Save time, data, and annoying queries.
Do we need different font colors and elaborate layouts in one communication medium? Emails are not a website, they are meant to deliver digital letters. Simple text is quicker for the eye to grasp and is neatly displayed in any email client either desktop or mobile.
Not every email needs the company logo as an attachment – especially internally! A plain text signature is faster and easier to read than colorful gimmicks. Plain text has a better open rate compared to HTML emails. (In case you still need arguments for your boss)
“Bear in mind the device you use to read your messages. Reading texts on a small screen phone consumes less power than reading an email on a large computer screen.” YouMatter
AWI Is Your Sustainability Partner
If email marketing campaigns aren’t one of your company’s most valuable assets, it’s probably because your current customer database is hindering your results. That’s not sustainable for anyone.
Being sustainable in your marketing campaigns means less waste -- data, time, and energy. AWI is uniquely positioned to help. Whether you choose to utilize one of the products from our Email Suite to create a profitable database or hire Andrews Wharton to handle your entire campaign end-to-end, we will deliver!
Be Certain.
