When it comes to sustainability and reducing your carbon impact, it could be tempting to think that you’re off the hook if you’re focusing on digital marketing campaigns…hmmm not quite.
No, you’re not felling trees, buying chemically produced ink and transporting physical mailing campaigns all around the world but no, you’re not off the hook. An article by the BBC in 2020 gave some startling figures:
“The carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions, according to some estimates. It is similar to the amount produced by the airline industry globally, explains Mike Hazas, a researcher at Lancaster University. And these emissions are predicted to double by 2025.” BBC
Double by 2025! So what’s your impact? To make it simple, just sending 10 emails a day over the course of a year can equate to the carbon emissions of driving a car 1000 km.
The internet (and therefore digital marketing) requires a lot of energy to traffic all those data packets around the world. So, bearing in mind our activities are also inducing humans to consume more ‘stuff’ and the associated carbon footprint of the purchase and usage, how can we take steps to actively reduce the impact of our marketing activities to be more sustainable?
Here are some ideas about how we can reduce digital marketing's environmental impact.
Whether your business is big or small you can start making improvements in a number of ways:
Track your carbon footprint - there are now tools like CarbonAlyser which help you actively track and visualise your electricity consumption and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions generated by your internet browsing. And when you can see it, just like a smart meter, you can start doing something about it.
Measure your website’s carbon footprint - the Eco-friendly Web Alliance provides website audits with the aim that your website shouldn’t generate more than 1g of CO2e per page view. We passed! You can get regular audits and accreditation.
Website hosting - so it’s fair to say that your website hosting could be consuming a lot of energy. If your website’s carbon footprint is a little too hungry, firstly look at your web design and the volume of data it’s storing but you can also look at green hosting providers such as the wind-powered Green Hosting. If you’re a smaller business looking for an easy-to-use service like Wix, try Create.net in the UK, they even plant trees for you!
Purchase refurbished technology - not only does this mean you spend less but you also have a reduced environmental impact. We use a great company for this, backmarket.co.uk. Calling themselves a marketplace that fights against planned obsolescence, they provide a great service and a huge variety of technology.
Marketing design - surprisingly colours make a difference too. A website that uses more muted colours e.g. greens and blues, emits less light in device LEDs, requiring less energy.
Marketing processes - take a look at the processes you use to deliver your marketing. Are you emailing lots of large files (higher energy usage), or transferring them? How are you creating reports, could they come from your marketing platforms as white-labelled reports rather than re-inventing new branded reports in-house? How targeted are your digital ads? Mass distribution of ads across multiple (or any) channels eats up energy but targeted, relevant sites deliver higher ROI and a lower carbon impact. Could you possibly have too many cooks involved in your marketing broth, slowing things down and re-visiting tasks eating up time and energy?
The conclusion is this: not only are there lots of easy ways to start making an impact on carbon reduction through our marketing activities, the planet needs us to. Remember, the internet’s consumption of energy is only set to grow with only a proportion of the world’s population online. We all have a part to play and more and more of our clients are demanding we play it (thank goodness!).