on Friday April 25, 2025
Successful Sustainable Email Marketing: 9 Top Tips
With an average return-on-investment of 36:1, email marketing is one of the most valuable activities you can undertake – providing you do it right.
Climate-focused companies can deploy email marketing to raise brand awareness, generate engagement and nurture leads, but sustainability shouldn’t be overlooked. Without an effective strategy, the carbon footprint associated with email campaigns can be surprisingly high. With a tailored, sustainable email marketing strategy, however, climate-focused companies can achieve their commercial objectives and amplify their brand’s eco-conscious attitude.
To get started, take a look at our 9 top tips for sustainable email marketing now…
Select the right email marketing platform
Whether you’re running weekly campaigns or sending quarterly newsletters, you’ll need an email marketing platform that combines optimal functionality with budget-friendly subscriptions and environmental awareness. When you’re exploring the options, be sure to look out for hidden limits that could impact your campaign management and carbon footprint, such as:
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Max. monthly sends
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Capped lists
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Segmentation options
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Platform branding
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Limited user seats
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to selecting the right platform, which is why it’s important to compare service providers to find the best platform to fit your needs. At Orange Bird, our dedicated email marketers have experience across a wide range of platforms and ecosystems and we’ll be delighted to help you find the right resources for your team.
Top Tip: Reduce your company’s carbon footprint by using an email marketing platform that offers low-carbon or carbon-neutral emails. Data centres are expected to emit 2.5 billion tons of CO2 by 2030 but you can limit your impact by using a climate-focused platform.
Segment your lists for optimal targeting
Segmentation increases open rates by 30% and delivers 50% more click-throughs because it gives you the opportunity to send the right message to the right people at the right time. Your company’s contact list is likely to contain a wide range of buyer personas, so generic messaging will fail to engage and motivate a significant proportion of recipients. For example, a decision-making unit can be made up of a range of buyer personas, including:
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Heads of Sustainability, Innovation and Transition
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Finance Directors, Purchasing and CFOs
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Venture Capitalists and Equity Investors
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Managing Directors, COOs and CEOs
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Technical Directors, Lead Engineers and Operations Managers
With accurate segmentation, you can ensure that email content is tailored to the recipient and reflects their interests, objectives, motivators and pain points.
What’s more – segmentation allows you to avoid ‘over-sending’, which reduces the risk of users unsubscribing from your emails and further reduces your carbon footprint.
Top Tip: Before segmenting your email marketing lists, take the opportunity to review your decision-making unit and buyer personas. For expert help identifying and understanding key decision-makers in your sales pipeline, book a free marketing session with our team now!
Orange Bird delivers successful sustainable email marketing campaigns for a range of climate-focused companies.
Increase engagement with advanced personalisation
There are a whole host of tools that can be used to streamline your email marketing and increase its efficacy but personalisation is a must-use tactic that can transform your sustainable email marketing campaigns.
With today’s advanced technology, personalization goes way beyond simply incorporating the recipient’s name into a subject line. In fact, you can use enhanced personalization to display tailored content based on the recipient’s profile and past interactions.
An increased level of personalization doesn’t simply improve CTR and engagement rates; it enables you to deliver increased value to your target audience.
Many email marketing platforms have in-built personalization functionality but you can up the ante by integrating additional platforms, such as a CRM or heatmap tracking, to deliver curated content straight to the recipient’s inbox.
Top Tip: Integrate email marketing with existing marketing and sales activities to personalize content based on user behavior and attributes.
Streamline campaign management with automation
Scheduling regular email newsletters, but are you making the most of what automation can offer?
With custom automation rules, you can send sustainable marketing emails at relevant intervals, based on user behaviour. If a user downloads a product information flyer or White Paper from your website, for example, schedule an email to automatically send days later asking for their opinions and initiate one-to-one engagement with your prospective customer.
You can even incorporate user attributes into automation rules to achieve an extra layer of personalization. For example, “if user downloads [White Paper] and matches [industry], send [Marketing Email 1]”. Here, you’re ensuring that the user receives value-driven content that corresponds to their current stage in their customer journey.
Top Tip: Analyse automation rules in conjunction with one another to ensure multiple emails aren’t triggered during a single website visit. This stops you from bombarding recipients with too many emails and prevents unnecessary CO2 being emitted due to excess sends.
Reduce loading times and data size
If a user opens your email, you only have a fraction of a second to grab their attention – which is why loading times are so important! Optimizing media assets, such as images, can reduce load times and ensure your content is instantly accessible to the recipient.
However, this isn’t the only advantage that comes with limiting the size of your marketing emails. By keeping copy short and succinct, and optimizing media assets, you can reduce the ‘CO2 weight’ of each email and, therefore, minimize any carbon emissions associated with your email marketing campaigns.
Keep lists up to date with reactivation campaigns
Good data hygiene enables you to make sure that your contact lists are filled with relevant target personas who are actively interested in what you’re doing. Keeping lists up to date manually can be challenging and time-consuming but regular reactivation campaigns are an effective and efficient way to make sure your subscribers want to keep hearing from you.
You can automate reactivation campaigns so they send to recipients who haven’t opened or clicked through via an email in the past three, six or 12 months, for example If the user doesn’t actively re-engage via the reactivation email, they’ll be removed from the relevant list.
While some companies are hesitant about voluntarily reducing their list of subscribers, this can actually improve your email marketing success. You’ll get a more accurate picture of how many engaged subscribers you have and be able to create more meaningful content accordingly.
Collaborate with relevant partners
It can take time to build a large list of newsletter subscribers but collaborating with partners can be an effective way to increase brand awareness, drive targeted traffic to your website and give your subscriber list a boost.
Top Tip: Choose partners who have a similar target audience to you but who aren’t competing with similar products, services or technologies.
Both paid placements and free joint campaigns can deliver exceptional results and, depending on who you choose to partner with, you can reach 100,000+ of relevant users via a single campaign and grow your own lists of subscribers.
Providing you collaborate on a campaign that is already being scheduled, you won’t add any extra CO2 emissions either!
Launch a successful, sustainable email marketing campaign now
To find out more about how we help climate-focused companies succeed with sustainable email marketing, get in touch with our expert team now!