Digital pollution is very well known today. In 2020, it even exceeded the carbon footprint of civil aviation in France for the first time.
Digital pollution includes the manufacture, use, and lack of recycling of electronic equipment, video streaming (whose annual global pollution is equivalent to the pollution generated by a country like Spain), and data storage. This is where emails come in.
So how can you manage them as effectively as possible? Here are all our tips.

Email Marketing
Email marketing is the French people’s favorite channel, and it works: with an open rate of 17.8%, email marketing is 40 times more effective than social media (all the figures:https://mondedumail.com/statistiques-emailing/). It’s no secret: emails also pollute, and with 8 to 10 billion emails exchanged worldwide in 1 hour, it is a non-negligible source of pollution. The ecological impact is influenced by email storage, especially attachments.
The best advice is obviously to encourage people to clean and empty their inbox regularly. However, what can you do as a company to limit the sending of marketing emails?
Nowadays, no one wants to do without an email inbox, and no company can imagine stopping email marketing. Progress has its advantages, but today it is necessary to become aware of its impact on our environment and act accordingly.
Marketing automation companies like Webmecanik help you send more effective emails. By targeting better and adapting your emails to your leads’ actions, you ensure that you deliver the right message at the right time, using as few emails as possible. Goodbye obsolete databases (and rock-bottom open rates), endless email series (and pointless ones), hello hot leads, nurturing, and rising conversion rates!
To enrich your database in a relevant way, you set up forms at key points on your website and blog. These allow you to collect the email addresses of qualified leads. Why send 10,000 emails if 9,800 of your contacts have no idea who you are and therefore will not open your email? As we are 100% GDPR-compliant, we also help you set up a preference center to make subscribing and unsubscribing from certain emails easier.
Then your campaigns adapt to your customers’ behavior. The last 3 emails were not opened? Change the content, or try again in a few months!
And yes, rather than multiplying your emails, multiply your content (need advice? )
Hosting
More content means more data to host. At Webmecanik, we have chosen local servers, OVH for example, which cares about and is involved in environmentally friendly initiatives. By choosing nearby partners, you avoid going through hundreds of routers, which consume a lot of energy to operate and to cool!
Do you remember the email sign-offs saying “print only if necessary”? In 2020, it is time to replace this message with “keep only if necessary”! You can also take the opportunity to share your good tips: Ecomail and Cleanfox, THE combo for clean emails!
At Webmecanik, this is an essential topic that we are currently working on. We want to understand the real impact of email marketing and quantify the ecological benefits of marketing automation. As part of our approach to reducing our environmental impact, we are continually looking for ways to improve at our scale.
These are all the humble tips we give at Webmecanik for 2.0 marketing emails: more effective and less polluting! At the same time, we can only advise you to follow this advice within your company as well as in your personal life!