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Hey, !
I saw a reel recently that said that if every person in the world deleted just 10 emails in their inbox, they'd save around 43,000 tonnes of CO2. To be clear, that's the equivalent of driving
almost 172 MILLION kilometres in your petrol car.
It's because most of our emails live in the cloud which, far from being the environmental utopia it sounds like, is actually a bunch of data centre that produce even more carbon than the airline industry.
The more I learn about this, the more I question my responsibilities and actions as both a business owner and a digital consumer.
Does every reel I put online, every blog post I publish, every story I share, every email I send have environmental
repercussions?
At the end of July, I launched a new digital resource, the Brand Messaging Toolkit. Contrary to all marketing wisdom, I sent just one email about it to my community (delivered twice to those who didn't open the email the first time).
Sure, it's not good for business. But it just felt right.
My decision not to inundate my community with emails seemed like an ethical no-brainer.
Ethical on two levels: my social and environmental responsibility.
We're all
overwhelmed with info. They don't call it the information era for nothing.
In any one day, we can be flooded with digital stimulation from our social media, inbox, private texts, streaming services...
As business owners, we're contributing to the noise, the overwhelm every time we publish anything. Email. Reel. TikTok. Podcast episode. Blog post.
Each time we create material, we're asking our readers and audiences to let us occupy their brains for a bit. I want to make sure I deserve that time, rather than contributing unnecessarily to overstimulation and overwhelm.
This motivation has been on my mind for a while.
But in learning about the environmental impact of both my communications and my digital consumerism, it's reinforced my desire to scale back.
What if we based our marketing not on frequency but on intention? Let's call it marketing minimalism.
It could look like:
- Sending out one email a fortnight or a month, instead of one every week (or, god forbid, every single day)
- Creating only high-value freebies. Things that are actually WORTH paying for. A true service to the community.
- Posting less on social media - and only when we've truly got something to say.
- Reducing out podcasts to seasons or making the episodes shorter
- Reducing the number of live broadcasts we do on socials (the most energy intensive activity on Instagram, according to this 2020 study - aka before reels came out)
- Posting photos instead of videos
I haven't found the answer to marketing minimalism yet but I imagine it'll be a fair amount of trial and error - we've still got to earn a living, after all.
In the meantime, I can at least make some changes as a consumer. I've starting deleting emails more often - and emptying my bin too! I'm trying to scroll less and be intentional about who I follow and subscribe to...
... Which
circles back to the subject line you saw when you opened this email, . I hope my emails are helpful but if you don't find them valuable - or if you just don't have the time to read them - this is the nudge you might have needed to keep scrolling on down to the bottom of this email and ... *sigh* ... unsubscribe.
Until the next email (or not 😉)
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