The Sustainability & Performance Of Multichannel Marketing

With everyone telling us that we need to go green and reduce our carbon footprint, the immediate response has been to move all marketing activity online. It is often forgotten that online marketing has a carbon footprint too. The energy needed to power servers brings its own cost to the environment, and it may be more than you think. Not to mention that online marketing often works best when used in tandem with offline assets. Still unsure? See more below. 

Sustainability 

• Producing a Direct Mail with 4 A4 pages of paper and one envelope sent via a service such as Enviromail, which is climate positive, creates 25g of CO2 (Data Services Inc). One email with a 1mg attachment sent a single time creates 19g CO2. This is doubled if it is forwarded or bounces back (Mike Berners-Lee).  

• A typical online billboard ad campaign would emit 5.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide – which is close to being under half (43%) of the average annual carbon footprint of a person in the UK. (based on 20million impressions – Goodloop) 
• The internet has a larger carbon footprint than the airline industry, with online video and display ads generating the most emissions per £1 of media spend, (Essence). 
• Paper and card have a recycling rate of 83% – the highest of any packaging material (Two Sides) 
• Currently 65% of direct mail in the UK comes from recycled resources (Saxoprint). 
• Choosing FSC or PEFC approved paper means that a new tree is planted for each one felled. 

• European forests, where most of the raw material comes from, have grown by an area the size of Switzerland in just 15 years. (Two Sides). 

Performance 

• Direct Mail receives on average 4.4% more responses than email (DMA) 
• Direct mail has an average engagement rate of 95% (Marketreach) 

• 35% of consumers have made a purchase, or made a payment or donation, in the past year as a result of receiving a piece of DM – (IPA Touchpoints) 
• 70% of people have been driven towards an online activity by direct mail – JICMAIL 
• More than a fifth of 15-to-34- year-olds have switched brands after being mailed. (marketreach) 
• When used in tandem with online advertising – a third of case studies saw revenue increase by 35% compared to 23% without (marketreach) 
• Mail makes a longer lasting impression; 35% more than social media adverts and 49% stronger than email (marketreach) 

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Webmart Carbon Calculator 

At Webmart, producing offline marketing with a minimal environmental impact is one of our top priorities. We are currently creating a print carbon calculator which will supply a carbon emissions factor to many of our projects before we proceed. This will give us the chance to minimise the carbon footprint through our supply chain, and give our clients the chance to offset the remaining emissions through an approved scheme.