The Email Wars

With all the hype this year on GREEN marketing showing up in email marketing examples I have covered, I got to thinking… Is there really an impact directly tied to email marketing vs other forms of marketing. I did a search in Google tonight on a variety of terms like “green email marketing”, “environmental impact of email marketing” and “energy impact studies on email vs direct mail” and found a lot of results that were inconclusive. I can understand that using email as much as we do now changes the immediate impact on natural resources from a standpoint of paper, fossil fuels to deliver mail in planes, boats and trucks, but what is the real trade off? If you think about all of the servers, computers plugged in and mobile devices using power, does it truly reduce the use of energy? I mean as I type on a laptop right now while not plugged in I could argue an immediate savings on energy, but in the end I need to charge this battery again and I am on a wifi unit that is plugged in while connected to the cloud of servers running the web and this blog software.

So did it really make a difference?

Here is a pitch I read on an email web site this week, does this really tell the truth or is this an example of “green washing”.

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“Help Save Our Trees. Make a GoldMail.”

Every year billions of greetings cards and newsletters are sent all over the world, whose manufacture means millions of trees are destroyed.

It occurred to me that if I could encourage some of us who care about our environment to switch to GoldMail when sending greetings and newsletters, maybe we could save some of these trees.

This seems like something that lots of us could easily do, as GoldMail messages are actually more personal and fun, and easy to create.

I also like the fact that they are free!

So if you don’t mind, do me a favor and give GoldMail a try, and let’s see if together we can do a little bit to Help Save Our Trees.
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Has anyone seen any studies out there on this issue? I can find a ton from the DMA and DM News citing the impacts of DM, but nowhere can I find the impact of email.

Just a thought tonight as I think this is something we should investigate this year before all the marketers herald email marketing as sustainable and green.

What are your thoughts?