Emailing and newsletters: how to evaluate?

As part of our marketing initiatives, we examined the carbon impact of the monthly newsletters sent to our customers.

Our scientific committee has therefore developed a simple methodology to assess the carbon footprint of the monthly emails sent to users of our platform.

Based on the Bilan Carbone methodology, the calculation takes into account the footprint associated with the design of each newsletter, as well as its production and use.

• Calculating the footprint of THE design. Takes into account the working time associated with reading and writing on a desktop, the average power of the desktop, its carbon footprint and its lifespan, relative to the design time. As the people who created this work work from home, other items likely to emit in the context of face-to-face work (such as office furniture and possible travel) have been excluded from the calculation.

• Calculation of the footprint linked to production and USE takes into account the average number of views based on statistics provided by Hubspot, an average reading time in minutes, the weight of the email, the bandwidth and lifecycle of servers in France, the efficiency of datacentres in France, the lifecycle of digital networks and the consumption of national wifi networks, so that storage (on the server side) and distribution via wifi networks and user terminals are included in the calculation.

• GREEN-tips : To reduce the footprint of our newsletter communications as much as possible, we have decided not to include images or videos in our messages and to favour redirections. Our mailing database is also cleaned every month to remove inactive emails, and we allow and encourage unsubscribing (and not just for legal reasons!).