When people think about sustainability in marketing, email isn't usually a channel that comes to mind. But how much of an environmental impact do emails have? We sat down with James Gill, co-founder of EcoSend to discuss just that. From their journey as ‘the planet’s favourite email marketing platform’, to the future of sustainable email, check out our conversation below for some eye-opening insights!

EcoSend’s mission is to eliminate the carbon footprint of email marketing. What inspired you to start this journey, and how do you measure the impact you've made so far?

I met my co-founder at school. He knew more about code, and I knew more about design, so we started with websites and evolved into software. We were building our previous company, GoSquared, for over 10 years and turned it into a successful business. It grew largely through email, with a weekly newsletter and inbound marketing. We met up as a team on one of the hottest days on record, and someone had shared a report asking, ‘Did you know that sending an email creates a carbon footprint?’. We had never thought about it and it led us on a learning journey. “The cloud” sounds fluffy and virtual, but it’s also physical: thousands of computers in massive buildings, and the amount of energy needed to construct and run these facilities is huge. We wanted to make an impact, and it seemed almost no one was even talking about sustainability, let alone digital sustainability. That’s when we thought, let’s build a product here to be a force for good in the industry.

Many people don’t realise that email marketing has an environmental impact. Can you explain how traditional email platforms contribute to digital carbon emissions and how EcoSend addresses this issue?

An influential book for us was Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood where he breaks down how to design and build websites to be as energy efficient as possible. You can take any concept in Tom’s book and apply it to email. When we look at digital sustainability concerning web design, it’s largely about data transfer. You want to make an effective web page that achieves its goals with the least amount of resources. Another area is the assets - with email, there’s the added factor where, unlike a web page, which is viewed maybe a thousand times in a day, an email might be viewed a thousand times but is then stored as well. There’s also the question of who you're sending to. Marketers love to say, I've got 10,000 people on my email list. Great, but do you need that many? If you can avoid sending to disengaged people, everybody wins. You don't interrupt customers, you don't reduce your reputation as a sender, and you don't use unnecessary energy.

Did you face any skepticism or pushback from businesses when introducing the concept of sustainable email marketing?

Initially, there was our own skepticism. At the time, we’d been building software for a long time and never heard about sustainability in this realm, so is it a thing? And is it a big enough thing? Businesses, especially bigger ones, really struggle to make changes. For companies that have hardware or real estate, it can be hard and expensive. Switching to EcoSend is a relatively easy change in the grand scheme of things. It’s also very visual and high-impact in terms of what you are communicating to the world around you. We’ve had many customers change to us, and it’s led to conversations within their organisation or amongst their customers about those values. So that’s how I would counter skepticism around the argument that email doesn't seem like the biggest environmental challenge. Even if you make small changes, at a large enough scale, the knock-on effects are real.

EcoSend offers transparent metrics on email carbon emissions and offsetting. Why is this level of reporting important, and how do customers typically use these insights?

We're always trying to step up our game here. We've still got some way to go in terms of our reporting abilities, and customers want those for all sorts of reasons. Often, it’s part of the storytelling. Marketers want to tell their audience what their business is doing. Around the world, there are more regulations coming in around publicly reporting sustainability metrics. With initiatives like B Corp, you have to share an impact report every three years. So, the numbers we provide are often used in those scenarios. On a more fundamental level, in the world of sustainability, you have to build a foundation of trust, and transparency is integral to that. There's a lot of greenwashing out there and I think the only way to cut through that is with transparency. What are you doing, and what are you willing to share? For us, we know that the more transparent we get, the better we get and we want to set that example for others.

Aside from carbon footprint reporting, are there any other sustainability-related metrics businesses could track in their digital marketing efforts?

This is definitely an area that I’m interested in. I don’t necessarily have the strongest suggestions on new metrics. I do think that there is a danger of oversimplifying. Two different companies doing a carbon assessment of a business could very comfortably give you two different answers. We’ve seen that there’s a lot more that could and should be measured, but there’s also a lot that can’t. I was talking to someone recently about their business, and I found them inspiring. They acquired land in Scotland and started to rewild this plot of land to bring all sorts of biodiversity to an area that was otherwise an industrial site. How do you measure that? I think there are all sorts of things like that where the impact is the priority and is so obvious, and the measurement is secondary.

How do you see sustainability reporting evolving in digital marketing? Do you think that in the future there could be an industry standard for tracking the environmental impact of digital campaigns?

I think that would be really interesting, and I would be up for that. A big challenge that we face at the moment is the lack of standardisation and transparency. Great organisations are tackling this, like the Green Web Foundation, for example. They publish methodologies for how to track the carbon footprint and energy consumption of web services. Then, there are people tackling it from a technical level and some who focus on broader cost-based estimates. Certain approaches are well understood in the world of accountancy, but what we want to do is ensure estimates make sense at the technical level. There's a middle ground there to be found, and I think your question touches on not just email but also digital campaigns. In that space, you've got all of your other channels. What is Meta or TikTok willing to share about the climate impact of their operations? More standardisation would enable some of these parties that are currently very closed off to have much more transparency and ultimately enable marketers to make more informed choices.

What role do you see EcoSend playing in setting industry standards for digital sustainability? Do you think more tech companies will follow suit, and how can they be encouraged to do so?

I look at businesses like Wholegrain Digital as being hugely inspirational for our own journey and I want EcoSend to be one of those businesses that inspires others. I think it’s our responsibility to show what can be done. The fashion world looks at companies like Patagonia as inspirational businesses, and I strive for EcoSend to be like that, setting examples and being transparent about what we’re doing and trying to do. We've got a lot of work ahead of us but that's a big part of how I see our impact – showing what we’re doing as a path for other tech or software companies to take. You may think you're too small to make a difference, but you can have an incredibly big impact, and we’re proof of that. So I would like to think that we've got a lot of opportunities ahead to inspire and drive change. We’ve been doing this for two years, and we’re only just scratching the surface.

As digital sustainability becomes a bigger priority, what innovations or trends do you foresee shaping the future of email marketing and eco-conscious digital marketing strategies?

With email marketing, it’s being conscious of where it sits in the landscape. For the last 20-plus years, people have been saying email is dead. I think the very nature of its openness has enabled it to survive massive shifts. Things pose both risks and opportunities in the email space and AI is a big unknown there. We'll see how things develop, but using AI to craft messages and then consume and summarize those messages could have a profound change on how the medium evolves. Looking at email as this independent channel, I feel optimistic and emboldened by the growth of more independent services and I think it has a very bright future ahead. As long as businesses and individuals want to have a direct relationship with the people they write to and connect with, email is going to keep growing.

What are your long-term goals for EcoSend? Are you planning any exciting new features or expansion plans that align with your mission to build the world’s most sustainable software business?

We really feel like we’re only just getting started with EcoSend. We know that the B Corp movement itself is growing massively with over 10,000 members around the world. We see that as a bit of a proxy for people and businesses that care and we want to be a part of helping where we can. When we started, the whole mission was to eliminate the carbon footprint of email marketing. I think that has shifted to being just one of our goals. Today, our overall mission is to make email a force for good. We really believe there’s a lot of impact that can come from that. In many ways, we see it as our duty to help good businesses grow online and I think when you look through that lens there is just so much to do.

For businesses looking to make their marketing more sustainable, what are some easy first steps they could take today?

I would say looking at who your suppliers are and the businesses you transact with. Ask yourself: how many software companies do you work with because of their sustainability credentials and not just because they were the ones you first heard about and signed up for? A lot of people don’t necessarily review that and it’s something that the B Corp process encourages people to do. On the digital sustainability piece, the website is crucial. There are great tools out there, like the Website Carbon Calculator, and our Email Carbon Calculator where you can put your website into it and it will give you a score. All of those are great places to start.

The road to sustainable email marketing might seem like a long one, but there are a number of small swaps and changes that can help your company do good, all whilst staying ahead in a competitive landscape. It's something we at ActionRocket are striving for ourselves, so if you need expert guidance on where to start, get in touch and we’d be happy to help!