Emails that support the planet

We recognize that action on climate change is everyone’s responsibility. Not just our people’s, but ours as an organization too. That’s why we’ve decided to fast-track our efforts towards becoming a greener, more environmentally friendly business. Over the last few years, we have made significant and necessary changes to minimize our negative impact on the planet. We are now proud to be an ISO 14001 accredited and certified business.

Combating the climate crisis is an important issue for Dotdigital staff and our customers alike. As the climate crisis finds its way onto agendas around the world, we wanted to lead the way and help our customers and partners on their own journey.

What does that mean for you?

Instead of us telling you, let’s show you the numbers:

By choosing Dotdigital as your customer engagement platform you’re reducing your carbon footprint.

Here’s how:

• Let’s say you sent 1 Million (1,000,000) emails through your account in the last 12 months.
• That’s 215kgs of C02 equivalent emissions saved thanks to our platform being carbon neutral.*
• This amount of emissions is equivalent to charging your smartphone 26,230 times! Assuming you charged your phone once a day, this is equal to 72 years of charging.

That’s certainly something to feel good about. So, how many emails did you send over the last 12 months?

Here is some feedback from real customers:

Mike Kay, Head of Digital Technology, Woodland Trust: ‘Working with Dotdigital has enabled us to form a cohesive email strategy across the organization, reinforcing our brand and allowing our email channels to work harder for our cause. Our opens are up 16%, we’re 26% up on unique click-throughs, have 3% less send volumes, and are 60% up on revenues attributed to email. Being an environmental charity, it is important for us to partner with businesses that share our values on protecting nature and the environment and we are pleased to see Dotdigital’s ongoing commitment.’ ‘Working with Dotdigital has been a great experience, it feels like they are an extension of our own team, they understand our organization and our aims, and are always on hand to help us push to do more.’

Julie Mathers, CEO & Founder, Flora and Fauna:  ‘I love using Dotdigital, the marketing automation programs are so easy and important to my business and I’ve seen great success especially with the loyalty programs I designed. We try to the best of our ability to align with the most sustainable suppliers out there, Dotdigital made perfect sense for us with their commitment to Project DotGreen which aligns with our own brand identity, values, and culture.’

How can you use this in your own marketing

Shout about how your emails are carbon neutral to all of your customers – we’ve already done the work, so you can celebrate and tell everyone all about it.

• Why not include a statement on your emails, something like:

‘This message was sent with Dotdigital, a carbon-neutral company. Dotdigital offset all their measured greenhouse gas emissions, including Scope 1, Scope 2, and selected Scope 3 emissions.’

Want some further information? We have a whole article about it here.

• Use the above baseline equation to work out how much you have saved by using Dotdigital and let your customers know.
• Start some sustainable initiatives within your business and join us in the fight to save the planet. 

What’s next?

We are already carbon neutral and strive to reduce our emissions at source, we have done that by investing in green hosting infrastructure, changing the way we work, who we work with, and making sure our offices are using renewable energy. We have a very low amount of residual emissions and currently, we offset those with supporting gold standard GHG reduction projects. These include clean cooking projects in India and Ghana and supporting the UK’s Woodland Trust.

But we want to go further. We are pleased to announce that we are committed to being net-zero by the end of our financial year in 2030, a full 20 years ahead of the timeline set out in the Paris Agreement to limit global heating to 1.5 C.

We continue to look out for standards for net-zero that will hopefully be announced at COP26. For now, we are using information from the Science Based Targets initiative to guide our net-zero ambition.

Becoming “net zero” means reducing our emissions to a level where only truly unavoidable emissions remain. We will then look to partner with innovative partners to offset these “residual” emissions with GHG removal projects, (nb different from reduction) which remove GHG emissions directly from the atmosphere and store them for long periods of time, for example as rock or biochar.

Stats from Dotdigital**

• There are no net greenhouse gas emissions for sending emails with Dotdigital.
• We reduced our CO2 emissions by 40% in 2020-21 compared to 2019-20.  And we offset the remaining emissions.
• Our offset greenhouse gas emissions from our last financial year (2020-21) is the equivalent of taking nearly 140 cars off the road.
• By using ultra efficient data centres, Dotdigital reduced its emissions by 3800t CO2e in 2019-20 compared to the equivalent low efficiency data centres.  Equivalent to a reduction of 9m vehicle miles travelled!
• Our support of the Woodland Trust has helped:
  • restore nearly an acre of ancient woodland
  • plant 330 trees on land bought by the Trust
  • generate over £3700 through fundraising for next year’s funds

*We utilized Microsoft Azure’s sustainability calculator to understand what our emissions would be if we were using a low-efficiency data center. Including calculating the potential emissions produced by our key cloud providers & data centers if they were not using renewables.

**In 2019-20 the emissions were 378t CO2. For 2020-21 the emissions were 230t CO2 for GHG scopes 1, 2 and 3 (which cover business travel, major cloud infrastructure providers, remote workers, data centers & hosting, transmission & distribution losses, and employee commuting).

Where possible green energy suppliers & third-party providers are used within our business activities. For unavoidable emission activities, all of our measured Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions and key Scope 3 emissions (including business travel, major cloud infrastructure providers, and data centers) have been offset with high-quality carbon reduction projects from Climate Care, following the Oxford Offsetting principles. More information can be found in our SECR section of our annual report. 

Based on data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency.