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Every year, Earth Day inspires hundreds of millions of people from almost every nation on earth to do something to protect the environment. It is a day of action, community and purpose.
Earth Day offers marketers an opportunity to engage with email subscribers about this day of environmental awareness and volunteerism. But like any email marketing strategy, you first need to know your target audience.
Who celebrates Earth Day?
Not everyone who participates in Earth Day considers themselves environmentalists. People volunteer and get involved for different reasons. Some see great urgency in their actions. Others see small, practical steps that make the world a better place. It can be something as simple as planting a tree or something as grand as advocating for new legislation.
Almost every company can find a way to uniquely target a specific customer segment on Earth Day.
Whatever you do, make sure your organization is walking the walk and not just talking the talk. Earth Day email campaigns that are viewed as inauthentic, self-serving, or hypocritical can easily backfire.
See which of the following Earth Day email marketing strategies and ideas you can adapt to your business.
1. Segment your list
As with any marketing campaign, your Earth Day emails will be far more successful if they reach the right audience. This type of message resonates most with people who have strong feelings about nature, the environment and sustainability.
How can you segment your list for Earth Day email campaigns?
If you sell a sustainable product line, you could use this data to create your Earth Day segment. For example, American Eagle could send this jeans email to subscribers who they know are interested in denim and other behaviors that might indicate an environmentally conscious shopper.
Another option is to conduct a survey, preferably weeks or months before Earth Day. The details of the survey depend on the type of business you have.
The goal is to include at least one question that identifies the people on your list who will respond positively to the Earth Day news.
Another approach is to send an email with a link to an article about Earth Day. Motivate people to click on it and then add them to your Earth Day segment.
Now you have an audience ready.
2. Make Earth Day emails emotional
Anger, fear, joy, belonging, celebration, unity – there are many emotions you can use on Earth Day. You can use any of these emotions in your messages, but ultimately Earth Day emails should be about hope and solving problems.
If your company has a line of eco-friendly products, illustrate how they help solve a specific problem. Show statistics, videos, stories and the consequences of the harmful approach and explain how your brand is taking on the mission to create change.
Here's an Earth Day email example from a furniture store that highlights the problem of disposable furniture ending up in landfills. They then bring emotions into the story of their sustainable furniture. Essentially, they present “quality products” through the lens of Earth Day values.
Reel uses the concept of unity to discuss charity work in Africa. They appeal to subscribers' emotions – discussing how people in Africa often struggle to meet basic needs like food and water – and talk about how sustainable companies and charities work together to meet these needs.
Remember, Earth Day is about action. People don't act if they don't feel anything. Find an emotion to use in your Earth Day email marketing campaign to motivate your customers to take the action you want them to take.
3. Showcase sustainable products and practices
If you have sustainable product lines, this is definitely the time to highlight them. You may want to spread the messages across multiple emails to clearly highlight the wide variety of products available and the different environmental impacts.
Here's an email example from Under the Canopy, which sells linens and towels. In this email they highlight the organic and chemical-free process used to create their cotton-based products.
If you don't have a sustainable product line, highlight the progress your company has made in other areas, such as: B. when selecting responsible suppliers or introducing environmentally friendly processes in the office.
4. Support environmentally friendly causes
This is probably the easiest Earth Day marketing idea. Simply search for a cause, nonprofit, or action related to land, sea, air, or animals that relates to your business in some way.
Then, let your customers know that you will donate a portion of sales to that nonprofit in the weeks leading up to Earth Day. This is called cause marketing and is very effective when used on the right target group.
You can make your donation pledge apply to all of your products or just selected products.
This email from Leesa does a great job. There are some tips for how everyone can be a little kinder to the planet, but rather than just making suggestions for others, it's about what the company is doing to contribute. They reaffirm their previous activities (planting 275,000 trees) and announce a new, intensified effort for the future.
5. Demonstrate impact and progress
If you have a sustainable product, find a way to calculate the positive impact of that product on the environment. This could be the amount of water or energy saved, the number of trees saved, the amount of recyclable materials used, or the number of animals preserved.
This email from Bulb Energy uses fun statistical analogies to show how much their subscribers are saving in carbon dioxide emissions. For this company, it's pretty easy. But almost any company can do something similar if they have held Earth Day promotions in the past.
Many large organizations publish annual sustainability reports detailing corporate responsibility initiatives. These reports often contain facts, figures, and predictions that you can use in Earth Day emails to demonstrate your brand's commitment to the health of the planet.
Good advertising is good for business. Let's say your company invests in solar panels or participates in a community wind or solar project. Highlight third parties and news organizations that have written about your environmental work.
Or brag to your customers and show exactly what they've accomplished, whether by using your products or completing projects of their own. Likewise, you could highlight employee efforts from the company's volunteer days, showing that you don't just talk about sustainability, but are actually committed to it.
If you have joined a nonprofit or other cause in the past, communicate the impact of previous years' efforts and use them to sustain and add momentum to this year's campaign.
6. Earth Day emails that inspire outdoor activities
This is another way to build community goodwill toward your business. Give your subscribers something to do that has to do with loving the planet. Earth Day is not only about protecting the environment, but also about appreciating its beauty and enjoying nature responsibly.
There are several examples of Earth Day emails in an article from MailCharts. Sports brand Puma encourages its customers to run outside. A bicycle company encourages its readers to cycle. Pretty simple thing. But it is effective.
Any health or fitness product company can do this. This also applies to most food and leisure companies.
But action can also mean signing a petition, volunteering, buying a sustainable product, trying a meatless burger, etc.
Even better, you can motivate your customers to take photos or videos of themselves doing the actions you want them to do and then share them on social media or send them to you, helping you create your own customer-centric, user-centric business can create. generated content.
Your Earth Day email needs to look good everywhere
Don’t let your Earth Day campaign fail because you didn’t test it before hitting send. You can spend months refining your audience and your message, but at the end of the process you will fail because of one mistake.
Distorted images, misaligned text, embarrassing typos – these and many other errors can creep into your email campaigns and kill the goodwill and response you're trying to generate.
Email on Acid Helps is an email testing tool that allows you to preview your emails on over 90 such devices and platforms, so you can be sure your emails always look right for all your readers.
And it has a find and fix email editor, so you can double-check every link, image, and word and fix problems immediately. Additionally, you can optimize opens and compare them with spam filters to ensure the maximum number of subscribers have access to your message.
This is an important final check to do before sending anything to your list – especially emails as important as targeted Earth Day campaigns.
Author: Laura Horkey
As Email on Acid's Email Marketing Specialist, Laura is somewhat obsessed with email strategy and often delves into A/B testing, subscriber behavior patterns, and occasional pop culture references in email copy. Outside of work, you can find her at a baseball field or around a backyard campfire with her husband, two children, and poodle mixes somewhere in Northwest Arkansas.
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
