Why by EcoEmails

When should I consider using an email verification tool?

Working in Sales? Check on your lead lists to save you time Do you work in sales? Do you have a list of leads and prospects? Chasing leads can take up a lot of time - make sure you have the right email address with our email verification service before reaching out. Never-Cleaned Email Databases You've got a list of emails for marketing purposes but have never cleaned or checked the list. Maybe you've never considered using an email verification service. EcoEmails is super easy to use - and we are here to help if you have any issues! Give it a go. You’re a Public Relations pro whose work revolves around pitching journalists and editors. Building your list of contacts is an ongoing goal – but are all those email addresses valid? Before you add them to your database, check them here. This way, you know your pitch is going to reach a real human being and you increase your chances of getting a response. Your email list grows at a slow pace – perhaps you get a new subscriber every other week. Once you see someone signing up for your emails, you can use our free email verifier to check their address. Thus you’ll know whether it’s valid and safe to use, or it’s a spam, abuse, or temporary email. Working in Sales? Check on your lead lists to save you time Do you work in sales? Do you have a list of leads and prospects? Chasing leads can take up a lot of time - make sure you have the right email address with our email verification service before reaching out. New email marketing list? Set up automations to make your life easier Just started out with a new email marketing database? Not sure you have a big budget for marketing? Fear not, our real-time API service is affordably priced and keeps your email database in order without you having to lift a finger.

Reducing the carbon footprint of your email marketing campaigns

Even though it’s still one of the cleaner marketing channels, emailing out to your customer databases still has a carbon footprint. Let’s understand how much energy the emailing industry uses, and how we can reduce it. Emails have a large carbon footprint Did you know cloud computing now accounts for over 3% of global emissions, and can be as high as 6% per nation? So what about emails? Sending one email with a 1MB attachment will emit 3.3g CO2e. So the average B2C company may emit over 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year with weekly email sends to 150k customers. These small things do add up. So let's talk about what you can do to reduce your company's carbon footprint from emails. How can digital marketers go green? Going green is the act of accounting for and finding ways to reduce the environmental impact of your actions. This can include switching to green suppliers or reducing the amount of file storage and emails you send. One awesome initiative is the idea to set an expiry date to your emails, from Zero Carbon Emails. While that's a while away, here are three things you can do today to reduce the carbon footprint of your email marketing department. 1. Target your emails more specifically By not sending all emails to all users, you could save tonnes of carbon emissions! 2. Move to simpler email signatures Did you know every image sent adds an additional 30 - 100 grams of carbon emitted? This doesn't even include the energy from the user's device while they're reading it, perpetual storage, or sending it to more than one device. If you can, we recommend choosing a small image, ideally just a few KB in size. If you can, for internal communications, create a logoless, minimalist signature. For bonus points: delete your email threads & history when you reply to an email. 3. Keep your lists clean Unwanted emails don’t just bother people, they also waste energy. Use EcoEmails to remove spam and unnecessary weight from your email databases!

How to reduce the carbon footprint of your tech stack (without Google)

Building an energy-efficient software stack When we started out building emails.eco, we set out to create a full tech stack on a green web. With the help of the Green Web Foundation, we started from the foundations with a hosting provider. Our other challenge: we didn't want to build on one of the big baddies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft). Firstly, we were shocked to find that hosting suppliers are in short demand! Success Awaits We finally found a hosting company in Germany that runs on renewable energy and offers bare metal servers which was a good starting point for us. Building off that offering we could have gone down the route of installing the usual Linux based hosting environment with Docker, Kubernetes and so on but we decided to look at the energy efficiency of that stack and, combined with our needs, we decided to go another path. FreeBSD and jails Our stack is pretty simple. We have a bunch of elixir/phoenix apps plus some monitoring so spinning up a complete hosting environment for massive flexibility when we only run on a single physical server looked like a massive waste of resources. We installed FreeBSD and decided to build on top of FreeBSD jails, ZFS and all the other goodness that comes with the base operating system. The massive plus of that approach is that we don’t waste any energy with abstraction layers. FreeBSD jails are a thin permission layer around the FreeBSD kernel that doesn’t burn any CPU cycles for emulation like docker would and, because our setup is rather small, we don’t need the overhead of Kubernetes to add flexibility to a setup that only needs to change within hours not seconds. Ansible for good old DevOps To automate the setup we decided to put everything into Ansible as the good old workhorse in the industry. Having our entire setup in one config management system means we can change hosting companies within about an hour if we find one that has better carbon reporting. We can also add hosts in regions we currently under-serve as we add customers there. Finding a suitable hosting company is reduced to the value alignment with us because all we need on the tech side is an IP address to point our config management to. This gives us the flexibility to work with pretty much anyone. If you are interested in how we built that stack then check the blog frequently as we keep releasing snippets of Ansible config, parts of phoenix code, more in-depth reasons for design decisions and so on. The final result Ultimately we're now happy to say we not only have a zero-emissions stack, we also have an energy efficient one! We'll be preparing and publishing our carbon report next year.

Three tips & tricks to boost your average open rates for email marketing campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most impactful strategies to acquire new customers and nurture leads. Marketers report email is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined! So we've collected a few tips and tricks for how to make sure your emails are hitting the inbox, and being read, every campaign. First, what is a good open rate? According to a Mailchimp report, the industry average open rate is 22%. But this can vary depending on your business or domain, e.g. non-profits usually average over 30%. Overall, 15 - 20% is a good open rate for marketing / sales emails. The more personalised the content and the better the timing, the higher the open rates. Write catchy attention-grabbing subject lines Pull out your most topical, funniest, most shocking email titles and see the difference! Here are some things you could try to use in your subject lines: Using first names Headline news Emojis Ask a question or for help Our rule of thumb is whatever sparks curiosity, and doesn't result in an unsubscribe, is likely to boost open rates! Time your email marketing campaigns When do most people check their email inboxes? Sending your emails at a practical and non-stressed time for your audience is a great way to improve deliverability. The best time to send your email campaign is: 6 AM: If you want them to be reading it first thing in the morning, over their breakfast, or on a commute to work. 10 AM: Deliver if it's work-related, or if reading it would be best done in the office / at work. 12 PM: Sending a whimsical or topical email which people could debate about over lunch? Emailing at lunch might be the time for you. 8 PM: This is the latest we'd recommend sending an email. Always send emails during daytime (according to contacts’ timezone) to ensure good open rates. Make sure you're only sending emails to real accounts Over time it's very easy to accumulate email addresses in your database which add to the number of recipients, but not the open rates for your emails. The more emails you send to untrustworthy or inactive accounts, the more likely you are to get flagged as a spam sender yourself. Instead of paying for a higher tier of email sends, consider turning on our email verifier to clean your databases for you. This way you can rest assured your databases are clean without sending on storage and campaign sends.

Three Reasons You Should Use an Email Verification System

Reason One: Save money on email campaigns and database storage Over time it's very easy to accumulate email addresses in your database which add to the number but not the conversion rates of your business. Instead of paying for a higher tier, consider turning on real-time syncs to automatically clean your databases for you. This way you can rest assured your databases are clean without spending excess money on storage and campaign sends. Reason Two: Build your domain reputation Does your company have multiple different customer signup points, contact forms, and mailing lists? Over time it's very easy to accumulate email addresses over time. What some people don't know is that it up to 25% of your email addresses can be invalid, especially if the databases have been around a while. Slowly, as well as limiting your open rates, this can also build up your risk of going into spam folders or having a worse domain reputation. Reason Three: Reduce your carbon footprint by decreasing your storage and sending requirements Did you know every email we send has a carbon footprint? While digital communications are a low-carbon option, all our online activities do have an associated carbon cost.

What is the carbon footprint of an email marketing campaign?

Did you know? ✈️ One B2C email campaign emits more carbon than a flight from London to New York. ✉️ 100,000 emails = 1,000 tonnes emissions. ☁️ Cloud computing now accounts for over 3% of global emissions, and can be as high as 6% per nation. How much does emailing customers add to our carbon footprint? Sending one email with a 1MB attachment will emit 3.3g CO2e. So the average B2C company may emit over 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year with weekly email sends to 150k customers. These small things do add up. So let's talk about what you can do to reduce your company's carbon footprint from emails.