The Rise of Green Marketing: How Environmental Consciousness is Shaping Digital Marketing

Jennie Wright [00:00:06]:

Hi. This is The Acquire Podcast from the The Phonic Podcast Network and I’m your host Jennie Wright. I’m a list build and lead generation strategist as well as fractional CMO. And in this Podcast, I always try and dive deep into the world of list building and online events and I try and empower and help entrepreneurs just like you and marketers with the knowledge and strategies to master these essential business growth tactics. And before I get started, I am going to apologize. I am I currently have bronchitis. And instead of missing The show and not recording, I’m going to just muddle my way through. So if I sound a little different, it’s not a sound effect.

 

Jennie Wright [00:00:48]:

You know why. So let’s jump in really to, big topics that I’m really excited to talk about. And one of them is about green marketing and how that actually works in the digital space versus if you had like an actual product where you could use say recycled plastic and things. And the other one is Chrome is finally going to disappear The third party cookies. The is a decision obviously by Google. All the other browsers got rid of third party cookies years ago. And so I just wanna have a quick conversation about how that’s gonna impact your marketing if at all. And it’s just a reminder as to, like, how we need to look at permission based marketing a little bit differently.

 

Jennie Wright [00:01:27]:

So let’s talk about the 3rd party cookies first, and then I wanna get into the green marketing side. So 3rd party cookies, you probably aren’t using them directly, but, indirectly, you’ve used them before. So if you’ve ever run a paid ad or anything that, has used a third party service to track any kind of cookies before, you definitely have used that. Now when g d GDPR came on board a couple of years ago, that meant you actually had to, ask permission for cookies, and some of those were third party cookies. Now most people use a first party cookie, and that is on your website for, say, like, Google Analytics or Semrush, things like The. And everybody should have a cookie notice on on their website. And if you don’t, please do so. And you should be looking at ways to make sure that you let everybody know that you are using cookies if you are.

 

Jennie Wright [00:02:21]:

But this third party cookie piece is really kind of interesting and very important. Mostly, Meta used third party cookies or uses third party cookies. And Chrome, obviously built by Google, was supposed to get rid of them in 2022, but it didn’t give developers enough time apparently to be able to, oh, you know, figure out a workaround in some way, shape, or form. So they extended that deadline to 2024. And, beginning this month, like, beginning of April 2024, they’ve started to now cut these back. And by the end of 2024, they will have completely eliminated these 3rd party cookies. So it’s really, really kind of interesting if you’re into sort of the tech side of things. And, so they really did extend this timeline to try and help people, which I thought was kind of interesting considering Safari and Firefox stopped using these things a long time ago.

 

Jennie Wright [00:03:16]:

But it does impact b2b marketing the most. Chrome has the largest browser market share globally with, I think, 63.47% as of August of 2023. That’s a lot. So what do we have to do in the meantime? So it it just pivots a little bit on your permission based marketing. So looking at things like web push notifications, you have to ask people’s consent for sharing other people’s information. They can choose to allow or block your request. That’s a really great first step in permission based marketing. Look at chatbot marketing.

 

Jennie Wright [00:03:53]:

So if you’re using a chatbot to initiate communication, and then you ask leads if you can message The, you actually should be getting that permission. And then if you’re using any sort of SMS and email marketing, then you’re absolutely going to ask permission for contact. So one of my clients, just ran a series of webinars, and they wanted to SMS. They wanted to text message the people who register for the webinar, but they didn’t ask direct permission, and so we couldn’t. And that person was like, well, why can’t we? And, you know, there’s a whole big of a legality thing because if you send a message and the person says, hey. Look. I didn’t authorize you to do this. You’re in the wrong.

 

Jennie Wright [00:04:33]:

You don’t wanna do that. So asking those people to give you their information and share it and give you permission to contact by that method is incredibly important. So a couple of best practices just for you to consider, to really cons just excel in this sort of, like, consent based marketing world is making it super easy for people to opt in, but also to opt out. For some reason, I have gotten on a bunch of email lists where people are constantly mailing my main email address and saying, hey. Do you want me to build your website? Hey. Do you wanna do this? Hey. Do you wanna do that? And I cannot opt out of these emails because they’re not giving me a way to do it. And a lot of them will say at the bottom, hey, if you don’t wanna get these anymore, just hit reply.

 

Jennie Wright [00:05:20]:

I’m not hitting reply. Luckily, I can hit, you know, block sender and things like The, but they’re actually breaking the rules, and I’m sure you would never do that. So making it easy for users to opt in and opt out, massively important, and then letting users know what type of information you intend to send to them. So if somebody opts in for webinar a, it does not mean that you can then market them for webinar b or product x. You have to say in some sort of a footer Wright statement somewhere, terms and conditions, whatever it is, to say, like, hey. By By opting into this email list to receive communications about this webinar, you’re also agreeing to receive future communications from Jenny Wright. And I always do that. It’s always in the footer, and and also in my privacy policy as well.

 

Jennie Wright [00:06:06]:

So and I always have an unsubscribe button. I actually have 2 in my emails, usually at the tippity top, and then one definitely at the bottom. So I’ve gotta make sure that people have an easy opt in and an easy opt out. Obviously, you know, what kind of information I’m gonna send them, which we just talked about. And then I’m going to let people know, and you should too, how often I’m going to contact them. Because if you have, you know, somebody signs up for your email list and you’re on the whole Seinfeld sequence, daily email kind of thing, they might not be prepared for that. So one of your first emails, and this is part of automations that I love, is sending an automated email that says, hey. This is who I am.

 

Jennie Wright [00:06:43]:

This is what I’m gonna do. This is what you should expect from me, and this is how often I’m going to contact you. And I always try and set that up so people just have an, you know, an expectation of what they’re gonna get. And then make sure you give people the freedom to manage their preferences, such as which topics they can subscribe to or unsubscribe to, and creating incentives for users to give you their data, like rewarding people who share, official work emails for a free product and so on. So on the, managing your preferences, it’s a really great idea that if you’re going to email people about a sales, like, a sales, you know, push or a launch, some of those emails at the bottom, you can easily say, hey. Look. If you don’t wanna hear anything about this sales launch, but you wanna stay on my list, click here. And I do that often.

 

Jennie Wright [00:07:32]:

And then I have a success page that says, hey. We won’t talk you know, we’re not gonna send you any more emails about x y z, but you’ll receive regular information from our newsletter or something like that. So all in all, this just means that you need to refine your data strategy or it should remind you to refine your data strategy Jason look at your how you’re accessing or utilizing your customer data in things like your digital advertising campaigns and so on. So a successful b to b marketer or b to b CEO or founder is going to really look at their data and how the data that they collect is being used and personalized in email marketing campaigns. So as you’re saying goodbye to these 3 party cookies, if they haven’t affected you, Wright. But if they have, it’s time to review your data strategy, and you’re not gonna be able to buy any third party data from any marketing databases going forward after basically the end of 2024. And this new reality should make you think about what you should do and just kinda be a little bit of a call to action for you in terms of how you need to approach your digital marketing and the way that you look at taking data, basically. So there’s not much more I wanna talk about that because it’s you know, I don’t wanna get too much in the weeds about it.

 

Jennie Wright [00:08:47]:

But I did wanna bring it to your attention so you have something to think about as you’re looking at your marketing going forward. And this is sort of one of those holes in the boat that I love to plug, because a lot of people forget these little pieces, And I’m constantly finding landing pages where we don’t have a link to a privacy policy or terms and conditions at the bottom, which is completely necessary. Even if you’re not running ads, you absolutely have to have it because people have to have an expectation of how you’re using their information. So now let’s shift and talk about green marketing. And you’ve seen green marketing. You’ve also seen some white you know, some some some not so great green marketing where people actually fake it, and we’re gonna talk about that too. But how does this relate to digital marketing? Because it’s not like you can put a sticker on your Tumblr bottle and say it was a 100% recycled plastic because you’re probably not selling a Tumblr bottle. But what can you do to actually be part of the green marketing movement and show people that you care about the environment, show people that you are committed to sustainability, and making sure that you are aware of the environmental impact that your business has.

 

Jennie Wright [00:09:56]:

And if you have a digital business, just because you run everything off of Zoom and you have your courses on Kajabi or you have a, you know, Wright card account, you are still having an environmental impact by the sole thing of using energy. So everything that we do does actually use energy. I’m gonna get into that a little bit. So consumers, your your your clients and your your customers are increasingly, gravitating towards brands that are gonna prioritize the planet, prioritize some green initiatives. And this shift is is still like, it’s still in its early stages for digital marketing, not so much for, you know, brick and mortar businesses, but it’s definitely big and starting to grow in the digital marketing space. So creating or adhering to eco like, eco conscious strategies, I think, is something that people are really going to appreciate, and then there’s gonna be a, you know, an expectation of it. And you should probably look at getting on board early. It’s something that I’m looking into deeply, which is why I want to talk to you about it.

 

Jennie Wright [00:11:01]:

So because everything that we’re doing is having such a massive impact, and whether or not you’re on the side of, you know, you believe in, climate change or not, and, you know, science is real. So, I’ll just put that out there, and we are having an effect. And our digital marketing ecosystem is a significant consumer of energy, and energy isn’t free. It doesn’t grow on trees. So, primarily, this is coming from places like data centers, digital devices, network infrastructures, you know, anything that supports any kind of online activity is a huge draw on the power grid. And even though our practices are both, like, you know, mainly email campaigns and social media, content creation, all of these virtual things have to rely on some physical server, some physical thing that consumes electricity 247. So think of those huge data farms that Google has, that Apple has, that, you know, these huge data farms all over the world that just have servers sitting in an air conditioned environment, and they’re running all the time. These servers need power.

 

Jennie Wright [00:12:10]:

They generate a ton of heat, which needs to be displaced. They need a ton of energy to cool them off, and they need to maintain optimal temperatures. I actually worked for a company for well over a decade, and we had a server room because all of our machines, were, like, running off of these huge, you know, servers. And so we had a server room, and that room was the room that honestly you went into if you wanted to cool off. And you had to have permission to go into that room. You actually had to have a code to get into that room. But a lot of people would kind of sneak in there and cool down because it was constantly air conditioned. So think about that.

 

Jennie Wright [00:12:45]:

And not everybody thinks about that. You don’t actually think about these data firms that have to be maintained and so on. And I know this might seem kinda like I don’t know if this seems kind of redundant or banal to you, but there’s a real importance behind it and people are actually getting on board with, putting their money with companies that are actually thinking about these pieces for the environment. So taking a look and assessing your, you know, your environmental footprint, with your digital marketing activities, I think, is just really gonna be something that people are gonna pay more attention to. It’s critical. You can look at things like digital hosting, and we’re gonna get into a little bit more of this in a bit. But looking at the companies that host your website that are reliant more on green energy is a really great thing to look at. I know that some of them run only on solar power or only on wind power.

 

Jennie Wright [00:13:33]:

That’s a really cool way to sort of offset the carbon footprint that running these server farms does. And so that’s really kinda cool. I think it’s really, really interesting. So if you didn’t think of it before, now you know that digital marketing really contributes to carbon emissions and, with all these electronic devices constantly running. Right? So every online activity that you perform from sending an email to streaming a video, it involves data being processed and stored in these data centers, and they consume so much energy, like I said. And as we know that a lot of our electricity, at least in North America, is generated from fossil fuels. It leads to emissions of greenhouse gases. It produces the disposal of digital devices.

 

Jennie Wright [00:14:20]:

Think of that for a second. You know, I used to work for a company that used to produce rare earth metals from mines in Northern Quebec, Canada, And, one of The, you know, this this metal is called Niobium, and it’s used in the production of of cell phones. And it’s a rare earth metal. It takes a ton of money to mine, like, 1 ounce of this rare earth metal. So all of the you know, and I know a lot of these companies recycle, which is fantastic. Apple, I think, is trying to recycle a 100% of their rare earth metals. I think they’re getting there, which is great. I know other companies are doing the same.

 

Jennie Wright [00:14:55]:

But these digital devices and smartphones and computers, they all contribute in this way to creating of carbon emissions. Right? And digital marketing strategies are incredibly data intensive. They require more and more computational energy and power and storage, and our sector, like our digital sector, our digital online businesses are actually continuing to grow our carbon footprint other than the other way around. And we need to look at ways of reducing it. So who’s doing what and what can you do? Take a look at switching The companies that offer alternatives to how they’re actually drawing power or if they give back or if they offset. So taking a look at green hosting companies, which I mentioned before The derive power from wind or solar, take a look at your website. You can actually reduce your carbon footprint by actually optimizing your website. Didn’t know this until I researched it because I started getting into this recently, and I’m really looking at this as a way to support not only myself, but as my, fractional CMO work, I’m also gonna be looking at the companies that I work with to make sure that they’re looking at these things.

 

Jennie Wright [00:16:06]:

Right? So one of the companies that I was working with as a CMO, their website was incredibly bloated, and it had a ton of high quality images and high quality videos, and the load time was really low. That contributes to the carbon footprint. So you wanna compress, you wanna optimize, you wanna reduce file sizes without sacrificing quality, and you can do that. You can do a lot of, like, the lawless, compression now so that you’re not losing the quality, and it doesn’t look like you’re staring at a bitmap. And as you might be able to tell, my voice is getting a little off, but I will continue to keep going. We’ve got a bit more to go. So take a look at, you know, the software platforms, look at responsive design. And you wanna make sure that the design for your website is responsive automatically, because you wanna be able to size up and size down without having to need a different screen size or minimizing the data transfer and processing, which means you don’t have to have 2 different websites created, The for your, desktop and one for your mobile.

 

Jennie Wright [00:17:14]:

Take a look at, eco friendly digital marketing sort of toolkits and stacks. I love my tech stack. I use, you know, I use click funnels, I use go high level, I use active campaign, Canva, full Adobe suite, all these types of things for my tech stack, but I wanna look at making sure that I’m putting focus towards those eco friendly brands. And so now I’m actually searching to see which ones are. Funny enough, just like it was when, you know, back in the the, you know, couple decades ago, it was hard to find anybody who was recycling anything or offering a 100%, you know, recycled grocery bags and so on. We’re still at that stage in the digital marketing space, so we’re not seeing a ton of providers, but you can find them if you look for them. So you wanna look for companies that are focused on reducing carbon emissions, energy consumption, The they’re trying to reduce their digital waste by using eco friendly tools or recycling, and they’re using different methods to create, maybe communicate, and and make sure they’re, you know, driving value to their customers in a different way. Next, the one of the big things that you can look at, and I love this, is lazy load.

 

Jennie Wright [00:18:32]:

So you may have heard of that. So lazy loading is on your website again, and this is where your images and your videos only load as needed, meaning The only become seen on scroll. And so if it’s, you know, if you only scroll for the first part of the page, you’re not gonna see the other 2 thirds until you scroll. This is gonna save a ton of time. It actually saves a ton of energy too, and so that means it significantly cuts down on the data that’s needed to actually run your website. Pretty cool technique, actually. And, I actually am adopting this into my website. I love using it on clients’ websites, especially on mobile, because not everybody has, you know, 5, you know, 4 k or 5 k, for their for their digital plans.

 

Jennie Wright [00:19:22]:

And so it makes it actually a lot quicker for people to be able to view the website. It also takes into consideration people who don’t have a lot of bandwidth. If you think about it, if you are like, if you’re in Canada and you go up north to cottage country and where there’s, like, a, you know, not so great cell signal sometimes and you wanna open a big website, it has to load everything and it takes forever. If you have lazy load, that means that people in rural area areas that don’t have access to a great signal will still be able to see your website and only see the stuff they need to because they’re not scrolling the whole thing. So you’re gonna get a faster load. So that’s actually really, really good, and and it has a little bit more than just, you know, being an eco friendly thing. It has the the premise of actually helping people out who may not have access to high bandwidth. And then take a look also at the ways that you can sort of give back or be part of the movement.

 

Jennie Wright [00:20:13]:

So what can you add to the conversation in terms of, you know, sharing on your social media that you’re looking at eco conscious options The you’re choosing to lazy load or you’re choosing to compress and sharing that on social media so people know that this is a thing and these are options that they can do. I love that. I’m actually talking about doing that myself, and I’m writing an article about it, which I’m gonna be trying to post on LinkedIn in the short future the near future, I should say. So I think that’s a really good way. But Wright, because there’s always this greenwashing. You know, there’s brands that rush to be eco aligned. There’s brands that fake being eco aligned. The say they’re more eco friendly.

 

Jennie Wright [00:20:56]:

They say they’re doing all the good things, but there’s a real risk of people sort of misleading you, making misleading claims, saying they’re doing one thing and actually doing another, just to claim that environmental Jennie, just to get some clout. I hate The, but I’m telling you that if you do that, people will find out. And you’re smart. I know that you’re gonna see right through this kind of stuff with other brands, so I’m sure you’re gonna see it from people. But if you’re thinking of doing something like that, just don’t. It’s not worth it. So, I think this sort of, like, green marketing idea has legs, and I’m looking at ways to actually put it into summits. One of the things that I’m looking at is with sponsorships and sort of looking at having sponsors for summits that are going to add to the conversation and add more to, you know, the side of of doing better.

 

Jennie Wright [00:21:49]:

I think, you know, and I’ll be honest, this is not something I thought of for I’ve been in business for in this business for, like, over a decade. It’s not something I thought of. I have done the charitable side of things. I always do a charitable contribution to the charities of my choice, but those have always been, like, children’s hospital or cancer research or Alzheimer’s. I hadn’t been looking at the eco side of things, which makes me feel really, really bad. It’s kinda bad of me. I mean, in my own personal life, we recycle. We do all those things.

 

Jennie Wright [00:22:20]:

But why didn’t I do it in this business? So I’m taking pause. I’m reflecting on that. I’m wishing I had done stuff like this earlier. However, I also know that some of The stuff wasn’t available earlier. Like, we just didn’t have some of these options. I mean, lazy loading has been around for a bit, but it’s not something I even really knew about. You know, having an eco friendly tech stack, not something I even thought of. Compressing and optimizing, yeah, I have always done that, but it’s always been to the detriment of the images or the banners or the videos, and that really sucked because I hate anything that’s pixelated.

 

Jennie Wright [00:22:57]:

I love crispness on anything I built. So I’ve I’ve always hated doing that, but now we have, you know, ways of getting around that technology. You know, there’s technology, I should say, that’s built to help us get around this sort of loss, of, you know, pixels and so on. So there’s a lot going on out there that can be really helpful for us, And we’re getting to the point of having a lot less excuses to be able to be part of these kinds of things, so something I wanted to bring up and and have you think about. I know this is one of the shorter episodes, but honestly, I’m sounding more like a frog. And, I’m sure you don’t wanna hear that. So I’m going to go and rest up my voice, and hope that, I get better soon, but thanks for listening to this episode. I hope you found it useful and enjoyable.

 

Jennie Wright [00:23:42]:

I appreciate you listening to the Acquire podcast. If you found it helpful or useful, please don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave me a review. Take pity on my voice today. Maybe 5 stars would be cool. And I appreciate you being part of my community, and I would consider or, you know, ask you to consider following me on social media. Drop me a line. Let me know what you think of the podcast or what topics you’d like me to cover. And what’s really, really cool is this podcast is reaching more and more people.

 

Jennie Wright [00:24:11]:

I was looking at the stats and the amount of countries that Acquire is getting to is astounding, and the numbers every month are just growing and I’m so grateful. So if you know anybody that could use this podcast, please forward it to them. I’ve got so much good stuff coming, great guests and more solos where I don’t sound like a frog, and I don’t have bronchitis, but there’s really good stuff coming and I hope that you’ll enjoy it. Make sure you go over to jennywright.com. Check out the free resources and lead magnets that I have there for you to download. And if there’s something there that you’d like to work with me, like, if there’s something going on in your business that you’d like my support or some marketing strategy or even fractional CMO work, let me know. I’d love to talk to you about it, and you can find me and get in touch with me at the website. Thanks so much, and I really appreciate it.

 

Jennie Wright [00:24:57]:

And as always, the Acquire Podcast is brought to you by The Auphonic Podcast Network. Have a great night. Take care.