By Ashish Dwivedi Did you know 83% of consumers say they’ll choose a brand with a stronger sustainability record?
That’s right. Your brand’s eco-credentials are no longer just nice to have.
In today’s eCommerce world, sustainability has become a brand differentiator. Even a small thing, like an email template, can tell your brand’s sustainability ethos in a big way.
Yes, your eCommerce email templates!
If you are an eco-conscious online business, your eCommerce email templates can be your best friend in sharing your inspiring green initiatives and engaging your target audience.
Let’s explore best practices to design email campaigns to promote eco-friendly products.
Top 6 Ecommerce Email Template Design Tips to Highlight Your Brand’s Sustainability Efforts
69% of CEOs view sustainability as a significant growth opportunity. If your brand promotes it, congrats! you are ahead of the game.
As a sustainability advocate, you can definitely seize the advantages from brands that have not sufficiently invested in sustainability.
The majority of sustainable brands are heavily relying on email marketing to connect with eco-conscious consumers and inspire thoughtful buying decisions. Your eCommerce email marketing template design is the best tool for this.
But how do you seamlessly fit your eco-conscious initiatives in your email campaigns in a way that it benefits your email strategy and planet both? Let’s understand.
Showcase Your Sustainability Initiatives
Whether your brand is fully rooted in sustainability or has recently adopted an eco-friendly business practice, your initiative deserves an email to announce and promote it.
Your eCommerce email campaigns are the perfect platform to share your sustainability story.
The best way to let your subscribers know it’s about your brand’s positive impact even before they open an email is the subject line and preheader text. Just like this—
Subject Line: We’re Celebrating Earth Day Today & Every Day
Preheader: We’re making a difference—and you can too.
Next, align your email copy with the initiative. Discuss your eco-friendly products and explain their “what,” “why,” and “how.” Who gives a crap does this job really well:
Are you offering fair trade goods? Donating a portion of sales? Cleaning beaches? Planting trees? Saving water? Partnering with non-profits? Or making any eco-conscious effort to reduce the planet’s carbon footprint?
Engage your subscribers by reminding them that their purchases directly fund these initiatives. Show them additional ways to support your mission that don’t require buying your products, such as donating items, participating in recycling programs, or spreading the word about your cause.
So, they feel better about their purchase if they are already customers. And if they haven’t bought from you yet, it offers a gentle nudge in that direction.
To make your contribution clear in the email template, use specific numbers and milestones achieved. Use real-life images of your team’s efforts to establish an emotional connection with your audience.
Link CTA to a detailed sustainability page or offer actionable ways for subscribers to participate in your initiatives.
Want to go beyond showcasing your initiatives? Then, educate. Share tips on recycling, upcycling, or composting your products in your eCommerce email templates. Feeling bold? Encourage them to make lifestyle changes for the environment, such as reducing plastic use or choosing sustainable alternatives.
Incorporate Eco-Friendly Visuals and Colors
For a sustainability-focused message, incorporate eco-friendly visuals and color palettes in your eCommerce email templates. An important thing to remember here is the color scheme must resonate with your brand’s colors.
Greens, browns, blues, and muted hues are good choices for subtly evoking nature in your email.
To be more authentic, infuse images of natural landscapes, recycled materials, or your sustainable products in use. Avoid generic stock photos.
Lastly, add icons like leaves, recycling symbols, or eco-certifications to emphasize your environmental efforts.
Adopt a Minimalist and Clean Design
Designing eCommerce email templates for sustainability-driven messages isn’t always about adorning it with all the bells and whistles.
More often, it’s about emphasizing simplicity and clearly showcasing your sustainability values. What better way to do that than with a clean, minimalist email design?
This design approach’s biggest plus is that it removes needless distractions and lets the message take center stage.
That’s why you get an email from Outer with such a clean layout.
The email template design cleverly uses white space, making each section easy to read and navigate.
Neutral colors, concise copy, and high-quality visuals highlight their eco-friendly initiatives, such as the Teak Collection and recycled rugs. Mind you, this does not diminish the email’s visual appeal even an inch. We also love how content is split into different sections with bold headings, making it super scannable.
In short, it’s a great example to source inspiration for designing sustainability email campaigns.
Use Trust-Building Badges and Credibility Markers
Here’s a simple yet powerful design practice: include sustainability certifications and badges in your email templates.
Farm Rio nails this by showcasing the B Corp certification symbol in every email they send. A visual cue that ties their products directly to their circular economy initiatives.
These badges demonstrate third-party verification of your brand’s sustainability claims. They also lend your eco-conscious products and practices much more credibility and save you from the risks of greenwashing accusations.
Design Templates with Eco-Friendly Principles
Source : Fortomorrow
Your email templates can reflect your sustainability goals not just in the message but also in their design.
However, numbers tell a different story. Have a look at the following image.
So, what can be done to reduce the environmental impact of your sustainability email templates?
- Reduce the size of your emails, especially the images. The larger your email, the more storage space it takes up and the more energy it consumes. Always compress and resize images. Instead of embedding videos in your email, host them on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo and include a link.
- Avoid code bloat. Mark Robbins, a software engineer at Parcel, advocates using default user agent styles, a single-column layout, and code minification to reduce file size.
- Use responsive email templates to design your sustainability campaigns. Responsive emails are easier to read, don’t require re-downloading, and save energy.
- Send segment-specific, targeted emails instead of batch-and-blast emails. They save energy and improve the relevance and effectiveness of your campaigns.
Personalize Your Email Templates with CRM
Using CRM data, you can make your emails more personalized and tailored for eco-friendly messaging. You can create narratives that can strike a chord with the customers. For example, you can highlight how customers’ recent shopping saved the environment. Phrases like “your decision to buy from us saved 1000 liters of water!” can touch the audience greatly. CRM tool gives you access to audience data and it can enable you to make your emails more meaningful and personal for the recipients.
We leave you with one final eCommerce email template design tip for sustainable brands—ensure your brand walks the walk, not just talks the talk. The last thing you want is your email campaign to feel inauthentic or overly salesy and risk losing customer trust.
Wrapping Up
Use these best practices to guide your eCommerce brand’s sustainability-focused email templates. Consider how effectively you can educate your audience about eco-friendly initiatives your brand is taking.
Study from the above examples where brands successfully promote their products in a way that feels genuine.
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