Business Commons^™

Dialogue Marketing: Ecological Sustainability Of Letter And E-Mail In Comparison In Germany, Atilla Wohllebe

Journal of Environmental Sustainability

With the spread of the Internet, e-mail has also steadily gained in relevance over the past years and decades. Especially in the form of newsletters, e-mail marketing is probably the most important channel of digital dialogue marketing today. This paper examines the carbon dioxide emissions of advertising e-mails in Germany on the basis of existing sources and compares them with the emissions caused by sending letters by post. Despite significantly lower CO2 emissions per piece compared to a letter, e-mails seem to be a much greater burden on the environment due to their practically unlimited scalability in terms of cost. …