Mindful B2B Marketing | Business Growth and Social Impact (Former: Forward Launch Your SaaS)

S2E7: How eco-friendly email marketing helps you reach your audience -- ft. James Gill, Co-founder of EcoSend and GoSquared

• Season 2 • Episode 7

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MAIN INSIGHT
B2B marketers can send campaigns that ultimately can have a positive impact on their audience by optimizing email marketing practices, such as reducing email frequency, targeting more effectively, and using eco-friendly infrastructure and content strategies.

GUEST BIO

James Gill is the co-founder of EcoSend and GoSquared. EcoSend works with brands to transform email marketing into a more climate-conscious practice, addressing the significant carbon footprint of the over 350 billion emails sent daily. GoSquared, celebrating its 18th anniversary, provides a privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics, helping thousands of businesses grow sustainably every day. James is dedicated to creating environmentally responsible and privacy-centric digital tools.


BENEFITS OF ECO-CONSCIOUS EMAIL MARKETING
Reduced Carbon Footprint:

  • By optimizing email campaigns, marketers can significantly lower the environmental impact of their digital activities.

Increased Engagement:

  • Sending fewer, more targeted emails can lead to higher engagement rates, as recipients are more likely to find the content relevant and valuable.

Improved Efficiency:

  • Streamlining email content and reducing data load can enhance the overall efficiency of email marketing campaigns, leading to better performance.

Enhanced Brand Reputation:

  • Demonstrating a commitment to sustainability can improve a brand's reputation and appeal to environmentally conscious consumers and clients.

Cost Savings:

  • Optimizing email campaigns can reduce the resources and energy required, potentially leading to cost savings in the long run.

Sustainable Business Growth:

  • By adopting eco-friendly and privacy-centric practices, businesses can achieve sustainable growth that aligns with modern ethical standards and consumer expectations.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

  1. Optimize Email Content: Streamlining the content of emails to be more concise and relevant can reduce the data load and, consequently, the environmental impact.
  2. Improve Targeting: Ensuring emails are sent only to those who are genuinely interested and likely to engage can minimize waste and enhance the efficiency of email campaigns.
  3. Compress Image Sizes: Reducing the size of images in emails can decrease the data required to send and receive emails, thereby lowering the carbon footprint.
  4. Avoid Putting Text in Images: Keeping text as text rather than embedding it in images can reduce the email's data load, making it more efficient and environmentally friendly.


COMPANY DESCRIPTION
EcoSend works with brands to revolutionize email marketing by making it more climate-conscious. The company addresses the significant carbon footprint of email marketing by promoting sustainable practices and tools. 

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[0:32] All right. Today, I am sitting down with James Gill. He is the co-founder of EcoSend and GoSquared. And with EcoSend, he works with brands to revolutionize email marketing for a more climate-conscious approach. Also, GoSquared, which has recently celebrated its 18th anniversary, has a privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. So thousands daily grow their businesses sustainably. James is committed to addressing the environmental impact of email because it has a significant carbon footprint amidst the staggering statistic of over 350 billion emails sent daily. So James, super excited to talk about EcoSend and or GoSquared.

[1:22] Hi, Keirra. Yeah, pleasure to be here. Really, really looking forward to the conversation today. Thank you for a lovely lovely intro as well yeah thank you for being here so why don't you tell me a little bit about like why you started eco send or even your other company go square yeah like a little bit of your your journey with recognizing the importance of like sustainability and privacy in in marketing yeah absolutely no i think i mean for a start like this podcast seems great because Because it's topics that I care really deeply about and with what we're doing.

[1:59] So it felt like a natural fit to have a discussion. And yeah, I guess, as you mentioned, GoSquared has been going for a very long time. We started it with friends from school when we were much younger. And we really embarked there on building an analytics tool that was something we wanted to use. At the time, the space was very different back then, as you might imagine. But tools like google analytics and other analytics tools were just very hard to use very.

[2:30] Very dull very like just horrible to use really and and we just hated all of them because they were hard to get to grips with like things like google were doing we weren't sure like what they were doing with the data but it's like google gives away loads of stuff for free but but there's got to be a cost somewhere, right? And so we set out to build GoSquared as this analytics tool dashboard that was just really simple and something we wanted to use. And fast forward to today, GoSquared is really thriving. We've got thousands of businesses that use it to have a simpler, more privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. So fewer, like less need to worry about where your data is being sold to or used for advertising efforts. So you just pay a small monthly fee and you get a really nice product. And we support our customers to help them with that whole journey. Ghost Grips has been going great. And so over that time, we've always tried to build a good company. We're kind of self-proclaimed geeks. We are very nerdy and we love building nice software. Some people like to cook. Some people like to play the piano. We like to build software.

[3:45] And we've always tried to build a good company as well. And we've always tried to look after our our employees, our team. We've always tried to build a company we're proud of. We've always tried to care for our customers. But something we never thought about was our climate impact. We're a totally remote team. We build software. We don't have factories. We don't have vans and trucks.

[4:09] And so we've always cared about the climate as individuals, but we never really thought the company had as much we could do there to impact it positively or negatively. And then about a year and a half ago, we had this really hot summer in London, at least. I think around the world, we've all been experiencing a lot of heat. More and more extreme weather conditions. And within the team, someone shared a little article that was about the carbon footprint of our digital activities. And one of the stats in there was that an email, sending an email even has a carbon footprint of anything up to around 26 grams of CO2. And this was from a widely regarded and trusted book called How Bad Are Bananas by Mike Berners-Lee.

[4:58] And we dug into this and we were like, that can't be, that's surely not like

[5:03] email. Email has a carbon footprint. And the more we looked into it, the more we were staggered that like we'd just be totally overlooking the fact that our online activities have a carbon footprint. And the more we dug, the more we found people doing something about it. But we could never ever find an email tool that was doing anything about about this so we were already working on some some an email marketing tool ourselves and we we that that was essentially how we began working on eco send and we started eco send with this mission to basically to eliminate the carbon footprint of email marketing and i know there's other industries like there's a lot of other industries that are very very heavily polluting but when you start digging into the effects our digital lives have on the climate it starts to get a lot more serious and and so when you think about it everything we do online is relying on computers that sit in data centers and data centers are huge buildings like unimaginably huge buildings like many many football pitch sizes of like any they're the size of multiple multiple football pitches filled to the brim with hot servers that all need energy, that all run all day, every single day, and also need pooling. And so there's this huge growing...

[6:27] Need for the energy to power data centers to fill them with computers that do go wrong and need to be replaced need to be shipped around the world that need to be cooled often with fresh cold water and the land that needs to be used to build data centers so there's all of these factors with just the the data center piece itself and so our whole ethos with what we're doing with eco send is to to put the climate at the top of our agenda in everything we do, from how we build the software, how we work with customers to send campaigns that are conscious of this, how we even help customers send campaigns that get their messaging right with regards to sustainability, because it's another whole area that's difficult. But also just helping send campaigns that ultimately tick the right boxes for being as lightweight as possible, that have the climate in mind, and that are still effective for getting the job done for a marketer, like converting a customer, selling products, distributing a newsletter. We're trying to build a great, great email marketing platform that takes into account all of those things. And yeah, happy to unpack lots of that if you like, I know that was quite a lot to say.

[7:46] Yeah, I think there's multiple things that kind of strike me, But one of them is just like how difficult it is to like balance that as a business owner. Oh, I want this really good email marketing platform. I mean, that's a difficult challenge in and of itself, right? And then you're layering on this commitment to the climate. And so how do you like...

[8:16] Balance those things? How do you make sure that you're building something that's like competitive with other email marketing platforms, but at the same time, it's climate conscious? Yeah, it's a fantastic question. And, you know, we've said this a lot ourselves internally, like, there's no point building.

[8:34] I mean, there's no point building a climate conscious anything if if the product itself is worse than what the alternatives are, because not many customers want to buy a product that's worse to care about the climate more. Like even people that care a lot about the climate, they rarely want to make a trade-off in switching to a product that does their job worse. Like whether you're buying a, you know, you don't want to buy an electric car that doesn't have round wheels. I don't know, I'm trying to think about, you know, making huge trade-offs. So with EcoSem, we're always trying to make sure we tread that balance.

[9:17] But the really interesting thing and really helpful thing, and I think something we've found in a lot of areas with focusing on sustainability and the climate, is that it's often not a trade-off. It's often totally aligned with the goals of the actual ultimate job of the platform so when you think about the wider world of digital sustainability you've you've got all sorts of things that require require energy but i think in my mind is often like people thinking about their website design as well as being digitally sustainable so thinking about the climate thinking Thinking about the energy usage of a website, again, someone might say, well, that doesn't seem terribly important when there's cars driving around on the roads with petrol in them and companies left, right, and center shipping stuff all over the world.

[10:14] But when you think about how much we use our devices today and how much of that is internet based usage, how much of that is loading websites on our phones or on our computers, every time you load a site, there's energy being used to load that site, to download that site, to call that information from across the globe. It's the same thing for email. But what we find is that when you optimize the site for using less energy, you also often optimize the site for so many other aspects that help with conversion and being a more effective marketer. So for instance, if you're optimizing your site to be using less energy, often that means you're being very thoughtful about the images you put on there. You're often optimizing the images you put on there to be as lightweight, which you're often making sure you're very conscious of how much text goes on the page, the code that is behind the site so that it's as.

[11:12] That's as minimal as possible. All of these things are great from an energy usage perspective, but they're also really great from an accessibility perspective, from an SEO perspective, to make the experience for someone loading your site better. And all of that stuff applies to email. The number of emails that don't make their way to the inbox of their recipients for all of these kinds of reasons. Often people put in huge images in their emails, like photos and things like that which are not optimized they're often not the right format oftentimes those emails don't even get received or there's no chance to even open them because they just get bounced back, so many emails have tons of unnecessary cluttered code in them which also, often weighs down loading that email and actually opening it which reduces the chance of someone actually reading your email so all of these things have like this this multi-faceted benefit and so i i mean we always kind of think about it as like it's it's not this like downgrade you're making it's actually an upgrade and the marketer and the the sustainability person both, feel great about the choice they're making so that's that's sort of a quick summary of a not so quick summary but a summary of how how we think about that yeah yeah okay i can see how.

[12:39] The things that you do to be climate conscious, once you break it down in terms of marketing actions, it's usually reducing something like page load speed or optimizing the images and the amount of, I guess, data that you're putting on a website so that it's, I guess, more text-focused or, like, lower image load?

[13:05] Yeah, maybe could you talk about, like, what are some of those things that you do to optimize an email? Like, could you list them out and, like, what kind of effect it's having on, like, marketers' ability to reach customers? And then we could talk about the climate consciousness of each of those things as well. Yeah, sure. Yeah, gosh, where to start on this? I think there's obviously a starting point here, which I think just generally applies to most actions one takes within their business. But being really clear on the goal, first and foremost, and everything threading down off that.

[13:54] Because often we talk to customers that send email, they send a lot of email, but they're often sending email because that's kind of their job or like that's what they've always done. Sometimes it's actually not that clear what the goal of the email is. And I think that's sometimes very clear both to the business and the results they see and the recipient. So I would say just starting with like that goal, it's a really obvious thing, but But it's like going through any campaigns you've sent, can you like see what the goal, like can you actually articulate what the goal of that campaign is? Can you measure even against that goal? Once you get clearer on that, like, you know, it's like you might be sending a newsletter. The goal of that is to encourage people to get back to your blog or just to be front of mind for people. You might have...

[14:46] A in an e-commerce business of course you might have a multitude of campaigns that have a very clear goal to go and drive someone to purchase something but when you have that goal clearly in mind it then helps focus the message and the email it helps focus the content of the message it also helps focus the audience that receives the email and this is a huge thing a lot of what i've been saying there is around you know similarities between email and website design where the content of the email should all be optimized. But with email, there's also this choice of like, who sees that email? And that's a big thing of like, not on bombarding your audience and kind of wearing them down, but also like sending to a smaller batch of people is also more efficient from energy usage perspective. So there's this like, all of this combination of things to like, think about segmentation. In terms of the email itself and the email design often people start with an off-the-shelf template or they start with the template they've been using and i would say to start with just a bunch of like really good practice things there to to think about like does it like is do you need everything that exists in that template how many images are in there how big are those images how How many sections, how many blocks do you have in that email? And how necessary are all of those?

[16:14] Within that, there's also the code behind the email. And for some people, that might be quite a complex thing to figure out. Like a lot of marketers don't necessarily have like knowledge around coding. But those who can, or those who have access to like a.

[16:30] A programmer of some sort sometimes worth like assessing what does that email actually look like the code behind it because there's often a lot a lot of of horrible code that is unnecessary in there which just doesn't need to be sent and then yeah a big thing is around like probably the biggest thing is around the the images you have in in those emails and i mean some people even try to put video in emails and that's usually not a well-supported or good idea but with images there's a bunch of really common things like one is just a really simple one like you can use image.

[17:09] Compressors like there's free tools online where you can compress images and that essentially means that like you might have the image it will come out of this thing looking exactly the same but there's lots of intelligent stuff to reduce the file size of the image and compress it because also so so that's one thing image compression there's also like most emails are viewed on a phone which has a screen size with a retina display maybe maybe a thousand or so pixels wide when you take a photo on your phone the size of those images is like is something like 5,000, 6,000 pixels wide. So you're sort of, if you just put images in without thinking about the actual dimensions they can be viewed at, they can often be far, far bigger than they need to be. And then also file types, like the image you put in an email or on your website.

[18:08] If you have a photograph, for instance, it's much better to have that as a JPEG rather than a PNG or another file type because it's just optimized for that format.

[18:19] Whereas if you have something that's more of a graphic style with fewer colors, more bold shapes and everything, a PNG is often a more suitable file format. But often people interchangeably use those formats in the wrong way, which can make the file size far, far bigger than it needs to be. And all of that in tandem like yes it requires more energy to send but it's also just giving you the best shot of having your email opened and read and consumed the number of times i've been on the train going into london and i i'm going through my email and how many of them don't load and don't open fast enough and i'll just i i've got very short attention span i will just archive out of it get rid of it and move on to the next one and you compare that with the emails you get from a friend that are just a couple of lines of text and load instantly so like I think sometimes as marketers we get into this like I'm in marketing email mode now I'm gonna send some really big bold colorful thing it will get everyone's attention but often it does the opposite of that it will just be never load and be ignored so finding the right balance of all of those things i think is generally a good idea but yeah as i say a lot of these things like they help on both fronts and and hopefully often ultimately help you get get seen by more people.

[19:43] Okay that makes sense and that's a good like rundown kind of guide to what needs to go in an email in order to like well get through to the the customer and also like you know be climate it friendly, I think. So...

[20:01] I guess if we went like piece by piece through each of these, like you, you, you've done this, like, I presume for like yourself, like your own company and then like potentially for clients. Right. Or yeah. Yeah. Okay. So like, yeah, we work with hundreds of brands now, loads of really like passionate businesses that care about the climate and everything they do. And it's, it's yeah. yeah, incredibly exciting to see so many more companies like caring about this in their marketing efforts. Yeah. But sorry. Yeah. Continue.

[20:37] Yeah. So I was just going to ask, like, as you've tried to implement this in real life, like with something like, okay, one of the first things you said was look at the content of the message, look at the audience that's receiving the email.

[20:54] Like, how does that go in practice? And have you come across any like challenges or obstacles with trying to look back at these campaigns and assess what the objective was yeah yeah so i i think it varies a lot depending on the the business but i i think sometimes it's like especially for something like a newsletter it's not always clear what the goal of the newsletter is like sometimes it's like our competitor has a newsletter or that company has a newsletter that's really cool we should do something like that and like the actual intention of why you are doing it as a business is not always as deeply considered so that's something we often talk to customers about something we've considered a lot over our time we've we've go squared we ran a weekly newsletter for i think over 300 issues i we ran a newsletter for a long time we go squared and we ultimately wrapped that up because it got to a point where we were sort of like are we just doing this because we've always done it but then more recently with eco send we started a newsletter uh fresh uh with much much clearer goals to be to be kind of educating more people around the concept of digital sustainability.

[22:19] And, you know, it's that educational aspect, but also, you know, from our perspective, that is part of our marketing mix to drive people to go check out Ecoset and learn more about what we're doing as our company.

[22:33] And so we see that a lot with customers with newsletters in particular. And but I think there's also an aspect there around the audience that receives the email. And so a lot of people have a big audience and they're very proud of their big numbers of growing, growing, growing. And you look at that headline number of how many people are in your audience, how many contacts you have.

[22:56] But what's often not considered is how many of those people are still, still want to be receiving the email. How many of those people have like email addresses that no longer work. They may have be company email addresses and they've changed jobs. How many of those email addresses are not even people email addresses. They're like info at company name or team at company name.

[23:20] A lot of these are like kind of, you know, red flags in terms of like, yes, Yes, those numbers at the high level are great for us as marketers to report because everything going up and to the right is usually good. But sometimes we're considering what that means for the rest of the numbers. What does that mean for the open rate, the click-through rate? But also, obviously, from a sustainability perspective, you're sending stuff out that doesn't need to be sent out. Why do that? It's kind of that whole reduce, reuse, recycle. Just don't send stuff out if you know it's going to get bounced or it's going to be just immediately go to the bin so yeah so those are also common things and you know we can we we often help customers with that but there's also lots of tools out there that you can kind of run your list through and understand like how how how good quality i guess how many how many of the the contacts on there are actually reachable email addresses, and cut those out. And as marketers, we may take a hit in our pride of seeing that number decrease, perhaps when we run that process. But you know, if they're not actually being received in the first place, then who who is that number benefiting? So?

[24:40] So what kind of email list checkers do you run it through? Do you have any you would recommend? I can chuck a few in the notes. There's quite a few out there. I mean, to be honest, I would just recommend Googling around for a few. I think we might have some recommendations on the EcoSend blog as well. But there's quite a few. And some tools may have this built in as well. If you if you if you're already using an email tool like of your own like you may be able to see if there's anything built in to check that stuff out and that can help you just get a sense of like are we sending stuff to the wrong email addresses i would also say like you can also if you have time or you can be bothered like you could even just look at your mailing list and see like how many of these email addresses are legitimate like how many of them are actually.

[25:36] You know how many of them look like real real email addresses or not and that can help you understand a little bit more but yeah there are a bunch of tools out there that can do this in an automated way and save a bunch of time okay sounds cool so another thing that you talked about was looking through the email content itself to make sure that you're looking at those sections you're seeing how many like different blocks are in email and like the design and everything and whether or not you need all of those things so what are like some tips that you have and or have you come across any like challenges with redesigning that sort of content yeah yeah absolutely i mean there's always there's always challenges and any kind of change within any kind of business. But I think there's a few things like one thing and something we do with our own emails and something we have in EcoSend is we have kind of two options. There's one like using a traditional HTML visual email, but we also have the option to send a very simple, we call it a simple email, but like it's essentially a totally stripped back email template that is just.

[26:55] Basically just as bare bones as possible, just text, and the option to add up add buttons and, and simple images. And kind of sometimes it's an opportunity like if you like a B testing between a really, and it's again is why having a clear goal is important because a B testing without knowing what the goal is, is kind of pointless, but having a really visually bold email that maybe has, you've gone to town with the HTML and the design of it versus a simple email that is far, far more stripped back. Now, most people would probably be a lot more proud of the visual one and with

[27:35] what work they put into it.

[27:38] But often what we've seen is the simpler email, the simpler template is much more likely to be opened, much more likely to be clicked and engaged with and so that would be one thing of just like questioning whether you you know do you need to keep using the same template have you tried when was the last time you tried switching to a different a different template and a simpler one and and just testing that out you know it's it's not the maybe it will work better maybe it won't but like having that boldness to just experiment i think can be a a really even just a segment of your your audience can be really really impactful and then yeah in terms of the email content itself there's often things like how how you're using imagery and a lot of people put like text within images because they want to make sure that font looks good or they have some sort of styling telling they want to bring across.

[28:42] You know, sometimes that's understandable, like especially for a logo, for instance. But there's all sorts of consequences of putting text inside of images. It weighs down the email more, it takes longer to load. Also, from an accessibility perspective, it's just really not such a great thing to do. And anyone reading, you know, anyone who relies on accessibility of emails, that's another thing to consider. Like every time you have an image, it's quite hard for someone to actually consume that if they have those accessibility needs. So there's all sorts of factors there that are worth considering. And then, yeah, in terms of.

[29:24] Yeah, just building out that building out the email, just being conscious of internally, like, as a team, you can sometimes find that, like, the bigger the team, everyone wants to have something in the email, especially if it's a newsletter, like, can we add this? Can we add that? And making sure that there's someone responsible for overseeing like the email as a whole?

[29:46] How big does it need to be? How many things do we need to put in here? Like, yes, we can add more, but adding more maybe dilutes the message of the whole thing, it can sometimes reduce the chance of someone actually seeing that email and reading it.

[30:03] So yeah, thinking about that as well is also a really important thing. And yeah, generally just the old phrase of less is more is often quite applicable here.

[30:16] And we tend to find that the simplest emails and the most focused emails are the most effective for achieving the goals of the customer yeah you mentioned also putting you have a plain text email feature i've seen that in other email marketing platforms i've never used it because i'm just like oh well yeah i'm gonna think that this isn't like professional enough if i like just send kind of a plain text email and it's not just like coming from a person it's coming from like an email newsletter list yeah yeah so so we we we offer plain text but we also offer like a simple email and it's actually there's there is a bit of a distinction there because yeah plain text i agree plain text can sometimes come across in the wrong way because sometimes there can be an element of feeling like i'm sending you a plain text email i'm sending 10 000 people a plain text email like that does take you know a good box for like being the most efficient thing to to do from energy usage perspective but i i think it you you're right like the professional nature of it also like an element of like we don't want to we don't want people to think they're being tricked like we don't want people to think that like this is a a personal email that is is being said just So the reason we have the simple email is, is it's not, it's not as easy to.

[31:45] It's not as like plain as a plain text, but it's also a far more stripped back and simple email than a fully blown image laden background color, heavy kind of quintessential email template that a lot of businesses use. And so trying to strike that balance that makes it appropriate for marketers to get their message across in a professional way, but not looking like it's just you sending an email to your mates. Kind of approach and and having said that plain text does have a place of course and and yeah it can be used to great effect but um but yeah it's often at best used i think when when you want to start conversations and and and used in a really personalized way and and And often less so for sort of the traditional e-commerce use case or newsletter use case. But it still does have its base in the world. Okay, that makes sense. And so, yeah, well, I think we've gone through a lot of the different parts of the email at this point, which thank you for that breakdown, because I think that's going to be really helpful to people to have that checklist.

[33:08] Yeah. So I guess I want to just zoom out a little bit and then see like, Have you guys, what kind of results have you slash your customers had? Like if you had to break them down after kind of going through these email campaigns and sort of optimizing them, like, or even just like using the Ecosyn platform, because I'm assuming it makes some of these things easier. Yeah. Yeah. What kind of results have you had?

[33:41] Yeah, sure. No, there's a bunch we've seen. So there's several kind of things we could cover here. I think one thing we haven't talked a huge amount about is the, there's a big part of email marketing as well, which is just building an audience and like having a way to capture an email address from people. And so one of the other parts of Ecosend is Ecosend forms. And so that's an area where we've put a lot of work into designing really nice email capture forms. So like the kind of thing where you sign up to my newsletter. so we've designed these to be really really lightweight really and just a great user experience but also highlighting like that there's a climate benefit to using ecosend there's a climate benefit to to being on this newsletter because we care about uh sustainability we're using renewable energy like we're offsetting what the other parts that aren't in control And so like that's those ecosystem forms have had a tremendous impact on conversion. So we've seen conversion rates like of those forms be in the region of 15, 20% better at converting like visitors into email signups that then a lot of the alternative options out there that are off the shelf from other other email tools. So that's that's been one really great thing.

[35:07] But then also with the emails themselves, often when we work with a customer coming on board, we have a discussion like, do you want to bring your template over, your email template over, keep it as it is? Or do you want to optimize things? Obviously, we want to encourage people to optimize things, to reconsider, take it as an opportunity to think about their email template design. And on that side, we've seen the size of their template. Sometimes we can get it down by like 30 or if not 40 percent in terms of the size of the email that's being sent by helping them like be smarter about all of the stuff we've just been talking about the code the image optimization all of these things and that that then has a big impact on, deliverability and on open rates and ultimately on on click-through rates so that can result i mean We've seen that result in definitely an uptick in open rates of like 10%, 15%.

[36:07] And we've got a bunch of case studies now on our website around customers who have moved over and the kinds of impacts to their numbers they've seen.

[36:15] And so it's often around open rates, but also, yeah, it's around the deliverability and getting that email to the inbox, marks not balancing not being marked to spam and getting getting engaged to like getting the engagement of that email up um so it's been a a lot of a lot of really really positive things there and i i think also like it's easy to kind of say well putting more effort in will get better results but a lot of this is like when you make the switch there's the effort in making the switch to to to see those results but once you made that switch you kind of then are just like using the platform as you normally would so it's like you're getting those benefits but not with but with you're getting these ongoing benefits but without the ongoing like extra effort because a lot of that's being done for you so yeah those are a few few things but you know if anyone is interested like yeah we we write about this a lot we write about um stories of our customers a lot we we're always trying to share what our customers are doing because they're often the ones teaching us about like what they've been doing to optimize things and improve things so a lot of the things we build and make available in the platform come from like conversations with our customers that you know then they're doing great great stuff so yeah lots more if you're interested in that like there's lots more to see on our site okay and i also want to ask about the results in terms of like.

[37:43] Like you personally like with ecosend or like any of your customers using these like email marketing strategies have you seen any difference in like customer engagement metrics or like have like brand sort of loyalty as a result of you know switching to this like climate focused.

[38:09] You know email marketing yeah no i i'm glad you asked that because it's certainly something that in the early days it was honestly is quite quite challenging because we felt like you know we were doing some stuff here that was a little bit wacky a little bit different and you know a lot of people like really you know really what is this a thing but as as we've continued to push on and continued to like learn a lot ourselves and work with our customers we started to see a bit kind of a bit of a movement taking shape and there's this growing awareness and care for digital sustainability that that is now you know we we see customers sort of talking to each other helping each other out about it and like wanting to actively learn more and and and educate themselves and i think we're seeing like within you know at least sustainability circles like people are kind of like i you know i didn't know about this before but if your website isn't as optimized as it should be i.

[39:16] I'm gonna tell you about it i'm gonna i'm gonna question how much you care about this stuff if your emails are not optimized and i i you know i'm i'm gonna be i i don't know if i feel comfortable with that like you should be caring about this stuff and and so like within this community there's this growing kind of force of like change that people are seeing like i was talking to someone the other day who was saying i'm going to set up a an auto responder so that if anyone sends me an email that's not optimized i i'm i'm going to tell them to go use ecosend so i i think it's some interesting you know it's been an interesting mindset change that seems to be happening and growing kind of hair about this which you know only a year ago felt like pretty pretty unique and weird but now is starting to take take hold in many ways and obviously you know i think we're still just getting started on this whole this whole journey here i think there's you know the vast majority of businesses you know far too many businesses full stop don't don't really care about enough about sustainability in the planet and the climate.

[40:30] When it comes to that versus profit. And so there's far too many businesses that fall into that category. And then the number of businesses that care about their digital sustainability is an infinitesimally small number of businesses in the grand scheme of things. So I think we see tremendous work, but also opportunity ahead to get more people thinking about this. And so most of the time, we're talking to people about digital sustainability as a whole and thinking about the other areas of their business, like not just email, but their website, the tools they use, the way they think about storing files, all of these things. And email is part of that whole message and story.

[41:18] Yeah, that sounds awesome. Awesome. And that's a good natural segue into us wrapping up because is there anything that, EcoSend or you guys are working on right now, anything you want to promote or just a little blurb you want to give for people who might want to look this up? Yeah, I can't believe how quickly it's gone, Kira.

[41:37] Honestly, it's been such a pleasure talking with you. I think maybe, I don't know if people are emailed out after hearing me talk here, but obviously if anyone wants to learn more we're on the internet.

[41:51] EcoSend is the website EcoSend.io is our website and we're on LinkedIn and everything as well and we have a newsletter so go get that we also I don't know when this will go live but like in March it's B Corp month in March so like it's celebration of the B Corp movement and we're going through the B Corp.

[42:16] Process ourselves as a business right now but we're doing something really special in march which is we we're giving a free tier of eco send away which we don't normally offer to b corp so if you're a b corp and you want to start using us for if you're email marketing you want to switch and make a step in the right direction then in march do sign up and uh we've got a free tier available if it if you're listening to this it's not march anymore sorry but uh but do get in touch and we can maybe work something out okay well thank you so much james for this conversation this was awesome no thank you kira i i love what you're doing and yeah thank you so much for inviting me on the show it's been a pleasure chatting with you same to you.