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Earth Day Email Ideas

Earth Day celebrates global efforts to support the environment and promote sustainability. If you're an environmentally conscious brand, you can craft an Earth Day email campaign around these two topics to connect with caring customers.

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April 22 is Earth Day, what its organizing group, EarthDay.org, calls “the largest secular observance in the world.” With more than 1 billion people involved in projects
around climate change, sustainability, and more, Earth Day is likely to be an event that your customers are thinking about.

Consumers, especially younger shoppers, say they want to buy products from sustainable brands and are willing to pay more. A First Insight study from 2021 found concluded on these consumer trends:

  • 75% of Generation Z’ers, 71% of Millennials, 73% of Generation X’ers, and 65% of Baby Boomers consider sustainability more important than brand when making a purchasing decision.
  • There is a 17% increase across all of these generations in the willingness to pay more for sustainable products in comparison to when the same study was executed at the end of 2019.

The latter may explain why Earth Day is not a typical sales holiday. While an increasing number of brands seem to celebrate Earth Day with an email campaign, these emails are often non-promotional, focusing on creating engagement rather than sales.

You can see what that looks like in our selection of Earth Day email examples below to gather inspiration for your own email marketing strategy around Earth Day.

Earth Day Email Campaigns
Earth Day Email Marketing Ideas and Strategies

Earth Day Email Campaigns

Tell them how you're contributing

Mattress brand Leesa shows its subscribers the steps it has taken to become a more eco-friendly brand. It shares the numbers that vouch for its sustainability pledge, such as its B Corp environment score and how many recycled plastic bottles go into a mattress (73!).

While Leesa doesn’t organize a full-on Earth Day sale, it does use the holiday as an opportunity to show off its most sustainable mattress… and to subtly offer a discount on it.

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Teach them an earth-friendly habit

Care/of does a great job at teaching its email subscribers an environmentally sustainable practice (composting) that’s relevant to its products (vitamins sold in compostable packets). The GIF at the top of the email shows exactly what the process looks like.

The bright orange of the CTA buttons stands out against the otherwise earthy tones of this email. The CTA text invites recipients to click through to the care/of website where they can take a supplement quiz that is the first step to getting them to sign up for a subscription plan.

Lastly, the email contains a much more subtle CTA for readers to learn more about the company’s larger sustainability plan.

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Highlight behind-the-scenes efforts

If your efforts to be more sustainable and environmentally aware happen out of sight, Earth Day is the perfect time to brag about them. That’s what Buffy does. The pillows and comforters brand shares what it’s doing to keep planet earth comfortable – just like it wants to make its customers comfortable.

While their average email subscriber might not know what a “closed-loop supply chain” is, Buffy does a good job at explaining the concept and leading the recipient to its CTA to “see the story” on its website.

We also love how Buffy created a special email address for subscribers to send in feedback and earth-friendly suggestions, as well as a hashtag to promote the brand’s environmental efforts on social media.

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Be an example

Authenticity is everything with cause-related emails. UNTUCKit sets its subscribers an example by sharing how it organized a trash cleanup at a local park. The photos serve as a type of social proof and inspire subscribers to share how they’re creating a positive impact by tagging UNTUCKit on social media.

Also, note the relevant promotion near the bottom of the email: it’s for a sustainable product line of swimsuits line made from post-consumer plastic.

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Offer a sustainable gift

Some brands devote their Earth Day emails to education, but there’s no shame in running an Earth Day campaign with a relevant promotion or incentive. Cotopaxi’s campaign is a sustainable BOGO: buy one eco-friendly product, get another for free.

At the same time, this isn’t all promotion. It also highlights how many of Cotopaxi’s products are made using recycled materials and how the brand plans to eventually use only recycled fabrics.

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Stay on brand

Many large fashion brands nowadays have an eco-friendly or sustainable product line. GUESS is one of them. Its Earth Day email campaign uses a greenish background and green font to create a link to Earth Day, but other than that, the email design stays pretty on-brand by showcasing some of GUESS’s eco-friendly products.

The two main CTAs invite the reader to “shop eco” or “learn more” about GUESS’s eco-friendly line while the 15% discount acts as an extra nudge to get people into the online store.

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Earth Day Email Marketing Ideas and Strategies

The Earth Day email examples above are a great source of inspiration, but we realize you may want some extra concrete tips. That’s why we put together the following list of Earth Day marketing ideas.

Inspire customers to act

Use your Earth Day marketing campaign to give customers ideas for how they can combat environmental issues. A few general ideas that don’t take much time or effort are a good start. (Check EarthDay.org’s list of 52 ways to stand up for the environment.)

To be most effective, focus on efforts for which subscribers could use your products, such as how to recycle your containers or shipping material. See care/of’s email example above to find out how to create this kind of valuable email.

Give to get

Celebrate Earth Day by offering an incentive or a special item, and then donating proceeds to a national or local environmental group. This way, your customers will know and feel that they’re contributing to a good cause by buying from you.

Strive for authenticity

Consumers are quick to jump on brands that claim to support a cause but don’t live up to their claims or that run Earth Day campaigns that use the cause as window dressing.

If your company doesn’t have a track record for supporting environmental activities, you can still participate by reviewing the strategies listed here and checking out the email examples.

But if you do have something to talk about, show what you’re doing to help out, even if it’s a behind-the scenes effort – trying to go carbon-neutral, reducing shipping or packaging waste, recycling or reclaiming waste material, or supporting local or regional organizations. Customers want to know you’re an ally.

Keep your Earth Day email subject lines on-point

As you can see from the Earth Day email examples above, many brands clearly or implicitly mention the holiday in their subject lines. While you still want to stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes, chances are your audience wants to know how you engage yourself for the environment and so it’s a good idea to be clear when you’re sending an Earth Day email. Refer to planet earth, use an earth emoji, or simply wish them a Happy Earth Day.

Create Earth Day email templates

Having an email template for any type of campaign is always handy to run A/B tests. If you’re sending different types of Earth Day emails to different segments of your email list, you may want to create different Earth Day email templates to experiment with. In this case, your email templates will serve as the defaults that you test against, and that you will adapt whenever a new version comes out of a test as the winner.