Carbon-Aware Marketing Will Redefine Customer Engagement

For years, the industry has comforted itself with a simple dichotomy: Email and digital channels are “green,” while print and physical marketing are wasteful. It’s a neat story but a deeply flawed one. The reality is more nuanced, and for organizations serious about both customer experience and sustainability, it's dangerously oversimplified.

Digital marketing is not the zero-impact alternative many assume it to be. Every email, every abandoned banner impression, every automated customer journey running on outdated systems carries an invisible carbon cost which becomes amplified by the sheer scale of modern marketing operations.

Meanwhile, print has quietly evolved: renewable-energy printing, FSC paper, recycled fibres, carbon-neutral logistics. The footprint gap isn’t what it used to be.

Do we as marketers want to claim leadership in sustainability? If so , the question is no longer “digital or print?” it must be “Who are we talking to, and what’s the most effective and lowest carbon way to reach them?”

The New Imperative: Reach Fewer People, Better

Marketing has spent the past decade optimizing for reach. Bigger audiences, more impressions, larger databases. But “more” has also meant more irrelevant messages, more duplicated journeys, more algorithmic churn, and frankly more waste both environmentally and financially.

A more progressive and responsible approach is emerging and that is based on the premise of reach fewer people, with higher relevance, through better-designed, lower-carbon interactions.

This is more than a sustainability philosophy. It’s becoming a business strategy.

Relevance lifts engagement and conversion. Better targeting reduces cost. Reducing unnecessary volume lowers carbon. These forces align perfectly but only if a brand’s MarTech foundation is capable of precision, personalisation, and orchestration without mass data movement, complex integration and reliance on substantial teams of operational resources to run this.

Unfortunately, many aren’t.

Legacy MarTech: The Silent Sustainability Problem

Organizations sit on vast collections of ageing platforms. They run customer journeys that are heavy, inefficient and impossible to optimize for carbon.

Legacy stacks create over-messaging because they can’t optimise audiences effectively. They often reflect poor targeting due to fragmented data and incomplete profiles. This leads to excessive processing from workflows running endlessly in the background. And what is the ultimate outcome of this? Opaque carbon outputs because emissions per send, per impression, or per workflow aren’t measured.

MarTech modernization is no longer just an issue of efficiency it’s becoming an all to real necessity to meet our sustainability requirement.

Introducing the Carbon-Aware Marketing Model

We already model propensity to buy, likelihood to respond, customer lifetime value.
So then why not model carbon impact per interaction?

A modernized approach would combine:

• Marginal Carbon Cost (MCC) per impression, email, app notification, or mail piece.
• Channel Efficiency Curves, mapping carbon cost against expected effectiveness.
• Personalization Precision Scores, highlighting which audiences require fewer touches to convert.
• Optimised Channel Mix Modelling, balancing cost, conversion, and essentially carbon.

This creates a planning system where sustainability is not an afterthought it is a decision-making input and part of the core fabric of our planning and strategy.

Suddenly, “carbon-aware marketing optimization” becomes as natural as media mix modelling.

A Sustainability Index for Marketing Communications

From these components, organizations should build a Marketing Sustainability Index. This would represent a measurable score of campaign footprint across channels, audiences, and customer journeys.

It would include at minimum a baseline CO2 per touchpoint, a cumulative CO2 per campaign measure, a carbon avoided through targeting efficiency calculation, and potentially a renewable energy usage measure and a level of offset required to reach net-zero indicator

Crucially, offsets shift from being a reputational shield to a last resort used after reduction and optimization, not instead of them.

Where Agentic AI Will Take This Next

The next leap forward will come from AI systems that not only predict behaviour but design lower-carbon strategies.

Agentic AI will become the driving force behind the calculation of the MCC of every campaign in real time but will also ensure the auto-selection of the greenest channel without sacrificing effectiveness. Agents will also scrub redundant workflows to eliminate idle processing, improve send strategies to reduce peak server load, compress creative assets to reduce transmission energy and automatically generate sustainability reporting for regulators. The most effective applications of Agentic AI will also factor in their own carbon footprint to the overall sustainability model.

The combination of this moves sustainability from manual audit to always-on optimization.

Sustainability Will Reshape the Marketing Model

If the last decade of marketing was about volume, the next decade will be about value. Value for the customer, value for the business, and value for the planet.

As a collective we must stop treating sustainability as a compliance chore and start seeing it as a modelling challenge, a technology opportunity, and a competitive differentiator.

Mike Turner is principal business advisor for SAS Customer Intelligence. With over 30 years of experience in marketing, Turner has worked across many different industry sectors leading mixed teams of creative and technical resources in marketing agencies, consultancy, and supply and demand side commercial businesses. Turner has led two startup marketing solution software organizations through their incubation and early development and supports two university Digital Marketing MSc courses in the U.K.