Eco-friendly marketing

#### Print your stationery yourself Unless you know you'll be sending out a lot of formal documents requiring your letterhead (and by a lot I mean hundreds per month), it can be more cost effective and environmentally friendly to print your letterhead and envelopes on your own printer. I strongly recommend a good color laser printer - colors tend to be richer and toner has come down in price over the years. Doing this saves paper and ink since you'll only be printing it when you need it or in small batches. But notice I left business cards out this. Business cards can become more costly when you print them yourself, especially when you factor in your time to cut them or the money spent on the crappy pre-cut business card paper. Printing your business cards with a professional printer is usually less expensive and can have minimal impact on the environment since often they'll do what's called a gang run (running multiple jobs at once). Plus, the quality will just look better. The key to printing anything yourself is to ensure that the design and message is still professional and appropriate for your business so it doesn't look so cheap and home-grown. #### Use an eco-friendly printing company It's uncommon now for printing companies to use inks that aren't soy or vegetable based. But not every printer offers recycled paper and not every printer does its part in reducing their carbon footprint. What good is using recycled paper if the emissions from running the presses are canceling out whatever good you're doing? If carbon footprints and recycled paper is important to you, look for a printing company that takes this into account too. Just know that your printing costs will likely be higher (though not always). #### Stick with e-mail Aside from your day-to-day correspondence, e-mail is a great tool for marketing. Of course, I'm not referring to using your copy of MS Outlook to send out a mass emailing. Instead, get a true email marketing service to get your message out. It's not only better on the environment (by skipping the paper for more traditional marketing), it's often more effective because it's much more targeted. #### Market online instead of offline I'm a firm believer that the traditional yellow pages are slowly dying. More and more people are simply turning to the web first and with better results in most cases. Couple that with the fact that phone books require massive amounts of paper and that the costs can be outrageous, marketing online just makes more sense. And in most occasions, the ROI is much higher. #### Final note One thing I should note is that I didn't mention too much about carbon footprints. As we move online we are saving paper, but don't forget that the datacenters that host the servers that host the websites we market on require energy. As such, it's probably wise to look for ways to offset your own carbon footprint. One great site to do that at is Native Energy. In fact, we use this as well to do our small part in keeping the environment clean. So, what are you doing to keep your marketing eco-friendly?