Photo thanks to Don Jopi
My Baba reuses teabags. She hordes bacon grease in tin cans in her freezer, and she uses old butter wrappers to grease cooking pans. When Baba raised her six children in the post-depression era, she used cloth diapers for all of them.
What the big car companies and fortune 500s are just starting to do, my grandmother has been doing her whole life.
Though she doesn’t know it, Baba is greener than most of us. While Oprah and Katie Couric are hosting how-to-seminars on saving water by doing your dishes in the shower, Baba has been quietly watering her plants with dehumidifier water for decades.
Though she may not know it, most of Baba’s money saving techniques are also green. And in an economy that is eerily reminiscent of ’29, we all could take a page from her book.
So what can your small business do? Besides implementing “Walk to Work Wednesdays” savvy businesses are reducing their paper trails.
With Email Blasts, paper newsletters are becoming obsolete. I know, it’s a little scary when you can’t physically see the newsletters going out, when you can’t lick (or re-use, as Baba does) all those stamps yourself, but when you are able to track your readership online for a fraction of the cost of paper mailings, your wallet and your tongue will thank you.
Email Blasts allow businesses to track how many people are opening and reading their enewletters, providing an amazing insight that never existed with paper mailings. Email newsletters build loyal customers, because most enewsletters are opt-in. It’s an interest thing. And interested customers mean repeat customers, which means increased revenue for you.
Besides saving money, Email Blasts are kind to the environment. They render obsolete paper mailings’ dependence on logging for paper, and gasoline for transport. Instead, thousands of copies of your message are sent instantly around the globe leaving a minimal carbon footprint.
Though Baba has, to my knowledge, never used a computer in her life, I know she would approve, and probably blast her 100th birthday invites out online.
