The very first Earth Day took place on 22nd April 1970, and now, five decades later, we are still celebrating and advocating for our wonderful, green, and watery planet.
The theme for Earth Day 2024 is Planet VS Plastics, and EarthDay.org has called for a 60% reduction of plastic production by 2040.
Your brand, too, might want to consider celebrating Earth Day. It may be a perfect fit with your company’s ethics and vision, or there may be a natural fit between your products and the celebrations. You may even think to celebrate Earth Day by trying something more radical (we’ll get into examples and ideas later).
What’s most important, however, is being honest, authentic, and never succumbing to greenwashing. Today’s savvy folk will typically see through a company masquerading as a friend of the Earth for one special day of the year, so it’s better not to try it at all if it doesn’t fit with their brand’s ethos and image.
If you do want to celebrate Earth Day, though, and need a few ideas on how to communicate that across social media, email, and your website, we’ve compiled some examples of how other brands have acknowledged it, with a little advice on why these work, too:
Molton Brown
Establishing your goals
Many brands use Earth Day as an opportunity to lay down their intentions and goals for the months and years ahead.
As a recent example, we can look to fragrance brand Molton Brown used Earth Day 2023 to communicate their goals in regards refillable and reusable packaging, as well as direct customers to their already-existing refill pouches and washable glass bottles.
Emma Bridgewater
Draw attention to your eco-friendly products
Oftentimes, your products will already be eco-friendly or sustainable, and this is just a good opportunity to show them some love in your marketing.
For example, Emma Bridgewater used Earth Day to promote its Chilly’s products, which are washable and reusable:
These aren’t new products, or even items which are essentially marketed as “green” but they do help customers to pursue a more environmentally-conscious lifestyle – such as ditching plastic water bottles in favour of these long-use containers.
Thinx
Run a discount or sale on those eco-friendly products
To encourage people to invest in reusables and more eco-friendly production, you might think to offer a special discount on Earth Day. This might help some people who may be sceptical of a different product, or perhaps just need more financial incentive to invest, to finally complete their checkout.
For instance, Thinx creates reusable, washable period underwear, and in 2023, they offered customers new and old a 20% off discount. Specifically, they said the special code was in an effort to see more people make mindful choices and move away from plastics.
Scrumbles
Offer advice
You might also think to create content around Earth Day, like pet nutrition brand Scrumbles has in this example:
Here, they’re giving their audience further value beyond just their product, and engaging with them on matters they care about in the form of 10 simple tips for being greener for Earth Day.
You might also think of other ways to create content around this celebration, including videos, photographs, infographics, polls on social media, and, as above, listicles, articles, and thought pieces. This might be an especially useful tactic if your brand values the greener way of life, but doesn’t have a rich selection of professional content to pull from.
Costa Coffee
Outline your environmental efforts
In 2022, Costa Coffee highlighted the environmental efforts they were already making, such as offering additional loyalty points for reusable cup-users, and free water refills for people who brought their own bottles. They also announced that they were trialling fibre cup lids to cut back on plastic waste.
In this vein, you might think to highlight everything you’ve done to be a more environmentally friendly, sustainable company in the last 12 months, or even since your conception. It doesn’t have to be anything too revolutionary, but letting your customers know that you’ve reduced your carbon footprint or plastic consumption by even 10% is a sign that you’re making an effort.
Tribe Kelley
Offer greener delivery options
Shipping can be a big problem if you want to lower your environmental impact. Earth Day, therefore, could be the perfect opportunity to start offering greener delivery options.
Obviously, many customers will want and choose Next-Day Delivery, but there are also eco-minded buyers who will, instead, choose a delivery option that is kinder to the Earth. In fact, Shopify research says that “43% [of shoppers] are more likely to buy from brands with sustainability practices like carbon-neutral shipping”.
As an example of this, fashion brand Tribal Kelley offers Carbon Neutral shipping on all of their orders:
Tribal Kelley has been reported as having seen an increase of 19% cart conversions after implementing carbon neutral shipping with Shopify app EcoCart.
Cider
Cut back on plastic in deliveries, too
While we’re on the topic of deliveries, you might also look at how to reduce your plastic packaging when it comes to postage for this Earth Day – especially given the call to action established for 2024.
Dubbed Gen Z’s favourite fashion brand, Cider prides itself on its efforts in sustainability, including their plastic-free postage. The bags in which clothes arrive are compostable, and where customers do not want to compost, the brand gives additional ideas of how to repurpose the plastic-like bags.
Not only will this have an environmental impact, but it might save you money, too. As of April 2022, the United Kingdom has introduced a fresh plastic packaging tax. This tax focuses on plastic packaging containing less than 30% recycled material, with a charge of £200 per tonne. It is applicable to all elements of your packaging. This means it may end up being cheaper to swap out plastic peanuts for the likes of paper twist fill, and plastic wrap for cardboard.
The Frye Exchange
Offer a resell option
One of the key Rs in sustainability is, of course, reuse.
Many people are already shopping via resell stores like Vinted or eBay in order to reduce their environmental impact. Vinted, in fact, doubled its user base from 2019 to 2022, jumping from 30 million to 65 million.
Some apps can help you facilitate this resell and secondhand shopping on your website, instead of customers searching for your products on third-party websites.
For example, The Frye Company uses an app called Recurate, which aims to create “a secure and reliable resale ecosystem for your community”.
When it comes to The Frye Company, Recurate said:
“Through their peer-to-peer marketplace, customers can easily buy and sell pre-owned footwear and accessories within the comfort of a familiar ecosystem. Through strong branding and an easy-to-find and navigate website experience coupled with effective marketing efforts, the program continues to gain a foothold as a leader in footwear resale.”
An alternative Shopify app might be Recommerce:
“With the Recommerce app, your customers can trade in secondhand items when no longer needed, in exchange for cash (bank transfer) or store credit with your Shopify store.”
Aveda
Make a charitable donation
Aveda is a cosmetics brand founded in 1978, and it prides itself on various green badges of honour: vegan, cruelty-free, and all-natural. It is therefore an easy fit with the likes of Earth Day, and in 2023, it celebrated by partnering with charity: water.
Specifically, it donated $5 from every special edition shampoo bar purchased, and outlined their objectives too:
“Together, we’ve raised $3.6+ million for clean water solutions, serving safe drinking water to over 92,000 people4 across two continents. And with your support this Earth Month, we aim to do the same for 35,000 more people.”
If you, too, would like to try donating to a special cause for Earth Day, you might try something similar, with either a fixed amount per product or a percentage of your overall products for the 24 hours of Earth Day.
Alternatively, you can simple pay a flat-rate donation, which could be inspired by or based off a number special to your company, or even the year 2024.
Conclusion
Earth Day is a special occasion for brands in that it looks at more meaningful plans and strategies behind a company, and not just new sales or imagery. More importantly, it’s up to you to know how to communicate those values to your customers, and we hope this article has given you some ideas on how to do that.
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