How to Harness the Green Monday for Marketing and Promotion

Green Monday is a holiday that began in 2007. eBay coined the term to describe the second Monday in December, which is a big day for shopping, right behind Black Friday. eBay called it a “Green” Monday because they claimed shopping on eBay is more environmentally friendly than shopping at a traditional brick-and-mortar store is. Whether that’s true or not is debatable, but one thing is for certain: their campaign succeeded and Green Monday is now a real holiday.

Green Monday is, of course, not the most popular holiday on the calendar, especially during the busy winter months. But it is still a recognized holiday, which means your business has the ability to harness it as a promotional asset. This page details the various ways in which your company can promote green initiatives while simultaneously increasing revenue on Green Monday.

General Marketing Tactics for Green Monday

A common marketing tactic on Green Monday is to introduce a new environmentally-friendly company policy and tell your customers or clients about the change you’re making. This approach allows you to bolster your brand image while simultaneously directly promoting your products during the busiest time of the year for sales and shopping. 

By deviating from traditional holiday sales that revolve around Christmas, you have the chance to catch the eye of customers who may be overwhelmed with cookie-cutter holiday promotions. 

Company Changes to Make on Green Monday

The change you make needs to tread the line between easy-to-implement and impactful. You need enough time to rapidly deploy the change and create the marketing campaign, yet you also need your customers to be impressed with the changes you’ve made. Here are two ideas that meet both of those criteria to get you started.

Ditch Paper Business Cards

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Paper business cards used to be a requirement for any modern businessperson. However, the statistics associated with paper business card usage are not pretty:

• 27,000,000 business cards are printed every day
• To create those business cards, 1,473 trees are cut down every day
• Tragically, 88% of business cards end up in the bin within a week of handing them out

Instead of wasting paper business cards every time you want to make a connection, you can switch to Mobilo: a smart digital business card that uses NFC technology. Switching to Mobilo not only gives you a fantastic promotional asset for Green Friday, but you can also save hundreds of dollars per year, per employee, on printing costs. 

Even better, every Mobilo card comes with four unique modes of information transfer, meaning you and your employees will be able to network significantly much more efficiently effectively than you would with paper business cards as well. Click here to learn more about Mobilo.

Donate to or Partner With a Charitable Organization

Donating money is always a good idea when you want to make your values known to the public. A sizeable one-time donation to a non-profit organization that focuses on environmental concerns shows that you not only care about the environment--but that you also put your money where your mouth is. Another option is pledging to donate a certain percentage of profits to charity--and you can use this marketing angle on all of your sales materials around the year to entice customers to buy from you.

Beyond literal donations, another option is linking up with an organization to promote an environmental objective every time a certain action takes place within your company. For example, Mobilo is partnered with One Tree Planted. Every time someone buys a Mobilo Wood card, One Tree Planted plants a tree. This partnership is an additional line expense for us, but it allows us to clearly demonstrate our values to our customers and do some good in the world while we’re at it.

Step-by-Step: How to Promote Your Company on Green Monday

Once you’ve decided on how you are going to associate your brand with Green Monday, it’s time to get the word out.

1. Send out an email and social media blast to your followers informing them of the action you’re taking on Green Monday.
2. Be sure to go over the impact of the action you’ve taken. For example, if you switch to Mobilo, include some of the statistics about paper business cards mentioned above. This helps readers quickly understand and digest the implications of what you’re doing.
3. Include a plug for your products and/or services. This doesn’t have to be a hard sell, but at the same time, you do want to transform interest in your green initiatives into revenue.

When executed properly, you can often make a small change that costs you a nominal amount of money and see an increase in revenue that completely offsets that cost. In some cases, such as if you upgrade to Mobilo, your new green initiative can actually save you money along with serving as a promotional asset for Green Monday. That’s a win/win.

Click here to learn more about Mobilo smart business cards.