Looking for a way to engage your congregation members? Consider email marketing for churches! Don’t underestimate the power of a well-crafted email.
This can be a powerful tool to keep your congregation informed. We’ve put together a few helpful tips so you can get started on your email marketing campaigns today!
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
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What is Email Marketing for Churches?
Email is definitely one of the easiest ways for churches to connect with members and new visitors. There’s a high chance that every person in your church has an email account they use regularly. Church email marketing service providers provide a way to streamline communication with your church, and it’s typically free or inexpensive, especially for small churches. If your church uses email without any strategy, you may not be using it to its greatest potential.
In this digital age, it only makes sense to utilize digital means to reach our congregations. Having an easy-to-navigate website, active social media, consistent email schedule, and even using a church text messaging platform can take your church from weekends-only to a thriving community of believers.
Why Your Church Needs Email Marketing
- Easy and inexpensive: Email is relatively easy to manage. Use email to quickly communicate with your church members the information they need to know without having to spend time printing or emailing direct mail. The timeliness of email is key. It’s also inexpensive to use an email marketing service to help you automate your strategy.
- Controllable: Email is more controllable than any other digital platform. With social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, your content may not be shared with every person. You’re dependent on the algorithm and how the platform operates. With email, you can send to your list and it’s pretty much guaranteed your recipients will receive the email. Email is a great tool to use alongside your social media strategy, especially for information that’s really important for people to know.
- Easy to get email addresses: Email addresses are easy to collect. Plus, an email marketing service helps you manage the emails you have to maximize opens and engagement. People (especially those in younger demographics) are much more likely to give you their email address than their physical address or phone number. Email is less invasive and helps start the conversation with new visitors.
- Measurable: Email marketing is data-driven and measurable. With an email marketing solution, you can measure opens and clicks, as well as figure out the best time to send your emails to maximize open rates.
- Segmentation: Email gives you the opportunity to segment, or send emails to specific groups of people. When people opt-in to your email list, they can select which emails they want to receive. This helps your recipients receive relevant content rather than information that may not matter to them.
Email Marketing Efforts You Can Try
First, you’ll need to establish a few things before you can start sending emails. This looks like finding the purpose behind every email, curating an email list and determining how often they send out. You’ll also need to find the right church management software for your email marketing efforts.
Establish a Purpose
The first place to start with an email marketing strategy is to define the purpose of your strategy. Determine what messages will be sent through email, which will be on the website and what messages will be posted on social media. There may be some overlap, but it is key to identify what you want to say through email, how frequently and to whom.
You’ll want to make sure your email content is simple and easy to digest. Remember, a majority of your email readers will open their emails on a mobile device. You’ll want to make sure your emails are mobile optimized, or easy to read on mobile, and clear and to the point. Your weekly emails are not the place to write a novel, as most readers will skim the content. Keep it short, sweet, informative, and to the point.
A few examples of emails you can send in your church emails are weekly newsletters with upcoming events and announcements, weekly prayer request lists, one time announcements like canceled events or services, and ministry-specific news.
Automate your Email Strategy
The days of manually adding new emails from connect cards each week to your Gmail list and bcc’ing your audience are gone (thankfully!). Using an email marketing solution offers the convenience, manageability, and measurement tools your church email marketing strategy needs.
There are a lot of affordable options your church can use to automate your email marketing like MailChimp, AWeber, SendinBlue, and Constant Contact. Any of these can be the right email marketing platform for your church!
Email marketing solutions will come with templates your church can use to easily build well designed, professional emails. Plus, the automation aspect of email marketing helps you save time by scheduling emails in advance. Finally, most email marketing solutions will have options to add a “Subscribe to our emails” button you can add to your website. This makes it easy for members to get added to your email lists. Social Reach Websites already has this function built into the platform.
Build Your List
Now that you have a strategy, it’s time to start building your list of contacts. You can collect email addresses through website subscription plugins and contact cards (print and digital). Be clear about why you are asking for emails. People can be skeptical that you’ll send too many emails and become “spammy.” Let your congregation know on your website, on contact cards, and from the stage that you simply want to keep everyone in the know.
Don’t forget regulations about email opt-ins and acquiring email addresses with permission. Updates in the EU concerning General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) make it more important than ever to make sure your church is complying with all regulations. It’s a good idea to ask for permission when acquiring emails, and to give subscribers the option to unsubscribe.
A good way to maximize the impact of your email list is to segment your lists into different groups. This way, people only receive information that is relevant to them. People like personalized communication, so make it specific. Some examples of lists your church can use are:
- New Visitor List
- Church Members
- Regular attendees
- Youth ministry (students and parents)
- Volunteers for different ministries
Write Good Content
The most important part of your church email marketing strategy is to have actual good content. You can send lots of emails and great lists, but it won’t matter if no one opens your emails.
Focus on subject lines to help grab your audience’s attention and open your emails. Great email subject lines are short, and personalized, and tell the audience what to expect when they open the email. The industry standard for open rates for non-profits is 28%, so you’ll want to aim for open rates around or higher than that. Using an email marketing solution can help you track this data.
How to Collect Emails for Your Church or Ministry
Collecting emails is one of the more trickier parts of implementing an email strategy. Here are a few different ways to reach people with your email list.
Social Media
Social media is a great way to connect with potential recipients. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind:
- Cross-Promotion with Engaging Content: Utilize your social media platforms to showcase the value of your email content, encouraging followers to subscribe for more in-depth insights and updates.
- Effective Call-to-Actions (CTAs): Implement clear and compelling CTAs on your social media channels to guide followers towards subscribing, emphasizing the benefits of joining your email list.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When done right, SEO can help drive new visitors to your website… and new signups for your email list. Here are two things to remember as you work on your search engine optimization.
- Mobile-Friendly Design and Responsive Templates: Optimize your website for search engines and ensure that the email sign-up process is seamless on all devices, improving the user experience and conversion rates.
- Actionable Insights from Integrated Analytics: Use data from your website’s analytics to understand how visitors interact with your site and refine your strategies to increase email sign-up rates.
Church Emailing Software
Using church email software makes it simple to stay organized, timely, and effective in your church email strategy!
- User-Friendly Interface with Responsive Templates: Select a platform that offers an intuitive interface and responsive email templates, making it easy to create and send messages that look great on any device.
- Measurable Outcomes and Actionable Insights: Choose software that provides detailed analytics on email performance, allowing you to track engagement and refine your approach for better results.
Helpful Tips and Tricks!
Now that you understand the how and why of email marketing for churches, we have a few helpful tips to make your emails go even further.
Use email opt-in on all your church forms
Every time someone visits your website, registers for an event, or asks for information about your church, make a signup form available for them to get weekly updates. People want to be in the know.
If you make your church email list difficult to subscribe to, people won’t know how to get the most up-to-date information about your church’s events, opportunities, and giving opportunities. Liberally include your email opt-in forms in as many places as possible.
One simple way to do this is to include a link to a signup landing page and embed an email signup form in the footer of your website. That way, every digital communication someone receives from your church will prompt them with an opportunity to stay connected.
Limit yourself to one weekly church email
People don’t need more than one email a week and constant contact. If your weekly email is designed well, contains links to more information, and is compactly written, people won’t feel the need to dig through sporadic emails or through hundreds of words of texts to find the information they need.
The worst thing you can do with your email list is to become an annoyance to your congregation. The easiest way to avoid this is to pick one single day on which to send your email, and send it on that day every single week.
Most churches send emails on Tuesday or Wednesday, because it gives the staff enough time to send congregants an update on the Sunday service. More than that, mid-week emails are a great opportunity to remind your congregation about what’s happening at church when the church may not be top-of-mind.
Send your church email mid-week
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are ideal days to send out emails. People may be distracted by their jobs and families at this time, this actually presents an even greater need to receive communication from your church. Your congregation need spiritual encouragement. They need reminders. They need church-relevant information to be brought top-of-mind in order to discuss with their colleagues, families, and accountants.
If you send an email on Monday, you might not have enough time to design and digest everything that happened during the Sunday service.
And if you send an email on Thursday or Friday, your church may be too busy planning for the weekend or finishing up work to respond to any of the action items in your email. And last, and certainly least, nobody opens their email account or takes serious action on Saturdays.
Give people spiritual encouragement in your church email
You don’t have to use church email merely to communicate the data of church events and needs. It doesn’t all have to be news and updates. Especially mid-week, people are often spiritually tired.
Include a spiritual note from the pastor. Tie each email together with a theme—generosity, legacy, service. Give your congregants something to reflect on as Sunday’s message sinks into the back of their mind throughout the week. This spiritual message may become the very reason that people look forward to receiving and opening your church emails altogether.
Don’t forget to add images
People typically tend to skim emails for important information. Adding photos and graphics help break up the content and keeps reader engagement high. Not to mention people love seeing familiar faces land in their inboxes!
Don’t forget to add your website or social media pages
A great email strategy will include a call to action in every email. To do this, you’ll need to be able to direct subscribers to your church website for more information. Plus, most email platforms allow you to install a plug-in on your website so people can subscribe to your email list to learn more about your church.
Does your church have a Facebook page or Instagram account? Make sure to include links to your social media platforms. The more ways you can provide information to everyone in your community, the better!
Start Emailing Today!
Communication through an email service provider is one of the most effective tools you can utilize. Keep your congregation well informed and able to locate important information easily.
Go one step further and include links to past sermons for those who didn’t make it to church on Sunday. Email is for more than just spam, it’s a vital way we can connect with the community. Use our helpful tips to make the best out of your email marketing! The possibilities are endless!
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