Email marketing can be a great tool for your church to retain and reach out to congregants. Most people either personally or professionally, or both, have an email address that allows you to stay in touch with them throughout the week in between services and gatherings. Many churches are familiar with the practice of sending regular newsletters, but if you’ve never ventured into email marketing (or need a little refresher) here are a few tips to get you on your way:
- Determine Your Goals
Sit down as a church leadership team and determine the goals you have for email marketing as a church. Are you looking to retain existing members and stay in touch with them throughout the week? Will you have an email signup on your church website? Will it be important for each ministry to have its own email design or list database? Establishing goals will help you get a handle on how you want to best utilize email, and why. - Choose an Email Provider
There’s no shortage of email service providers (ESPs) out there – and many of them are decent. How do you decide which is right for your church? Here are a few points to consider:- Usability – First and foremost, you’ll need to be comfortable using whichever ESP you choose. Spend some time with a few before you commit or feel free to ask us for recommendations.
- Cost – Many ESPs offer free plans for churches and nonprofits, but be sure you have room to grow and that any costs you may incur will be within budget.
- Website Integration – Minimally, you’ll most likely want to include a subscription form (for people to add themselves to your email newsletter list) on your website. Many ESPs provide direct integration with common web platforms like WordPress; consider which providers will work best with yours, both for signups and performance tracking.
- Deliverability – Review the deliverability rates each ESP advertises and how they intend to continue improving and adapting.
- Customer Service – Issues arise from time to time. How will the ESP handle technical issues? What kind of knowledge bases and help forums do they have available? Simple test: we call the vendor to see if we can get a human 🙂 It’s also a good idea to check out reviews online.
- Design Your Email Based on what you’ve found in your research on engaging content, design your email template to make the most of the content you’ll be sending. Consider including links to social media accounts, your blog, service pages, donation forms, volunteer signups, etc.
- Get Subscribers Include a signup page on your website, promote your newsletter in social media channels, and offer newsletter signup on donor and volunteer forms. Remember those engaging blog posts you identified? Let your blog readers know they can get even more by subscribing to your newsletter!
- Go for it! There’s a lot you can do to plan and prepare for a successful email campaign (this post is only scratching the surface), but in the end nothing is more valuable than getting started and testing live campaigns. If your ESP offers A/B testing, take advantage of it – test subject lines, featuring different content, and variations in content length.
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