5 Game-Changing Church Email Automation Techniques

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, that may not be the coolest way to do outreach. Email marketing is tried and true, and that is true for churches more than anybody else. We're going to talk in this conversation about email automation for churches. Does it make sense to make things automated? Let's talk about it. You're listening to the Reach Write podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow. Well, hey guys, I'm Thomas. [00:00:29] Speaker B: And I'm Ian. [00:00:30] Speaker A: And today we are talking about church email automation and some techniques that we have found will save you lots of time and help you reach more people at your church. I think it should be a good conversation because we have talked many times in the past about email for churches and email newsletters and email automation, and I think we wanted to give some extra tips. I know that it is not the most attractive thing to talk about and it's not the. You don't get all the buzz that you do around social media or TikTok advertising or any other Google adwords that we help people with the Google grant, that kind of stuff. But I think that email marketing remains one of the lowest hanging fruit for churches out there and it is such an important avenue for us to explore that we wanted to give you some tips that I think it's something that every church should be putting some focus into. So should be a good conversation today. [00:01:27] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I agree, Thomas. And one of the things I thought of too, that's probably more of a. Or it has in recent years been a buzzword or of interest is text messaging for churches and mass texts, and those are effective, too. But why I thought of that is, you're right, it's not always popular to talk about email, but it's still very relevant. Something that we see churches getting great results with, something that my church gets great results with, as a matter of fact, and that I, that I follow still. So, no, it should be a great topic and hopefully helpful for a lot of churches. [00:02:00] Speaker A: Yeah. We have five tips today. I think we're going to explore them more. I think we have five ideas. I think the first one we're going to talk about is probably the most important and we'll have the most to say about some of the other ones, I think are things we can kind of play with. It's not for every church, but we'll just get into it here. So the first one is your welcome series. This is something that I think has, is so important that you nail it. And in most cases it makes sense to automate it. I think that when we talk about a welcome series. What I mean with this is when someone first comes to your church, it's the series of emails that you send to that person that helps to encourage them to take a next step, whether it be coming back the following week, going to a new members class, getting involved in a place of service, or probably some combination of all of those things. [00:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:02:53] Speaker A: It is so important to nail this, and I think every church needs to invest some time learning about this and really getting it because as someone who's pastored for years, this has been at a church I was pastoring recently. It was our secret sauce and we really nailed this. We got a lot of visitors and we were able to have a very high retention rate of those visitors because we really nailed this. Now, I'll say this before we get any deeper, we did a video a couple of weeks ago that I'm going to leave a link to down in the description and then right here in a card, if you're watching on YouTube, where we broke down my exact visitor follow up lead seq or visitor follow up email sequence that we would send to people. And I gave you the exact script that I'm using at my church as we're rebuilding this process. So I've used it before at other churches, we're using it at our church and I just wanted to make it for you. And there's a whole video about it. There's a free download included with it. So if you want the information on how to get these scripts, I'll have that all here. So you'd have to do any work. Just change your church name in there and you should be just about good to go. These are pretty tried and true, but all that being said, this is probably the most important thing you can do is having a sequence for people when they first come to your church and making sure that's automated. So any advice or tips on how to do that? Well, Ian, or any thoughts on that? [00:04:21] Speaker B: Well, first of all, I totally agree. And I agree with what you said about this being probably the most important because obviously your church wants to engage first time visitors and have them go deeper into the life of the church and keep coming back and get involved. So. Well, you know, no, some of the, I guess, ideas that we've seen and that we can throw out there is, of course, one could be a welcome greeting from, a personalized greeting from the pastor to the new visitor there. That's always good. They heard you preach on Sunday, you know, hopefully they enjoyed your message and when they get that from the pastor. That obviously gets a good, uh, impression there. It can be also on, you know, small group involvement. You know, we're going to get to some of these other things later, but, you know, if it is someone that's new and has come, you know, they might be wondering about. Okay, yeah, how can I meet some people? What other on ramps are there to, you know, being able to go deeper into the church could be around your values, upcoming events, those types of things. Visitors are interested if they, of course, if they enjoyed it. They do want to know about events. Do you have something for their kids or youth coming up, if it's a family or do you have an adult ministry that they would want to plug into stuff like that? [00:05:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're right. And I think I have some thoughts on the automation of it. Well, this episode is about email automation, and I think this is a good thing to automate. And I think for a church the size of yours, for instance, Ian, wherever you guys probably have 100 visitors a week or something like that, if not more, you have to automate it, right? Like having this do it some other way would be just overwhelming. The thought of your pastor sending personalized messages to 100 people, that's his whole job, basically, if he's doing that, but I think the majority of our audience, it might make sense to not automate it just so that there's no chance of it feeling impersonal or something that is just auto generated or anything like that. Because you think of the average sized church, maybe there are 75 people, 100 people, something like that. How many visitors are you seeing every week? Well, I think if you're really healthy and you're growing, you're probably seeing six or seven visitors every week. If you're like most plateaued or maybe even declining churches, you're seeing a few visitors a month, maybe. [00:06:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:46] Speaker A: So it probably isn't too much for you to personally do this, and it might not even make sense to automate it if it's one a week or something like that. It's probably in those cases, it's usually easier just to send the emails yourself and not go through the whole automation process. So it's not for everybody. I think even at a church, my church's size 200, 5300 people, we are right between that. Or it might make sense for us to have a dedicated person who's administrative to help us actually manage that. Just because it can be challenging to make your emails, your automated emails feel personal at the same time, especially if it's going to be coming from your lead pastor or feel like it's coming from him. And let's say, you know, a church our size, our lead pastor usually meets everybody that's there for the first time. And so maybe you had some kind of a conversation and you talked about where they're from or what they do for work. You'll want to include some of that personalization in there, and it's hard to do that on an automated basis. So I have some thoughts on that. But I think for larger churches, you got to automate. For smaller churches, don't rush to automate. It might not make sense. It's okay to keep it unautomated. [00:07:53] Speaker B: That's good. That's a good point there. So next one is event reminders and follow up. So we kind of talked about introducing events to first time visitors, but reminders are good. You know, obviously everyone's busy these days and especially here. This has been actually a big deal for my church in the summer months as it is a lot of churches when people are in and out on vacations, those types of things. So it could be that, that youth event or that kids camp or whatever it is that can easily slip through the cracks. And this is year round, you know, just of course letting people know of upcoming events. And then the other thing in addition to that is once they've gone to the event or in case they missed it, sending emails that recap how the event went, photos, maybe testimonial stories or just something cool that happened or that God did during that event. And the subject lines are important to this too. So just in case you missed it would be for those people that maybe miss the event or don't miss our upcoming service or event or something like that. You want attention getting subject lines so people click and then get the information about your events and get those updates and follow ups. [00:09:16] Speaker A: One of the cool things you can do this is kind of in that automation camp is that you could set up in every modern broadcast email tool, whether you're using Mailchimp or constant contact or anyone that you're using, you should be able to send a follow up message to people that didn't open your message the last time you sent it. For instance. [00:09:37] Speaker B: I am. [00:09:37] Speaker A: So let's say you have a, a big event coming up, a baptism this Sunday, and you want to remind people to get signed up for baptism. You could send out a message on Monday and then you could have it automatically send a follow up message with a different text, different subject line. You don't want it to be the exact same thing, but send a follow up one to people based on what they did. Like. So if they didn't, if they opened it and clicked on the registration, maybe, and they didn't fill out a registration, you could send them a different email that encourages them to get signed up. Or you can, if they didn't even open the email, you can kind of send another message to only those people. So there's a lot of automation techniques there that you can look into, I think. Yeah, with event stuff. And especially you mentioned the follow up side too. Like I think even after events, that's a really good time to send emails also kind of in the post event time, asking for testimonies, some of those kinds of things. What was your experience? Like surveys, we've done some of those kinds of things. There's lots of ways you could be. [00:10:35] Speaker B: Using that or make people feel bad for missing the event and have all of the, like we said, all the photos and all of the success stories. [00:10:42] Speaker A: There you go. And automation for people that didn't show up, you send them only a rebuking email. There you go. [00:10:47] Speaker B: That's right, automated conviction. So there you go. But good. [00:10:52] Speaker A: Next up is weekly newsletters. So when it comes to automation for this, I find this one of the hardest ones to automate because a weekly newsletter is generally kind of a what's happening? Or maybe a individual blog post or some kind of a spiritual encouragement from the leaders of your church. And so the automation side of things with this is a little bit more on the challenging side for most churches. But I do think it's something that when it comes to email marketing, it is a pretty valuable tool. The one thing I think I'd say about email newsletters is that unless you actually invest time in it, it can be just kind of a waste and it'll actually hurt you with your other emails that you send. So let's say if you're the kind of church that has a bulletin and your weekly emails newsletter is just a copy and paste of whatever's in the bulletin every week, you just send that out to your entire church without like a lot of thought. It's just something that maybe a administrator puts together, just highlighting the times of events and that kind of stuff, not really that useful. Right. If people want that information, they get onto your site and what's going to happen is if you do that. And the worst thing you can do is subject line. It's something like weekly Update August 5. Whatever it is, that is something that doesn't get opened isn't useful when people open it. And what's going to happen is that the more you send those kinds of emails out and Google and the other email providers that see people's habits, they're going to start to see, hey, we send out this email every week, nobody ever opens it. This might be kind of a spammy account. Let's actually deprioritize them or put them into the promotional inbox on someone's Gmail account there. Those kinds of things, that's what you want to avoid. So when it comes to your weekly email newsletter, it has to have some thought. You have to have a real writer do some of those things to make it worthwhile. And if you do, I think it's totally worth the time. [00:12:49] Speaker B: That's good. Nothing more to add to that. I think you covered that well. The next one is a little creative, I guess, and thoughtful, maybe is the best way to put it, is sending automated emails for birthday and anniversary greetings. And again, I would say when we're talking about authenticity, keep these short and to the point, because if they are automated, you definitely want the person's name in there. But if it's an anniversary or birthday, it makes them feel thought of. But you probably don't want to go too deep on the messaging and the content because people are going to know that it's automated. Here, for example, my church, we haven't done this unless they just missed my birthday. But no, I would know, obviously, with the thousands of people that attend that my pastor Joe did not send it to me. But still, nice to be thought of that they know these dates, that they care enough, that your church cares enough to wish someone that well. But maybe it's like what you said. Correct me if I know we're talking about automation, but if it's a smaller church, you know, and it's one of those churches where, you know all of the families, then, you know, maybe it's something better, more personalized. And you gotta be careful on the automation. What are your thoughts? [00:14:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're right. I think that that's like a birthday wish from a machine is basically useless, right? I get that from Panda Express. And they say, enjoy a free wanton or something on us for your birthday. You know, that that's. That's one thing. They're giving me something for free. If your church is gonna do that, you know, hey, happy birthday. Here's a free, you know, coffee shop gift card or something. [00:14:31] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:14:31] Speaker A: Never heard of a church doing that kind of a cool idea. A gift from your church might be interesting. But all that being said, I think that this is a tough one to automate because it's even smaller. Large church. A large church is gonna be obvious, like you were saying that the pastor doesn't know you. In a lot of cases he doesn't even know your name because it's a large church. In a small to medium sized church, you expect the pastor to know you, but you really like. The thing with automation is you really have to nail your data. Your list has to be super clean. So for instance, if a guy's name is Jonathan, but everybody knows he goes by John, right? If in the system it's his legal thing because that's what it said on his checks. When you put it in there and the email goes out to Jonathan, it's an immediate red flag that says, okay, nobody that actually knows me sent this email because he said Jonathan, and everybody knows my name is John or Johnny or whatever it is. So it's hard to execute that. Well, if you do the math on this, is that on average, if you're a church of 100 people, you're going to have two birthdays a week in your church, right? So I think you can automate a system that would ping the pastor or someone at the church on Monday of every week, or maybe they ping them on whenever that person's birthday is so that they can send a simple two sentence email to that person that says happy birthday and just encourages them. That's probably a better automation system than having the system itself do the email for you and risk the chance of making it clear that I don't care about your birthday, but the machine does, and it really isn't something that matters here. [00:16:17] Speaker B: So in the age of AI too, it's just more insulting. [00:16:20] Speaker A: So proceed with caution, I think is the more on that one. Automation is tricky with that. So last one I think is a good one. Volunteer and service opportunities. I think this is good for service reminders. So you definitely want to have ways to automate this. So for instance, everybody that's on for children's ministry this weekend, let's say you have six people that are serving in children's ministry, having a system that they would automatically get reminded of. That is really good. Now, is it as good, like, does it feel as personal as if the children's director writes you a personal message with what the content's going to be about and that kind of stuff? Maybe not, but I think that. I think people expect that when they know that they're signed up to serve. It's nice to get that reminder that says, hey, you're doing that. It's funny, when I preach at my church, I get these reminders, which is okay. Yeah, I knew I was preaching. I hope I'm not getting surprised on Saturday night. Oh, gosh, I have to preach tomorrow. [00:17:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. [00:17:19] Speaker A: But when it comes to the children's ministry side of things, or ushers or people that are doing setup or tear down or banned members that are playing on the worship team, these are good things to use, I think. So those kinds of volunteering opportunities. And then also I think it's good just for general volunteer acquisitions. So getting more people to come on board and getting people signed up for certain ministries, asking people once they've been there for a while, do you want to find a place to serve? And having those kinds of requests be automated, that can go a long way too. You could have a list in your database of people that serve and people that don't serve. And you don't want to send lots of messages to get involved with serving to those that are already serving in two places. But for those that have never signed up for a team, well, you probably want to have some automated emails that goes out to those people that invites them into a place of service. So that's the thought. [00:18:13] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. And one other thing to add is this is one of those areas of ministry that you kind of can't over communicate, meaning churches often need a lot more volunteer help. So the more you're making that visible and giving people those opportunities, the better. Because as we know, this is, you know, typically a challenge for a lot of churches. So. Yeah, no good stuff. [00:18:37] Speaker A: Yeah, no, awesome. Hope it's been helpful. Yeah. Your church should be using email whether or not you automate all of it. Don't automate all of it. Almost certainly, if it makes sense, do it. It's not for every church. I would say for that's those large churches, medium to large size, you start to get into that. For smaller churches, it might not make sense just yet, but I think it's a good thing to be looking into. You do need to be using email marketing, though, effectively. I'm going to leave a link in the description down below and then also there's going to be a card that comes up right here with a whole conversation we had on the importance of nailing your email marketing and gives you a full breakdown here. So until next time, thanks for being a part of the Reach ride family. We'll talk to you later. [00:19:18] Speaker B: We'll see you.