Church Email Marketing Secrets: 5 Keys to Converting Visitors into Members

[00:00:00] Speaker A: If you want to help people get assimilated into the life of your church, one of the best tools you have at your disposal is email marketing. And now I know email marketing isn't the sexiest way to do marketing, but it remains one of the best opportunities that we have. Let's unpack it. You're listening to the Reach right 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 marketing. And it is one of those topics that we talk about quite often here on the right podcast and in our other videos. And we hear from people that it's something that really is helpful. But I've noticed that something like when we make this kind of content on our channels, that it's not the most viewed or the most clicked on things, but I think it is one of the most important things that we talk about. I get it, like, email marketing is not sexy. It's not something, it sounds old, it sounds like something that we used to do 20 years ago. But man, I keep seeing this, that this is the for us. I know for us as a company when we work with our clients, this is one of the most important methods of assimilating people into your church, connecting people with your church. It's something that, before you click off and say, oh, it's a marketing episode for email, actually hear this out. I think this is something that really will make, it'll really move the needle for most churches when it comes to reaching new people and getting them assimilated into your church. So. [00:01:39] Speaker B: Agreed, Ian, agreed. And so don't tune out. And there's only five, so we're not giving you an exhaustive list. [00:01:46] Speaker A: It's a relatively simple list today. Here, let's start with, I guess, a little bit about the why email marketing matters. I think the fact is, and I think people overlook this, while it's not social media and it's not flashy web design, people still look at their emails, they still take a look at that. I think most people look at it daily. I know I do, because it is still the primary way that the most important messages will come to us. So when someone needs to get a hold of us or needs to get a confirmation, it always comes to us in written form via email. So it's something that people are still looking at all the time. And if we can master it, we can actually get into people's inboxes and actually start to really make an impact on. There because they'll be seeing our content and it really is important for that very reason. [00:02:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And I like that you said master it because it does take some healthy strategy with the nature of email and how it's viewed now and how long it's been around, if you don't have a good strategy for it, it could be very ineffective. So mastering it was a good term to use. And that's what we'll be talking about at least five ways to kind of help master it. Yeah. [00:03:02] Speaker A: Before we hop into the five, too. So I think that it probably is good that we talk about how do churches build an email list? And I think that's one of the most important things that a lot of churches just kind of, if you're just getting started in this, you tend to neglect, I imagine for most of your church members, you have some kind of way that you've gotten their emails from them over the years and you will send emails to church members. But it's important that when someone comes for the first time, those visitor cards, whether they're digital or they're things that they're doing via text or QR, something that you're actually filling out a code, whatever it would be, or filling out a card, you need to be harvesting that information. Our advice for churches is you always get as little information as you can get away with because the more you ask for, the fewer responses you'll get. [00:03:50] Speaker B: Correct. [00:03:51] Speaker A: So if you're asking people for name and email, or maybe name, email and phone number, you'll probably get more responses on your cards than if you ask for name and email and phone number and address and date of birth of their kids and all that kind of information, which would all be nice to have. You can send cards to kids on birthdays and it's well intentioned, but I think people are not going to take the time to do that just because they're maybe not quite comfortable with you enough yet to do it. Or they just don't want to spend the time to write down everybody's birthdays and that kind of information there. [00:04:23] Speaker B: And often you get that info when someone checks their kid into children's church for the first time, too. [00:04:29] Speaker A: That's a great place to do those kinds of things there. So all that being said, it's so important that you get this. It's so important that you take that information and then you do something with it. And you need to use some kind of a broadcast email system. Do not blind, carbon copy everybody in your church into one email and just send it out to the whole church. [00:04:50] Speaker B: Now that is a dated practice. [00:04:52] Speaker A: Especially don't do a regular carbon copy where everybody sees everybody's email addresses. That's a big no no, but that's going to hurt your deliverability rates and it's just not an effective way to send out emails. But what we're going to be focusing on in this conversation is specifically with new visitors and how we kind of handle those emails and how you in the business world, this sounds kind of weird in a church world, but in the business world, we call this the indoctrination sequence. So it's where you send a series of emails to people and you kind of indoctrinate them or introduce them, I guess, into who you are as a company and the benefits that you bring and why people should sign up with you. And it's designed to help warm people up towards you. And really this is doing the same thing. We're trying to help new visitors become more warm towards us. They are more introduced to what we do as a church, what's important to us, what's happening at our church, what are their next steps, some of those kinds of things. So that's what we're going to be focusing on. So we have five tips that we want to get into, five different things that we have picked up that we think really are important things to keep in mind as you're building out this initial welcoming sequence at your church and ongoing. So the first thing is understanding your audience. And with that, I should say it's segmenting your audience and making sure that you're sending the right kinds of emails to the right people. So one of the biggest mistakes people make with email marketing is sending the same email to everybody that signs up. Right? So if you have new people at your church, let's say, like, you're collecting email addresses from your people that come to college group for the first time, maybe you're asking for, I don't know if youth ministries do this or not, but some do. They're asking for email addresses for students. Usually it's more connecting on Instagram and those things obviously, right? Maybe they do those. And you have senior citizens and you have parents and you have all these different kinds of people coming to your church. It would be a mistake if you just lump them all into one thing, because the messages you want to send to first time visitors to your youth ministry are different from the messages that you want to send to people that came once to a seniors group or to young families that are there. And it's so important that you actually have some of that kind of information. That's the most obvious way to segment your list is by life stage or age group, I guess, within your church. But then you probably will have segments for like, as you go on segments for people that are first time visitors. You'll have, obviously, a segment for people that are longtime members of your church. You'll have segments for people that are regular givers and those that are not. You'll want to probably send different kinds of messages to different people. And that's the whole point behind it, is it helps you to tailor your message to specifically to different kinds of people because we know that different people will respond differently to different messages. So when you're starting out with this, I'd probably recommend at least get one. You're going to need one primary welcoming sequence for the average first time visitor. So maybe make kind of an avatar of who is that average person? It's going to be a family that has kids or whatever it would be. You make that avatar and you probably do a sequence right towards them. And as you've kind of used that a few times, you'll start to see some patterns that, oh, we're having a lot of people in this different life place. What if we tweaked our sequence a little bit and invited them to different calls to action and different steps along the way and have different messaging for them? That's the way you would typically do something like this. [00:08:35] Speaker B: No, that's all good stuff, Thomas. Yeah. Segmenting was the name of the game there with all of that, as far as your audience. And I just had some funny pictures come to mind mentally, when you were saying all of that, because I've seen a lot of. Just for the work we do in evaluating websites and what other churches are doing online, I've seen these big, busy, dated looking email newsletters that have, like for the women's knitting, the senior women's knitting circle. And then there's a graphic with the yarn and all of that. And then underneath there is like the youth event. They just don't go together. Right. I could picture, like you said, if it's someone in college age in the college ministry, obviously they're not going to be really interested in what you have going on for little kids or seniors. So. Yeah, that's a good point. And I just had funny pictures. You have a big, busy Hodgepodge newsletter that needs to be fixed. [00:09:32] Speaker A: Yeah, we're all for some of these niche type things. And there's great, I mean, if you have great ministries that are going to appeal to a certain demographic, use them, but just you have to tailor it so that not everybody, I mean, the fact is that most people aren't interested in your knitting circle at your church. And it's not a big driver of new first time visitors for most churches. I'm going to maybe get a comment out there like, well, our knitting ministry is how most people come here. [00:09:57] Speaker B: We've had five salvations in one week from it. [00:10:01] Speaker A: That's awesome. We're for those kinds of things. [00:10:04] Speaker B: That's right. [00:10:04] Speaker A: But the fact is most churches aren't going to have that kind of result there. And so this is where segmenting and really understanding your audience comes into play. [00:10:12] Speaker B: That's good. Next one is one of the things we always love to talk about that is use ctas, stands for calls to action and have good follow up responses in your newsletters. We think that in any, just marketing and anything you're doing, it's like an altar call. Right. You're asking someone to take a next step at the end of hearing a great message. Same thing in your emails. You won't hear from people. And we've seen these studies and statistics for years now that the more you ask someone to make some sort of a response with your marketing on your website, social media, the more likely you will get a response. And this one thing we've seen really just drives great results and responses. So if you're putting together a good email newsletter and marketing campaign system, you want to ask people to make some sort of next step. If it's an event you're promoting, ask them to register for that event right there. Have a form where they can do that. Ask for prayer. If it is some sort of a consent form or something that you need for a youth event or something like that, or a kids thing, ask for it. Ask for that and you'll get more of a response for sure. [00:11:34] Speaker A: Yeah. So here's the hard and fast rule that we live by, is that if you don't have something to ask someone to do in this email, the email is not worth sending. There you go. Maybe you'll think, well, what about if I just have kind of a word from the Lord? Sure. Ask something still, like ask people to respond, encourage you. [00:11:55] Speaker B: Was it, did it hit home? Yeah. [00:11:57] Speaker A: And so that's kind of the cardinal rule. So every single email you send, it needs to have another rule. I guess that goes with it, is it needs to have one call to action. So this is a mistake. I see so many churches making is that you kind of have this weekly email that you send out and in it you want to pack in all of the different announcements you talked about on Sunday and give a call to action for each one. And there's a place for that kind of an email. But I can assure you that you'll get better results if you focus on one thing and it just hits that one call to action really hard. The emails that you look at, if you look at all the marketing emails you receive in your inbox, take a look at them, you'll see that most of the good ones that you are actually driven to respond to, they're to do one thing. It's the Southwest Airlines promotion ends today. Check flight prices or it says one specific thing on there. So for you, it needs to be one specific call to action. Now, a couple of things to think about with what those calls to action can be. Yeah, I think you mentioned a few of them. One that we're testing a lot right now, and I want to encourage churches to try invite people to actually reply to the email that you send them as a call to action. I know it seems so foreign because usually we've been trained to make buttons and make them go to forms and fill things out and go to the site and do that stuff. But one of the signals that we're seeing that the biggest email providers use specifically, like what Gmail uses, is they are going to judge whether or not your email is spammy based on how many people open it and how long they're staying on the emails, obviously. But one of the big metrics is how often do people respond to your emails or send replies to it? Because people that you reply to are generally emails that you want to read in the future. So if I can get someone who's just come for the first time to reply to me, whether it's like, hey, can you give me a little bit of feedback? Or hey, what are some things I can pray for you about? Like asking specific questions that demand a response in email. That's a really solid signal to Gmail that your emails are always worthy of delivering, at least to this inbox and probably to other inboxes as well. And then on top of that, it's a great way to start conversations and pray for people. [00:14:19] Speaker B: There you go. [00:14:20] Speaker A: There's a technical side to it and. [00:14:21] Speaker B: The actual ministry side to it as well. Yeah, for sure. No, that's a good one to bring up, Thomas, because I know a lot of people probably don't think about that because a lot of emails do say no reply when they're sent out too, right? These days. [00:14:36] Speaker A: Monitor your replies were very rarely are churches big enough that you can't handle the number of replies that you would get to these kinds of things. And even if you are that big, if you're thousands of people at your church and you're sending out new visitor emails, 500 a weekend or something, that's great. Find people to respond to those, engage with people that way. So yeah, absolutely, don't leave your inbox unresponded to next one. Let me get that. It's create compelling content. This should be obvious, but I want to take a step into it and talk about what we mean by this. And I think the trap that so many churches get into with their email marketing is we talk about just the what and not the why, not the story behind it. [00:15:20] Speaker B: That's good. [00:15:21] Speaker A: Our emails, if it's all about, hey, we have this event here, here's the particulars, here's when and where. All that information, great, have that on there. But you have to start with story. So always every time, start with the story of why you're doing these kinds of things and create something compelling. We've done a lot of testing on email marketing here at reachwright and we've actually landed, and if you're on our email subscriber list, you know this already, we've landed that we get the best results when we drop almost all of the design aesthetic from our emails and all the flashy buttons and moving parts and colorful things and all that work that we spend so much time working on and just get down to really good content that is relatively short. So in general, our emails here at retrieve we shoot for around 80 words is how much we want to send in them with a really clear call to action that actually piques someone's interest and drives their curiosity to take another step, whether it be watching one of our new videos or responding to some kind of request. And I think churches should do the same thing. I think there's a place you could certainly spend a lot of times on graphics and people will engage with pictures and those things on your emails. But do not neglect just the importance of good copywriting, good content and actually using some kind of a hook like grab people's attention. Maybe it's a stat, maybe it's something that you're hearing, maybe it's a testimony, but get that hook in there. And I think that's what will make people read it and make them not ignore future emails. And it'll just really up your overall engagement rate on these kinds of things. [00:17:02] Speaker B: Yeah, you made me think of a couple of things there that we've seen too. Just even on church websites. Like when we build an online giving page, when we do a church website for a client of ours, we say, don't just have the link to give, have. Why they should give. What does it mean for your church? Have storytelling behind it. Same thing in your email marketing. If it's a youth event, tell some story behind how their youth is going to be impacted. Maybe like you said, it's a stat know how youth are at risk from obviously distancing from God in the next coming years. So stuff like that really creates engagement. So that's good. Thomas, next one's kind of a no brainer, but I guess it's worth mentioning is optimize everything for mobile. I guess that that is just something that's important. Make sure that whatever newsletter system or email system you're using and most of the main providers have this stuff built in already, but make sure it's optimized for mobile. And I guess another way to put this too is just know that most people will be accessing this from their phone and when they're signing up for things, whether or not it's a form, clicking on a button, responding picture first that it's happening from a phone and make sure that you're optimized and set up for that. Right? [00:18:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I just got an email today from another website development and marketing company out there. I was on their subscriber list and they had for a long time done what I had just recommended where they focused mostly on text messages and then they just pivoted as the first email I ever saw from them that was more graphical and I got it and it was like one word per line because it wasn't optimized for lowball. Looking at this thing here because the graphics are squeezing it so tight and it was a strange format. So this is one of the other advantages of what I just talked about of doing just text based emails is that it's pretty hard to mess that up on mobile. Every mobile device can handle that pretty well. But yeah, I think that's something that is a no brainer. You absolutely have to know that we all look at our email much more on our phones than we do on our desktop or laptop computers. So understand that this is where people will be seeing it. Most people, they kind of do their test or their check on their desktop because that's where they're creating or writing the email. And so take the time to actually do the test. When you send it out, take a look at it on your phone. Even better. Even better. But if you have a tablet there, take a look at it on a tablet. Make sure it's doing the same thing. And yeah, especially if you're using images in your actual email, that's when you really have to make sure you're getting this right. That's good, good stuff. Can I get the last one? [00:19:49] Speaker B: You got it. [00:19:50] Speaker A: All right, here it is. It's personalize to try to build more relationship. This is something that every modern email provider should be able to handle for you, is the personalization. So my recommendation, I think, for most churches is you don't want to be too formal with your personalization. So I wouldn't say, Mr. Costello, it was great to have you at church this weekend. Or something like that in it. I'd say, Thomas, it was great to have you at church this weekend. It's like using those things, but make sure you do it. There's a few places that we have seen and tested for personalization and where it actually moves the needle. Personalization in the subject line is really a powerful tool. So if your email subject is a bad subject line, but if it is great to see you at church this weekend, it will perform almost certainly worse in that form. And it would perform better if it was. Ian, it was so great to see you at church this weekend. If it had your name in there, people are just automatically drawn to it and every modern email tool should be able to do this for you. So that assumes you have a clean list. What you need to pull this off is you have to have a list that has name information tied to emails. I think when it comes to email marketing, and this is something that I think for most churches, all you really need is first and last name and email address. You can get things like phone number and other contact information in there and addresses and those things. But really you're going to primarily use it for personalization in this time right now. So when you sign up for whatever system, whether it's mailchimp or constant contact or you're doing something through your church management software, make sure that those things are linked up. And every chance you get to personalize, do not start your emails with hey or hello and then nothing actually put hey, Ian, put that in there and people are going to be more likely to respond to these kinds of good. Yeah, any level of personalization you can add, it's a no brainer. You want to do that and it shows that you care. [00:21:59] Speaker B: We're supposed to do that in ministry. [00:22:02] Speaker A: It's a good idea. [00:22:04] Speaker B: At least. That's it. [00:22:06] Speaker A: Awesome. Anything to add as we close up, Ian? [00:22:08] Speaker B: No, hopefully that was helpful. And again, we know, again, email. That topic can be a turn off at first glance, but still vital, like we've said. And we hope some of these things can refresh someone's email strategy that they have at their church, for sure. [00:22:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it really can be some of the lifeblood I've seen it for. It's kind of the key part of your visitor engine. If you want to see people come back, engaging them outside of church and email is really one of the best ways to do it. Obviously, we have had other episodes where we've talked about texting and some of that stuff, so do check those out. But email is not dead, and it is something, I think, that is more important today than it has ever been, and it's something you really need to put some effort into probably if you're not putting your effort into that there. [00:22:54] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:22:55] Speaker A: Thanks, guys, for being a part of the reachwright family. If this is something that has been helpful to you, please do hit that subscribe button. Let us know down in the comments. If you have any other email tips that you have picked up over the years for your church that are working, share it with the people that watch this video, put it down in the comments. That would mean a lot to us. I'm going to throw up a link here now. It's going to be to one of our videos we've done about texting and why. It's another thing you can be looking into. So take a look at that and we'll see you next time. [00:23:23] Speaker B: See ya.