Speaker 0 00:00:00 In today's episode, we unpack seven church newsletter, mistakes that many churches make and what you need to do to fix it. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow. This is the read-write podcast.
Speaker 1 00:00:23 You're listening to the read-write podcast. The show dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders reach people the right way, hosted by me, Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help your church see more visitors and grow.
Speaker 0 00:00:51 Welcome to the <inaudible> podcast. Episode number 44. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost the in Hyatt. Hey Thomas. Hey Ian. Good to talk with you today. Excited for our conversation. We're gonna be talking about seven church newsletter mistakes that churches make and how you can fix them. I think it's going to be a good conversation for us to have, because it seems like most churches in 2021, and even before they do newsletters, you guys do a newsletter, right? And your church, dude, we've done it for a long time. Now, a lot of churches have been doing them for a very long time. Now they have not died. They have not died by, um, you know, it's surprising, I would say because it's been, there's been much made of the rise of social media and text messaging. And people will say that email, uh, emailing his dad or email advertising is what newsletters are.
Speaker 0 00:01:47 They'll say that that's dead. I don't find that to be the case. I find that, uh, email still is. I don't know if I can say that it's as valuable as it's ever been. And there are certainly some changes that make it harder, uh, in this climate. Uh, but I think that I don't know about you, but I, I open emails. Uh, I read emails. I, I look at my email every single day. Maybe that's a product of being a gen X-er, I don't know, or like a borderline millennial where I am. Uh, but, uh, I do think that most people still look at their, the evidence seems to show most people look at their email daily. So I think every church should be doing some kind of email marketing newsletter type thing. Uh, it just makes sense in this day and age. So I know our church does.
Speaker 0 00:02:29 And, um, now is it useful for everybody? Um, I've seen a lot of bad newsletters. Let me do just kind of, we didn't plan this ahead of time. And do you read your church's newsletter every week? No, no. Maybe either. Uh, if my, be totally honest, I think, I think that's the thing is that that's not necessarily the point of what a newsletter is about is to get someone to, to read it and pour over every bit of content. But I think what it is there to do, and we'll talk about this a little bit on the process is to get someone, to take a step, to draw them deeper into that relationship with Jesus and to discipleship. And so, um, you know, I think this is sometimes we could reduce email and kind of minimize it and make it something that's just kind of an administrative task of something we have to do. But really we see this as a discipleship opportunity for churches. This is something that, uh, if you do this right, it'll help people grow in their faith and grow closer to Jesus. And I believe more people will be added to the number who are being saved if we do email. Right. So maybe it's just me being super spiritual, but I think it's something good. So yeah,
Speaker 2 00:03:38 I would even add that. Oh, I was just going to say, I think we are in the age of where someone has their junk email that they give out to like, you know, some, if someone asks for it at a, at a, at a shop or something like that, when you're, when you're, you know, okay, this is the one I don't want to read. So if the church newsletter could end up in your good email address, then that's a win too.
Speaker 0 00:03:58 Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. So, so we're here today to help you to, uh, get your email newsletter for your church, get it opened by more people, uh, get it, read by more people and get more people to make decisions, to be closer to Jesus because of it. Um, and we see a lot of bad church newsletters out there and we want to help fix some of those problems here. So that's the point of the conversation here today is to try and help you fix some of those kinds of issues. So, uh, I'll go ahead and kick us off with a church newsletter mistake, number one, and that is not using an email service. Uh, so, um, for a lot of people that this is such a no brainer, but I would bet that there's people in our audience that this seems like, um, this is something that might be new to them, uh, because I've been part of churches that were medium-sized at times, you know, maybe four or 500 people that were going to them.
Speaker 0 00:04:50 And our email strategy was that we would take this giant BCC or blind carbon copy list, put it into outlook so that nobody could at least see other people's email addresses and send it out. And there are so many reasons why this is a bad idea in 2021. Uh, there is no reason on earth that you shouldn't be using an email service, some kind of an email service provider, uh, here at right-right. We use one called, uh, Zoho campaigns. Uh, we use we're in kind of the Zoho platform of all their services. So Zoho campaigns make sense for us. Maybe your church management software offers some kind of a mass email service, uh, far and away. The most popular one is one called MailChimp. And so that's one that I have a lot of experience with as well. Uh, failed MailChimp is 100% free if you have less than 2000 contacts on your list. Uh, so if you have less than that, to which I think the vast majority of churches and our audience will have less than 2000 contacts on their mailing list, uh, that is great service to use. Uh, and maybe you could share a few reasons why it's important, Ian, to, uh, to use an email service. You can kind of give us some insight on that.
Speaker 2 00:06:06 Well, they have a lot more options than just your standard email. You know, you can, you can upload images into them. You can add links a lot easier. There's I mean, the list goes on and on, but, uh, I think these are, these are designed to actually be a newsletter system rather than like you said, just here's the subject line. And let me put a bunch of people on here that reminded me of that's like a bad like group text, right? If you, if your phone number, if someone puts you on a group text and, and uh, now you're getting messages you weren't necessarily interested in. So maybe think of that's kind of the equivalent, uh, when it comes to that. But yeah, I think things like MailChimp I've used it as you know, I had a brief stint in real estate, uh, and, uh, I had, uh, created a newsletter and, uh, and, and tried to think of everyone I can put on there, uh, and, uh, to get that on out there. But what I learned was through using MailChimp, I didn't have a lot of options and things that I can play with and things that email wouldn't allow you to do alone.
Speaker 0 00:07:04 You know, me, I'm a, I'm a numbers guy. So the great thing about an email services, you can measure everything. We'll talk more about that in this conversation here today. So that's huge. They look prettier. Um, I think that there's, uh, they have tools and basically things that you never see as the center that help it get into more inboxes. Listen, it's like the filters that filter out spam messages. They are very robust nowadays. And if you are just sending a blind carbon copy email through your outlook or your g-mail account or something like that, it will wind up in spam very often and never be seen by your user. So this email services, they really help you get over that. They're not, they don't guarantee you getting out of spam folders obviously, but they will help you do better, uh, for people that are actually interested in that content there.
Speaker 0 00:07:56 So I think that's an easy one that you should correct. Go sign up today for MailChimp. Another one is constant contact. That's one of the really famous ones. Uh, and I will say that usually if you use some kind of a church management software, they usually have some email marketing tools. Now, in my experience, they can't really compete with a MailChimp or something like that because they just don't have the budgets that, uh, you know, even our biggest church management software companies like church, community builder, fellowship, one, um, planning center, those places, all great services, but they don't have anywhere near the budget of a MailChimp constant contact and what they can do there. So I would probably look at some of those, uh, those email specific providers and look at that route first.
Speaker 2 00:08:40 Yeah, that's good. Well, I'll tackle the next one, which this is a very important one that maybe people would miss, because I think everyone's goal is to, you know, have as many email, uh, email addresses on your list as possible. But this is the mistake is to not clean out your email lists. So, I mean, again, whether or not it's a church, it's a business. Like I said, whenever I did real estate, if I had, I was surprised, I probably had like 500 people I can put on there. I was like, wow, that's great. That's 500 people that are going to get my email, but did it do me any good if you know, 300 of them never even opened up. One of my emails are in. And again, like you said, a lot of these systems will allow you to measure and see who's opening your emails.
Speaker 2 00:09:26 Who's not. And you know, if someone unsubscribes, that's actually better than someone that actually just sits on your email list, but never opens it. So your delivery rate, as far as, you know, people, you know, opening it and doing something with it, you know, you want to clean out these. Like, if someone's after what, I don't know what timeframe we put on it, but let's just say someone doesn't after six months or X amount of newsletters ever opens it. Well, you know, it's time to probably just remove them, even if they don't hit unsubscribe. So, yeah.
Speaker 0 00:09:59 Yeah. I've been on the receiving end of those ups unsubscribes, and I hate it. Like just as a, as a pastor. I remember when I didn't really see these personally, but I know my admin would let me know that, Oh, so-and-so unsubscribed. And it's usually someone that, you know, we cared about and we were hoping they were connected more to the church and then they go ahead and they unsubscribe. It's almost like you have to get past that idea. Like don't mistake a email list as like someone's salvation, right? Like, just because they're unsubscribing from your email list doesn't necessarily mean they won't be with us in heaven anymore. God's not done with them yet. And God doesn't require them to be on our email list, but,
Speaker 2 00:10:37 And he following you another way on social media or something else.
Speaker 0 00:10:40 Absolutely. Yeah. So I think that that's the case, but I will acknowledge to our audience, at least I know it hurts when you get that unsubscribed, but you said it exactly right. And, and obsess unsubscribed is a good thing because it weeds out your list and the way that these algorithms for emails now work is that if you're sending out thousands and thousands of emails and only seven people open your emails, the algorithms say, Hey, whenever emails come from this address, let's keep a careful eye on it because they feel kind of spammy to me. Nobody ever opens this stuff up. So let's make sure we limit it. This is probably going to have to go in the junk mail folder next time, because this person's never opened it. So, um, and unsubscribed as great. And then also you do need to, I think you said the right number, I would say at a minimum of every six months, uh, if someone hasn't opened up one of your emails, uh, then it's probably time to remove them from your list because the odds are, if, if you're emailing them weekly.
Speaker 0 00:11:41 So they've had, what is that? 26 chances to open an email and they went over 26. Well, it's probably a good indicator that they're not really interested at this point, at least, or maybe in most cases they change their email or they just don't open that account anymore or something like that. But I think that in those cases, it really only helps you to weed down your list. And I know it's painful. We have a list of seven or 8,000 people that we email here at reach. Right. And every six months I go in and we probably take a thousand or so people off of there and I don't, you know, you can take it personally and say, I guess our contents really been crummy lately and that kind of stuff, but you know what, like, it's just, it's not the right timing. It's not the right message. And that's okay. It's just the way that it is there.
Speaker 2 00:12:26 Remember that people are being hit with so much stuff on a daily basis, not just emails, but you know, online ads that pop up, you know, on Facebook or wherever we're being hit and bombarded by. So they just might just not want to have one extra thing. And like we talked about is, you know, they may be interested in following your church another way. Maybe they follow your blog, you know, maybe again, they follow you on social media. And honestly, it's, it's one of those things where I'm careful about it. Like for the, my good email addresses, like we were talking about ones that I actually check daily less is better for me. And that might be just the way that they're viewing it. They still may love your church, but they're just trying to keep things minimalistic. So, yep.
Speaker 0 00:13:07 Yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. So let me get number three, uh, church newsletter, mistake. Number three is sending emails at the wrong times, sending emails at the wrong time. So in my experience, uh, having been on several church staffs, the time that churches usually send their church emails or their newsletter is when the administrator's done with the church newsletter. That's, that's when it gets sent. So sometimes that'll be on sin, that's it? It says, yeah, you proofread it and do all that kind of stuff. And then you hit send. And so sometimes there'll be on Wednesday and sometimes it'll be on Fridays. And, uh, if it's been a busy week, maybe I won't get out till Friday night or something like that. But, uh, whatever it's done, that's the time to send it. So that is not a good practice. Uh, you should probably be consistent with when you send out those emails.
Speaker 0 00:13:56 Uh, and, uh, there's, it's going to be different from church to church. So if you are in a, a white collar, kind of a community, most of the people in your church are they have nine to five jobs and offices. Then, you know, usually something around mid morning is a great time to send it. If you're in a blue collar community where nobody's on their phones all day, and then they, they pulled it out after work, maybe you should do it early in the evening. There's lots of strategies on that. So it's going to be different from place to place as a general rule. Um, so this is just like, if you just took the, uh, all of the United States population, the best times to send emails are the first half of the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in the late mornings. That's usually the best time to send emails, not a Friday night, generally speaking.
Speaker 0 00:14:43 That's not a good time when people are settling for their Netflix show or whatever that would be. They probably won't dig into your email. So, um, I think that's big, I'll mention this too, is one of the great things about email service providers is most of them, uh, they offer an optimal open time sending plans. So the way it works for reach, right, is I say, Hey, start sending out our newsletter, uh, or our, our weekly email update start sending it out at nine o'clock on Wednesday morning. That's when we do it, but it also has a, an optimal, optimal open time. So it basically takes our entire list of several thousand people. Uh, and it sends, it knows when they've opened emails in the past, uh, and when they're most likely to be looking at their phones or their computers, and it sends it at that time over the next 24 hours. So our big email campaign that goes out anywhere between Wednesday morning and Thursday morning, and it basically, it's smart enough to figure out when people are most likely to open it. Uh, so, um, you know, and this is so interesting because I don't even know when I'm most likely to open email, but the system seems to know this stuff about me. So what do you have to add to that? Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:15:53 What I had had is what I see most, and this is not just for churches, but what I see most companies or I think of is actually Thom, Rainer, and Kerry, new Hoff, both very knowledgeable people. As far as church leadership, church, marketing tech, you know, the list goes on and on they're very, their target is either pastors, ministry leaders or people who kind of work in the church industry like we do. And one of the things that I think they're very good at is, is the timing of when these emails come, they usually come around like seven sometimes, maybe around 7:30 AM. I think that they get pastors and people like us before they start their work day, if you will, in all of that. And I'm actually more likely, personally to open those before I get in my Workday. And it gives me some good knowledge base, something applicable to what I do in helping churches. So I think you just got to think through your people, right. And a lot of pastors and they know their people and they know their church service times and which people go to. And so you've got to think through it a little bit and it's, it's, it's good to have that.
Speaker 0 00:17:01 Yeah. See, I'm in Hawaii. So I get all their emails at like three 30 in the morning is when they come to me. So
Speaker 2 00:17:08 That's just, I don't feel sorry
Speaker 0 00:17:10 For, you know, it's okay. I I'm on my phone in there with me. It doesn't wake me up. It's okay.
Speaker 2 00:17:16 Well, let me tackle the next one. And this one I like, and I chuckle I've chuckled inside and outside with this, but that's another mistake is sending ugly emails. Sometimes people forget that even though the majority of content in an email is going to be written texts, there's still, you know, when people see these things, they gotta, they gotta be engaging. There's gotta be something that stands out. We've talked about it. And here's another reason why you don't want to just use a regular email, but you want to use something like MailChimp or constant contact. All these systems allow you to, uh, attractive imagery, um, you know, subject matter imagery, whatever the email's about kind of just like your sermon series. Like as a pastor, you want to find an image or something that it ties to that series, same, same thing you should be doing with your emails.
Speaker 2 00:18:04 Cause I mean, you know, that not judging a book by its cover, that's it that's out these days. People do judge it as much as you it's wrong. Maybe they do. You know, people just like the rule with your website. You've got only a few seconds to get someone engaged on the homepage there. Same thing with the newsletter. And I've heard from so many pastors and ministry leaders over the years that some of their newsletter systems are done by the church secretary using this old like branding and clip art from the church bulletin. They basically take the church bulletin and they pop that in their newsletter and just upload that and they call it a day and they're like, wait, great, two birds with one stone, but you're sending something out. That's just, it's not supposed to be a church bulletin and it needs to look better. So yeah,
Speaker 0 00:18:53 I think that's well said. I think that we miss the fact that this is probably reaching just as many people as, as how many people show up on Sunday mornings for a lot of churches. It's a, it's a huge communication opportunity. More probably. I mean, it's probably going out to more people, uh, for most churches that actually the number of people that show up on Sundays because you have people that are out of town or people that signed up and haven't been back in awhile. I don't know how many are opening it for your particular church, but I know this is one of the biggest things for, like, for us, for instance said, reach right. I mean, this is a way that we see, we send out our email to thousands. We have, uh, over, uh, usually about 2000 people open it, uh, and of those several hundred will click on it and go in and get deeper into the content that we put out there.
Speaker 0 00:19:39 So, um, when it comes to ugly emails, I do want to say one things. What I, what I think is that I think that there is a case to be made in addition to not sending ugly emails. I think sometimes it's okay to have text only emails though. And let me take a second to, I've tested a lot of this for us. Uh, and I've seen churches that have tested this, and I know for specific kinds of emails, it makes sense to do text only. So a lot of our meals emails, if you're on our email list, uh, if you're not, please get on it. We'd love to send you messages and update you when we have new content. But our primary goal is to introduce new pieces of content to people. Tell them about what we're thinking about here and get them to click deeper on it and get onto our website and engage with us and just continue to help pastors that way.
Speaker 0 00:20:26 And so we have found that I can do nice. Uh, our design team can do really nice, uh, designed emails with all kinds of graphics, but then we could also write four sentence emails that say, Hey, if you want to know more about this, here's the link. God bless you have a great week. Those kinds of things in there. And we'll see more people click on to our emails that are plain text. Then we will have ones that are like fully designed and those things in some cases now for church newsletters, I don't think that that's always the way that it should be, because I think a church newsletter, you're probably trying to hit a variety of topics covering what this week's sermon is about. Invite people to come out and get people to sign up for baptisms coming up, all that kind of stuff there.
Speaker 0 00:21:06 So you probably need some more design in that, but if you're sending out individual emails to get one specific, uh, called action. So let's say it's a reminder about Easter, that's coming up and you want to remind people to invite someone for Easter. I think he messaged her and the pastor. That's like five sentences long with a clear button to click and call people to action. That might be the best case. So don't mistake, no ugly emails. We are w I'm full agreement with you. No ugly emails. That's a bad idea, but it's okay sometimes to just use text emails, because that's the way most of our emails come across when you and I email each other, we don't put all kinds of graphics and those kinds of things in there. And, you know, we just, we send our, our normal emails. Uh, so it can be more likely read if it's just text in some cases.
Speaker 2 00:21:55 That's good, good stuff. Nothing to add there.
Speaker 0 00:21:58 Good. Number five then, uh, that is, uh, using uninspired subject lines using uninspired subject lines. So, uh, let me give you a couple of examples of bad subject lines. So, um, church newsletter week of May 5th, that's a pad subject line that would make nobody ever opened it or weekly update. That's another bad subject line that you shouldn't have as your church email newsletter. Uh, it is really important, I think for churches and, and this is probably, if you get nothing out of this conversation, this is the key takeaway. You need to use a unique, really interesting subject line. Then you would click on, on every single church email that you ever send out there. Um, because the fact is, if you do not, if someone does not click on the email, then they'll never read the content that's in there. And the only tool you have to get someone to, to click on an email, uh, is to, is the subject line and what it says there.
Speaker 0 00:23:03 Uh, so you want to use something that will almost come, it will just really compel someone to get in deeper and click into this. And so, uh, this is just really important to get this right here. Uh, so I would spend probably when we do our subject lines for our emails here in our team, we kind of brainstorm those. I probably spend 10 minutes or so kind of bouncing off ideas and making sure you get the words exactly right. That's probably the, you know, five to 10, most important words that I write every week is whatever that subject line is going to be, that I do weekend and week out. Uh, so really getting this right is super important.
Speaker 2 00:23:41 Yeah, that's good. And you know, it's funny, you reminded me of, I started after college and started my first real job and it was a sales job. And at that time it was acceptable to just put like your company's name in the subject line and people would still, you know, still open it now. I mean, you should, we stood should have still been a little more creative than that, but a lot of us would do that and the emails would still get open. Well, now, again, people are being bombarded. They have, you know, filtering in their email to take certain stuff up again, they're seeing more emails, so you need something that's going to stand out. And it just, it no longer can just be, you know, at my church for a good example, does a really good job of this. I'm on the men's like anything men's related, I'm on a newsletter for, and instead of it just being like morning prayer, like, cause there's a men's prayer gathering on Friday mornings.
Speaker 2 00:24:40 So if they just sent out something that just said prayer or something like that, it's kind of like, okay, well, yeah, we know about prayer. That's a, but instead something like men, time to step up and pray for your family or, you know, respond to the call, like, you know, time to man up, uh, you know, those types of things. Get my attention a lot more and I'll click on something like that. Oh, you're, you're challenging me as a man, what what's coming from my church here. So, you know, it's good to think through some of those.
Speaker 0 00:25:08 Yeah. Let me add one more thing that I've been seeing. Um, and it's in this idea of subject lines, uh, the, and this, this is not my nature. Uh, I'm not a guy that does this, but emojis work. Uh, so as much as I, as much as I don't, if you know me, you know, I don't use a lot of emojis in my personal, uh, conversations and texts that I, my kids will send me emojis and I'm a dad. So I'll try to respond back the way I supposed to, but it's just, I, maybe I missed that boat as an elder millennial slash gen X-er I guess. Uh, but, uh, emojis give you a higher open rate. Uh, so you better believe I use emojis all the time and my subject lines whenever we do our, our newsletters or anything like that, here are our weekly emails. So emojis are good. Uh, so for what it's worth, don't be afraid to dabble in the emoji land.
Speaker 2 00:25:58 Good. That's good. I'll tackle the next one. And that's, we kind of covered it a little bit already, but we can go a little deeper and it's forgetting to have a call to action on your newsletter. So again, we've, we've had so many podcasts already just talking about the importance of calls to action. You and I were joking before starting the podcast today. I was like, you know, really there should be a call to action in everything you do in life, right? So, you know, when your mother comes and visits from out of town and she shows up at the door and you hadn't seen her in a while, you don't say, Hey, mom, just good to see you. You know, you give her a hug, you know, there's an action. And we've talked about this before, just every good sermon, every good message out there.
Speaker 2 00:26:38 It, you should invite someone to respond, you know, to take that next step in their and so on and so forth. So we've seen this on websites, we've talked about it. We've said, Hey, you know, churches have been notorious often for just having an about page with their vision, mission beliefs. And they just say, there you go, bye bye. No, you want to ask someone to take that next step? And if your newsletters like event based when let's just say, you know, the summer's coming up, let's just say you have a kids camp or a youth retreat or something like that call to action. And that should be for a parent to sign their kiddo up. You know, maybe, maybe something like that. You've got to think of, of course what your newsletter is, but what, what do you want someone to do now? Sometimes newsletters are just informative, but there's still going to be something that someone could do with that information. Right.
Speaker 0 00:27:26 I would argue that if you really think about it and you can't think of what a call to action would be for this, I would consider that maybe it doesn't belong in your church newsletter that content, if there's nothing that someone does, uh, as a result of doing it, even if it's like, I just want to give someone a, a, a theological or like a, uh, an encouragement family. That's your primary goal. Even in that case, I think you would probably in the newsletter tease it and then have them link off and go to your website and they can dig in more for those kinds of things. So I would never put, like, if I have a letter from our pastor and, um, it's an encouragement about something coming up or some way they want us to pray. Yeah. I, I would never put the a 500 word letter into the body of a newsletter.
Speaker 0 00:28:12 Um, I would, I would have it on our website. You have more control over things that way, and you can engage with people better that way and give them other opportunities to respond that way. So, yeah, but I really stand by that. I think that if you can't think of what I want someone to do, then it probably doesn't belong in your newsletter. And we say that same thing about websites. If, if you, if you have a section on your website and you don't have anything you want someone to do with it, that it probably doesn't belong on your website. So everything needs to call people to take another step, to, to have an application, to do something as a result of getting it.
Speaker 2 00:28:45 Yeah. One last thing I'll add to that too, is think about it. If let's say you send out a newsletter to only 500 people, let's just say 20 people filled out a form. Well, that's a huge win for those 20 people. Those 20 people are also going to remember that this newsletter, it allowed me to take the next step that saved me time or allowed me to get signed up for something or sign my kiddo up for something. So I think too, when someone takes that extra step to fill out a form or whatever, they're going to be stickier. And we've seen that too, just on church websites where someone fills out like a plan, your visit form, you saw this at your last church that you pastored, then those would not everyone filled those out, those plan, your visit forms, but the people that did, you said they were the stickiest return visitors. So I think that again, it's a huge win when someone takes that extra step.
Speaker 0 00:29:33 Yep, absolutely. I think you got that. Right. So let me hit the last one. Number seven is not measuring results. Perfect. For me, I'm a, uh, I'm a numbers guy and I measure lots of stuff. That's just kind of the way that I I'm wired, uh, that just works for me. But, uh, you have these tools, you're using a service. You're calling people to action. You're doing all this other stuff. Um, it is so valuable to take a look at what what's working and what isn't, and then make course corrections as you go. Uh, so every time we do anything, and this goes for all of, uh, from our podcast to our, our blog posts, to our email newsletters, to everything we do, you can measure just about everything nowadays. Uh, and if you're not learning, learning from what you're doing there, you're missing a huge opportunity.
Speaker 0 00:30:20 So some things that you should be measuring, all of these systems are gonna measure, uh, your, uh, delivery rate. Uh, so how many of your emails get delivered there? So your open rate, how many of the delivered emails get opened? Uh, and then they're going to measure your click-through rate. How many of the opened emails do people click on and go to your site or take that next call to action. And there are really three distinct things. The delivery rate, you can, you should take a look at that and keep an eye on that. And you fix that by cleaning up your email list, getting people off of there that aren't opening it. Anyway, those that are bouncing, you get rid of all those bad emails, it ups your delivery rate that actually in turn, it helps you or open rate you're open, right? The only thing you can do about that is write better subject lines.
Speaker 0 00:31:05 And if you have 20, uh, once you've done 20 email newsletters with 20 of your best cracks at a good subject line, you'll be able to get in there. And you'll say, well, let's see this one that we wrote here. Only 9% of people open that, but this one over here, 25% of people open that. So whatever we did on this one, an emoji, an emoji that's right. So, uh, so whatever we're doing, hang on that one on that one that worked, let's try to do more of that and whatever we did on the one that only got 9%, let's try to do less of that. Right. I don't know if I mentioned this before, too, just as an encouragement to you guys, most people won't open your emails, like so more than half. I mean, if for some reason you're getting more than half of your emails get opened, you're killing it.
Speaker 0 00:31:50 You're doing something really good. The industry average across not just churches, but all industries and email market 20% or so is a good open rate. Okay. So the only way you fix that is writing good subject lines. So you've got to measure that and see what's working. Lastly, the click-through rate the calls to action. Um, this is something that's really important to measure. Uh, you're doing very well. If you have a 3% quick click-through rate, so 3% of those get clicked through and they go onto your site and take a step and do the call to action. That's a win, but this has changed by what are you writing in the copy? Are you using, are you sending ugly emails? Do you have a clear call to action with a clear button to make a next step? All those kinds of things are going to affect that. So you need to look at those, measure them and make course corrections based on what you see, look at, what's working, look at what isn't and try to do more of what's working. What do you have to add?
Speaker 2 00:32:48 Not much. That was very thorough and that's good stuff. And I think though that if someone's already taking this step, you know, to invest time and effort, and you know, you find a system out there and newsletter system, then why wouldn't you want to know the results? It's kind of just like pastors, you know, tracking how many salvations they have in baptisms. I mean, if you're getting a lot of new visitors in a given year, and none of them are taking that next step in your faith, well, what, what do we need to do different during our church service or during my sermon? So it's the same thing, but I think, I think that's what I would say. If you're going to take the time to do this, you definitely want to see, you want to measure it so that it's going to become more effective.
Speaker 0 00:33:28 I think one of the struggles we have in ministry is that, uh, people will, we get a lot of anecdotal evidence, so people will tell us things, but there's a lot of stuff in spirituality and in faith and in the church, that's hard to measure. Uh, and so, and, and to be very Frank people will tell you things that are not true very often. They'll tell you things like, Oh, pastor, that was a great message. Or, Oh, I really loved that small group material that you did. It's so important and engaging for us. And people will just tell you that because they can't come to you and say, pastor, that was a really bad message. And I didn't, I'd give that one a D plus, or like out of a scale of a hundred people. And I know I have those people too. You have few of those, but you're not able to get real numerical evidence of how you're performing on a week to week basis in lots of areas of ministry.
Speaker 0 00:34:26 You don't want to give your whole church a little sermon Raider, where they give you a percentage grade on your sermon every week and take that feedback, right? That'd be terrible. But when it comes to email, this is one of those areas and web development and all these things. This is why I love these areas is that we can actually get real honest feedback and it's not offensive or anything. It's just what's working and what isn't. And you can see the kinds of things that people are opening. And when I talk this way, when I, when I write this way, I have a much, people are much more engaged with it and much more likely to take a next step and you can kind of count these things. So this is one of those great areas. When we get so little honest feedback, it gives us real input onto how we can make improvements in this. So I don't know, maybe I'm wired differently and I enjoy that kind of stuff. But I think if you dive in a lot of people really enjoy that.
Speaker 2 00:35:16 And I'll just say this, you are wired that way. And I'm less wired that way. However, whenever I first stuff like that, I have to kind of go the extra step and extra mile to dig in and analyze things. But every time I do, I actually come away with learning something and it makes me better. So even for those of us that struggle to want to measure and in too deep and get
Speaker 0 00:35:38 Analytical, I don't know. Every time I do it to at least a good extent, I made better for it. So, um, I would encourage it to even the, uh, uh, you know, the, the pastor out there that is not inclined to do that. That's, non-analytical analytical among, among us. We'll try to encourage them to do it too so well, good, bad. Well, that's it for this week, guys, we hope this has been helpful to you. Email marketing is a huge opportunity, email newsletters for your church. I encourage every church to do it. I hope this has been helpful on some mistakes that we see most often out there. We hope it's been helpful to you and helps you make some, uh, some changes in how you're doing it. Uh, if it has been helpful, it means a lot to us. If you would rate, review, subscribe, comment, and just give us some feedback on what you think of this podcast. We want to thank you guys so much for being part of the retried family, and we will catch you next week.
Speaker 1 00:36:29 See ya. Thanks for listening to the reach right podcast. We hope this episode will help you reach people the right way, looking for more resources for your church. Check us out
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