Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 I'm gonna say something that might surprise you, and I want you to hear me out before you click off on this, but email marketing is more important now than it has ever been in history, and this applies to churches. Specifically in this conversation, we're gonna dig into how your church can be using email marketing to reach more people with the gospel. Let's do this. You are listening to the Reach right podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow. Well, hey guys, I'm Thomas.
Speaker 2 00:00:32 And I'm Ian.
Speaker 0 00:00:33 And today we're talking about email marketing for churches. Uh, I think that a lot of people just, uh, think this is a boring topic that, you know, it's, it's such an afterthought for us, but my goodness, I think there are a few things in the digital marketing world for churches that are more valuable than getting email marketing right? I think it's gonna be a good, uh, good conversation. Uh, you agree, Ian?
Speaker 2 00:00:56 I do agree. And you're right. It could come off as boring and there's that, uh, notion out there that email is dead and, um, you know, since now everyone texts and everything, and there's other, of course, a lot of other avenues and systems, but no, it's most certainly not dead. And we've, we've, yeah. There the proof is in the pudding. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:01:12 <laugh>. It's just one of those things, like I, I have recollections to my first ministry job and email was just something that we did a newsletter because it was basically just a digital bulletin. Yeah. And we had to put that together every single week. And it was delegated to someone, like nobody on the pastoral staff touched it at all. It was delegated to an admin person that just kind of cranked it out. Nobody ever read it. It was a total afterthought. And I think for so many churches, just in my experience, that's what it is. It it is an afterthought, but my goodness, it is the, it is a huge opportunity because emails are still opened. Everybody still uses email. If you have anything that's important, it's gonna come to you in an email form anything legal. And we all still have checked that because we have to maintain our email inboxes. Yeah. So, while it may not be a sexy way to do marketing, uh, it is still a vital way that I think that you cannot just ignore as a church. So I think it should be a good, uh, good conversation for us to jump into here today. Absolutely. Talk about some of the tips. So why don't you kind of talk us through some of the things that we need to cover here, and then I'll give you some feedback on 'em.
Speaker 2 00:02:17 Yeah. So I guess just, you know, as far as, um, you know, the first step I guess would be choosing the right email platform, right? So, um, so, you know, because I think there's, there's a lot of different, there's a lot of different platforms out there, and you may as a pastor not know where to start.
Speaker 0 00:02:33 Yeah. I mean, most of them now are pretty solid. Like, so you really can't go wrong for a church's needs with most of the paid email providers. I paid email, broadcast email systems out there. So Yeah. What we're getting at with this is, it is not okay for you to do blind carbon copy in your Gmail account Yeah. To your entire church email list, or worse, a normal cc, uh, and have everybody share everybody's emails. That just doesn't cut it. It won't get delivered. It won't get opened. It'll work for if you have nine people in your church. Yeah. But if you have more than that, I think it really is important that you start to use a, a legitimate email service provider. Um, we're talking about things like Constant Contact Mail Chimp. Uh, we hear, we use one that's tied to our, uh, our CRM system. It's called Zoho, right? Yeah. Uh, so that's what we use here at Reach, right? Uh, but it's able to handle thousands. We send out to about 13,000 people every single week here. And it's able to manage that well. It's able to deliver it well, and it's able to measure your results well. So you wanna make sure you really nail that. You gotta get the right provider.
Speaker 2 00:03:41 Yeah. That's good. And then next thing is, I guess we wanna make sure you create engaging email content. And I think the first thing that sticks out is subject lines. I think people we've seen over the years that that's something that easily gets missed. And because there's a ton of emails that everyone's getting in a given day, if you don't have an engaging subject line and then content after that, someone's just gonna, you know, pass you right on up.
Speaker 0 00:04:07 Yeah. Uh, so here's the thing is that nobody will ever read your email if you do not engage them with your subject line. This is your only chance for them to open it. So the subject line, you'll remember, that's all that people see before they click into your email. So if they don't see something that's useful to them on your subject line, they're not gonna open it. So we have to remember that in the process. This is something that you, you really need to make sure you get right. Your subject line has to be dialed in. I would recommend that churches use some kind of a tool to write better subject lines. There's all kinds of websites out there, or get this, I have seen more and more churches use chat G P T to come up with great subject lines. So this is something, again, we're always trying to find ways to delegate day-to-day tasks.
Speaker 0 00:04:54 Yeah. To AI systems. You don't wanna delegate your sermon writing or your prayer times. Obviously please don't do that. But when it comes to something like coming up with a subject line for your email, you say, Hey, I want to email our church about this. Yeah. And then can you come up with nine subject line ideas that will be, that will lead to a high clickthrough rate. Yeah. And chat G P T will usually be able to come with some really pithy good ones. Uh, I think it's something that churches should, should give a shot to.
Speaker 2 00:05:21 Yeah. We've been looking into the chat, uh, G B T and playing around with that more. It's kind of scary, crazy, but, uh, but definitely helpful. And like you said, um, anything to save time and, uh, delegate things helps, uh, the average busy pastor or ministry leader. So Good. So I guess other than that, segmenting your audience for targeted messages. That sounds kind of technical, but meaning basically means you need to have different email groups, right, Thomas?
Speaker 0 00:05:47 Yep. So yeah, that's exactly it. So one of the habits you need to build in your email list is not sending the same email to every person that's on your, your, your church list. Yeah. Because there's people that have different kinds of needs and they'll have different things that they're looking for. So for most churches, the segments you're gonna use are based on different kind of ministries and demographics. So obvious ones would be you want to send different emails to parents of, uh, of children, uh, who have parents that have young kids that are in your nursery or your children's ministry. You wanna send different emails to them than you would to parents that have youth ministry kids or parents that have no kids at all at home. Right. Or people that don't have kids or, so you'll probably have several different segments and you want to actually curate your list so that different people get different emails that are most relevant to them in those circumstances there. So I think we kind of innately know this. Like we don't send our camp registration email to every parent. Right. But it is something that I think we need to, to say again, you wanna try to segment your list as much as possible and not just do mass emails to everybody. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:06:54 And I think this also will help someone, uh, understand all the different groups of people they have in their church and better understand their, their needs. So we can thank, uh, email, uh, list to, to, to help us, uh, also know our church demographics and people <laugh>. So that's good. Good one. Good one. I think isn't this next one here, establishing a consistent email schedule. So, um, I think that's very important. Uh, right. Long gone are the days where you can just fire off one every, you know, like one a week and then next week you might have two back to back or something and just sporadic. Uh, you wanna be, well, probably organized, right?
Speaker 0 00:07:28 Yeah. I, I think you probably want to, at a minimum do a weekly email, right? Uh, so I think that one a week would be the minimum you would want to send minimum, uh, be sending out. You're right. You don't want to be sporadic where you know, we'll do one this month, or only when we have events do we do emails, right? You wanna have constant communication with people and keep people up to date on stuff. Uh, a lot of times email becomes kind of that drag that nobody opens, but that's because nobody puts some real time and thought into it, creating great content, great subject lines like we talked about before. Now, there is a maximum side to this though too. You do not want to be emailing your church every single day because that just drowns them in information. Yeah. And they'll be less likely to open your email.
Speaker 0 00:08:09 So, right. It is really important that you kind of strike that balance. So here's some rules of thumb. I think the baseline is once a week. Yeah. I think you can occasionally do a second one, and then for maybe once or twice a year, you can do a big push where maybe you do three or four emails in a week, but you want to use that very sparingly. So, right. I think a prime example would be maybe right before Easter, right? Right. So the week of Easter, holy week, maybe you'll send out one, uh, like letting people know about your Easter schedule, another email reminding people of who to invite. And you want to hit some of these same kinds of points in different emails there. So I, I think if you limit it to very important weeks in your church life, you can maybe do three or four.
Speaker 0 00:08:52 But I think one is probably where you, you should balance things usually around one a week. Um, there is also something to be said, and I want to differentiate here. When someone is new to your church, you should probably build some kind of an email sequence Right. That new people get and that will be much more frequent than once a week. You'll want to Right. Probably send them two or three emails in the first week just to kind of, uh, get them follow up to what you're about as a church and who you are, those kind of things. It has a funny name. Those are called indoctrination sequences. <laugh>, which like, it sounds kind of like, we don't wanna be in, like, we don't wanna be known as a church that indoctrinates people. Right. But in the marketing world, that's what we call those sequences there. That's not a church specific term, but yeah, that's something that I think churches can really jump on.
Speaker 2 00:09:36 That's funny. You know, that's good stuff. So this next one also very important. If everyone's doing all of this and they're setting forth on a good email marketing campaign, they need to measure the results, right? Through analytics.
Speaker 0 00:09:48 Yeah, absolutely. And, and any good email marketing system is going to give you the tools you need to measure everything that you need to measure. So I wanna highlight three, uh, there's three different metrics that we tend to look at the most. So number one is your delivery rate. Uh, so this should be sky high, it should be 99% plus, right? This is the number of emails that you send out that actually get delivered so they don't get bounced back. Uh, they don't wind up, um, just like not going through because they wind up in someone's spam, right? You want this to be high and you have to watch this once in a while. Even in our platform here, we run into some kinks where we get on some kind of a, a spam list and we have to do some things to fix it where it'll gr drop down into the, the low nineties and that's not good. So you want keep that above 99. The next one, uh, that is your email open rate. Uh, so this is the number of people that see your subject line Yeah. And they click on it and at least open the email. They do have Yeah. They have some level of interaction. Doesn't mean they read it, doesn't mean that they, they did any kind of an action, but Right. They actually, they actually clicked on it to open it. So
Speaker 2 00:10:57 Interest enough, yep.
Speaker 0 00:10:58 This, these numbers are all over the place. Um, so I think that I, I can tell you our open rate, our kind of target is around 40%. A really good email. We'll get about 40% of people opening it, of our list here. So yeah. Um, that's, that's kind of, I, you could use that as a baseline. I've seen some churches that are over 50%, which is fantastic. I see some churches that are down at 20% and there's some things you can do to kind of fix that. We'll talk about right in just a second here. So your open rate, you definitely wanna watch that. And then the third and final metric that I think you pay the most attention to is your click through rate. How often when people get your email and open it, what percentage of them are clicking on whatever your call to action in your email is?
Speaker 0 00:11:43 So this is email marketing 1 0 1. Yeah. Don't ever send an email where you give away everything in the body of the email. <laugh>. You want to actually get people to respond by clicking Right. To read whatever they need to read or watch whatever video they need to watch. Don't put the whole reading in the email. Make sure they click to see that there. So Right. Do you want to measure that clickthrough rate, again, a great clickthrough rate is gonna be five to 10%. If you get that many people to click on something in your email, you're doing really well. More typically, if it's just kind of a, a blog post or some kind of a sermon you want them to link to, I think you'd expect like a two to 3% even that would be a win. So those are the three metrics that we kind of take a look at. It's um, the clickthrough rate, the open rate and the delivery rate, those three things. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:12:27 It's kind of funny. That might surprise, uh, a lot of folks out there that 5% of a clickthrough rate is, is a good thing. <laugh>. Yeah. So no, it's, but uh, it is. We've seen that. So good. Well, last but not least, I love this, uh, tips for maintaining good email hygiene. So hygiene, let's
Speaker 0 00:12:45 Talk about this. Email hygiene, like brushing your teeth, you have to do That's right. You have to do this regularly. Yeah. Uh, with your email list and what this says, this is so counterintuitive. I, this is one of my least favorite things that I do, uh, every month or so I get in there and do this in our system here. So you need to delete people from your church email list that aren't opening your emails.
Speaker 2 00:13:07 Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:13:08 I'm gonna say it again. You need to delete people from your church email list that are not opening your emails. And you may say, well that's like, that's, it kind of feels like when you're a pastor Yeah. That that's like kicking them outta your church or something outta your
Speaker 2 00:13:19 Like that. Right? You're saying you don't want them longer
Speaker 0 00:13:21 Part of us. Our members are on the list. Our non-members aren't, that's not what this means. The fact is that if you consistently send emails to people that don't open your emails, that is a signal to the email providers that you're sending information that isn't valuable to people. Mm-hmm. And it's more likely to categorize your content as spam the things that you're sending out. So what we do here is we have a filter where we look at everybody that has an opened one of our emails in six months. That means you, we've sent 26 emails if we do a weekly email and you've opened zero of them. Yeah. We take that as a clue that you're probably not that interested in the emails that we're sending now. Sure. We could add them back in later if they say they want to be on it or if they Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:14:05 You know, something was missed there. But these systems are really good at measuring this. So you need to get in that habit of probably once a quarter getting there and, and removing everybody that hasn't been opening your emails there. And I'm telling you, if you haven't ever done this before, it's gonna sting, it's gonna feel bad. Yeah. Chances are you just have the wrong email for this person. Or you know, they're not opening it because they're not seeing it. They use a more official email account that you need to get on that email there. So, but I think this is something that you need to do, and in the end what this does is it helps you improve your delivery rate because less of your emails will be marked as spam and it also improves your open rates because more people will be opening a, a higher percentage will be opening your emails each week. So something you have to bite the bullet and just do.
Speaker 2 00:14:50 That's funny. I, I had a funny thought pop in my head that, um, the pastor when, uh, seeing the list of people that aren't opening that they have to eliminate some name pops up and they're like, wait, that's Joe. He's so involved in our church and he gives us so generously I can't delete 'em off the email list. But if he's not opening them, hey, it's right, it is proven point. So
Speaker 0 00:15:12 Yeah. It, it's just better to do. I, I, again, I know that that's, it feels so weird and you know, chances are you're gonna be offended by this. You're gonna look at it and like, I cannot believe that Jim doesn't read these emails. Yeah. <laugh>, I've been putting all this in effort into this here. What's, what's wrong with that? So, so bite the bullet and do it. Or maybe have someone on your team do it for you so you don't have to bear the hurt. There you go. Of people not reading your emails each and every week. Yeah. Cuz it does happen that way.
Speaker 2 00:15:34 That's good.
Speaker 0 00:15:36 Yeah. Good stuff. So yeah, I hope this has been helpful to you guys. These are just some of the tips that we have. Uh, if you have anything that you see working at your church for your email marketing, we'd love to know in the comments below. Drop us one in there. Uh, if you can, it would mean a lot to us if you would rate, review, subscribe to this podcast, do all those things that you do. That's how we get the word out there about the Retry podcast. And we wanna just be able to help more churches do digital marketing. Right? Absolutely. Uh, yeah. Thanks for being with us and we'll catch you guys next week.
Speaker 2 00:16:04 See you.
