Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Email is still one of the best ways for churches to reach out to people in their church community. But it doesn't really have the glamorous feel that a lot of other outreach methods have. In this conversation, we're going to talk about some of the tips and tricks that we've picked up on how your church can best manage your email list. Let's do this.
You're listening to the Reachwrite podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow.
Well. Hey, guys, I'm Thomas.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: And I'm Ian.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: And today we are talking about church email lists and how to manage them properly. And I know before we started, ian, you said, this is my jam. And I don't know if I'd go that far to say that email lists are my jam, but I just do know the importance of taking a hard look at this stuff in a church. Email, contrary to belief, is totally not dead. In fact, I'd say it's just as valuable as it's ever been here today. And it is one of the best opportunities that you have as a church to keep members engaged and to help assimilate new people that are not yet a part of your church. So I think it's important that we dedicate it. So we do, I don't know, maybe a couple of episodes on the podcast every year about the importance of email marketing. And in fact, I get questions all the time about, like, hey, what should I do? And I know it's your jam. It is my jam. Yeah, we do. Do you get questions about this? Do people ask you things about this, Ian, when you're talking to clients and things? Not as much.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Not as much, honestly. So I don't get it as much. But I mean, we address, but yeah.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: I have that nerd, that nerd style. I guess maybe it's a part of me. I don't know what it is that they think that I'm the email king. It's not a service we offer or anything. Here at reachwight, we don't have any dog or dog in this fight or horse in this race. We have none of that. But I just know that it's super important, so I want to be able to share some of the things we've gleaned. I will say that as a pastor, I practiced all of these, and as a business owner, I practice all of these things in our own lists. But I think there's so much opportunity here. So before you click off or don't go any further on this video, because, gosh, email list management. Can you pick up more boring topic?
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Boring.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Listen to what I'm going to say. I think it can be a part of growing your church.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: To be fair, every podcast I think that's going to be boring ends up being one of our best ones sometimes we've found. So there you go. But there you go. So, well, how about we dig in and I'll just, since it's your jam, as we've jokingly said, I will just introduce kind of each one of these and let you dig in. Thomas. But the first one we wanted to address was segmenting your email list for targeted outreach. What does that mean?
[00:02:46] Speaker A: Yes. Okay, so your email list, if you just have one giant list that's called church email list, and everybody from youth group attendees to people that have passed away, to people that are just young families within your church, people that are extended, families that don't live in the area, but they got on your list somehow. If that's what your email looks like, you are not going to be able to effectively send the right messages to the right people within your church. So what every church needs to consider is how you can segment your list into different parts so that you don't send youth group messages to your senior citizens group and you don't send invitations for what you're doing for your Easter service or good Friday service to people that live 3000 miles away. So you want to be able to manage that, so you can do that. And so a few ways that are most practical is you probably want some kind of like an age range segment on there. So I know that most churches don't do too much emailing with youth group members and kids that are under 18, but certainly young families that have kids, you want them to be a segment. Families that don't have kids would be the opposite segment of that. People that are involved in small group ministry or in certain ministry teams, whether it be your worship team or your greeters or kids ministry, whatever it would be, you'd want your list and you'd want this information in your email list provider on what group each one of these people are part of. The last thing you want to do is send out a mass email to people within your church that do not apply to them. And here's the reason why. It's not so much a matter of it's not going to hurt anything people think. But what actually happens is if people get emails from you that are not relevant to them. So your 80 year olds receive emails about what's happening at youth group this week right? Yeah. They will be less likely to open those after a while, which would make them less likely to open your other emails because they become accustomed to the fact that, well, these guys just send me emails that usually aren't relevant to me, so I'm not going to open it. And then here's what really goes wrong, is that all of the modern email providers, they actually have a lot of algorithms that are trying to figure out what kind of email is this. And so what can happen is in Gmail, that's the most commonly used email provider, you can wind up in a few different places. You can very easily wind up in the promotions tab. So you'll have that tab that says promotions. That's usually where all your ads from stores go, that kind of stuff. And they could deem that what you're doing actually is not a personal email, but a promotions email, which you do not want to wind up there. Your odds of people opening it are much lower. And then worse yet, if people are consistently have a very high ratio of people that aren't opening your emails, worse yet, you'll wind up in their spam filters and people will basically never see your emails if you wind up.
Segmenting is a really important part of that to help you get over that hump, and it's really not too tough to do. Another way you want to segment your list is by people that are like taking a look at their stats. Every modern email provider, they actually will give stats on how often this person opens your emails, clicks on your emails. And so you can kind of measure that. This 10% of our email list, these are the people that are most engaged. They open like every single one. They almost click on everything that we ever do. You can make them their own segment and maybe send different kind of messages to them and to those that aren't in that segment, those that engage the least with your messages.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: Right.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Maybe you send them different kinds of emails to help them get engaged more and move on to that 10% list there. So there's all kinds of ways you could segment it. That could be a whole nother episode. I know it'd be riveting. Email list segmentation for churches, a whole podcast episode. But just know. The point is you want to be thinking about not sending your emails to every single person within your church. That's really important.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. No, I like that. And it helps you stay organized too, I think a benefit too. Just one last thing. You covered all of that very well, Thomas, but is just that, I think it keeps you kind of aware of the involvement of your members and who's doing what and all of that. It helps for churches like organization and communication there.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:07:19] Speaker B: That's another benefit. Well, good. Next one here is this one seems kind of like a no brainer, regular maintenance and updating of your email list. So obviously I think when I say it seems like a no brainer, I could see how an email list could get neglected and forgot about. But you probably need to be maintaining it fairly regularly.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Frankly, this is the hardest one we're going to talk about today. This is the hardest not to execute, but it's the emotional hardest one. This seems so weird, again to say this, but here's what I've found, is that a general rule when it comes to your email list is if someone doesn't open a certain number of emails in a row, they just never open your email. So you're sending out a weekly email and they haven't opened twelve in a row. So a whole quarter they're just totally gone. The sad reality is that they're almost certainly never going to open any other emails in the future. Usually it's something at a church where they just change their email address and they stop looking at that. Or just maybe you wound up in their spam folder. But what is so hard is that when that is the case, it benefits you as an organization to start deleting people from your church email list.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: That's where the sadness comes.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: That's where the sadness comes in. Because I got to tell you, as a pastor, when I see people that I know and love on that list of people that never open my emails, I look at it and I say, oh my gosh, this person doesn't.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: You loved me. Exactly.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: And it's almost like you're excommunicating them from the church. Like you can't be on our church correspondence anymore. And that's not what it is. Obviously it's not about that. But here's again, back to what we were saying before, is that if you're consistently sending emails that are not getting opened, it raises the possibility and your likelihood of winding up in places like the promotions or the spam folder, which makes you less likely to be seen by everybody that actually wants to see your emails there. So as hard as it is, you need to have a regular rhythm here at retrieve. I do this once a quarter is I go through and we probably add, I don't know, maybe 3000 emails a quarter to our email list. But I probably delete about 1000 of those every month because they're people that have been on our list for a while and lo and behold they haven't opened, they opened a whole bunch in the beginning but they haven't opened anything in three months. So we're realizing that hey, they're probably not going to be doing anything going forward. So we delete them so that we have a higher likelihood for the other ones we've just added to show up in their inbox. And it really makes a huge difference. You'll see your open rates will increase and over time you'll just have a better email list that way. So it's hard. You can usually run some searches. Every major email provider, whether you use Mailchimp or we use Zoho campaigns, but whatever you're using, they have some kind of a filter you can run. They know that that's something that you should do. And actually weaning your list and doing what's called list hygiene is something that is just an important rhythm that you need to get into. It stinks. It's no fun. It breaks your heart.
I look at this list of 1000 emails that we spend a lot in making content and doing marketing and to delete 1000 emails from our list, it's like, man, that cost us so much time and effort and money, but it's something that you just have to do. So get in the habit of it. It'll sting, but you got to do it, it'll sting.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: So very emotional part of email list management there. Well good. This next one is kind of interesting. So organic growth of your email list. So how does someone organically grow their email list? Because it always seems when you think about organic growth, it's something that kind of happens naturally.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: And with email you always feel like you're having to solicit someone for their email address. Right. Ask for their contact information.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: Right? Yeah.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: So the thoughts on this one.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think it comes down to most churches, the way that they grow their email list is by people becoming members of their church. And at some point when someone fills out usually a connection card or something like that, they take that first step towards getting connected. That's when we get an email address from them. So that would be what I would call, I mean it's organic in a sense, but it's kind of like our main driver of our email list for most churches. On top of that though, if you're creating any content, it doesn't hurt you to have an opportunity on every page of your website that kind of calls people to that action. Like, hey, want to hear more about what's going on here at New Hope church or whatever it is that you're at? Having organic things that pop up on your site for people that just stumbled onto your content. They're watching a sermon, they're reading a blog post, they saw an event, having a quick call to action. It doesn't need to be the primary one, but having a quick call to action on the site where people can sign up for email updates, you're going to see people trickle in. That way, when people engage with content, they'll start to sign up. If you actually provide value, people will get involved with things. And so, yeah, I think that's what we're thinking about is really thinking through your current website and maybe even your social media channels and giving people an invitation to get onto that list on those places.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. So next one here is ensure each subscriber is properly identified. What does that mean?
[00:12:37] Speaker A: Okay, so used to be that email lists, and I think a lot of churches are in this camp where they just used whatever they had at their disposal for sending out emails to their whole. I can't. I know, for me, I was at a church right out of college, right out of Bible College, where the way we sent our church wide emails is we had this giant list of email addresses and we put it into the BCC line of our outlook at the time. And then it sent out to everybody that was on our church email list. And then occasionally we always had that nightmare where someone accidentally put it in the two or the CC so that everybody's email was shared with everybody. And that's a huge no no. So all of these are huge no nos. Now, don't use the BCC, that will kill your other email. That's not what that's for. You need to have a dedicated email service that's doing this for you. So a mailchimp or a constant contact or something like that, use something in that vein. And then what happened though, is that a lot of churches, they did not have names associated with email addresses in a clean way because they came from an old school way of doing BCC and that kind of stuff. So all they have is just this big list of email addresses. And what that keeps you from doing is personalizing your emails. And we've done studies on this here at Reachwright. We've read lots of other data on these things that personalized emails will always, hands down, perform better than generic emails. So if you had to write, hey, church member, as opposed to having hey, Ian on someone's email, their ods of opening and responding. If you put the first name into the subject line, the opening, it'll be greatly increased by actually personalizing some things there. So part of managing your church's email list is making sure you have a correlating at least a first name and an email address. It should be kind of a no brainer, but you really want to work to clean that up. And if you don't have it, you probably want to maybe send an email individually to each one of those people saying, hey, let me know who this is so we can just make sure we tie it. Chances are you're going to know 75 80% of the names just by looking at their email address, and you could probably figure it out for yourself. But you want that information in there and make sure that their personal identifiers are kind of tied up there.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: That's good. That's good stuff.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah. I hope this has been helpful. Those are our four primary tips for managing your church's email. It's funny, I'm in conversations like this all the time. I just had a pastor friend of mine reach out to me yesterday asking a few questions on this, and it reminded me that, hey, we got to talk about this more because I think it's something a lot of churches struggle with. It's so not sexy talking about email marketing that it's something that we just kind of. Nobody really talks about it and we all just assume that it's something that we all kind of do. Almost every church sends out emails, but there's so many opportunities that we're squandering if we don't get some of these things right. So hopefully it's been helpful if it has. Let us know down in the comments if you have any other questions. We do our best to answer every single question that comes in on our YouTube channel or any other place on our website. Wherever you're watching or listening to this, drop us a line, ask questions on email. We'll do our best to answer them. And they're actually us. We're the people that are answering these questions here. So let us know. Hit that subscribe button. Thanks for being a part of the retrieve family, and we'll see you next time.
[00:15:58] Speaker B: See ya.
