Social media gets all the buzz these days, but email remains one of the most effective ways to reach people and get results. The business world knows it: For every $1 they spend on email, they earn $38 in return.
But a lot of churches barely know where to start with email. Maybe your pastor sends out semi-regular emails, but they’re personal emails carbon-copied to an unconfirmed list of people your pastor knows (this kind of email is actually spam—and it’s illegal).
The good news is doing better email marketing isn’t that hard. We’re going to walk you through how to improve your email, whether you have a quasi-legal setup or you’re starting from scratch, with our free resource How to Take Your Email From BCC to Better.
My Experience
I attend a smallish church (250 on Sunday) with no dedicated communication staff. We have some incredible people on staff who are really good at what they do, but their job is not communication. So unless I want to be the volunteer working 50 hours a week (no, nope, no way), I need to have low expectations. Improvements come in baby steps.
A good way to make some improvement in this situation is to find something we’re already doing and make it better. It’s called leveling up, and it can be an easy way to get a big win.
I started by meeting with my pastor and asking about his weekly email newsletter. He had been sending it out for a while and it was gaining some traction. He described several pain points that, frankly, horrified me.
Among the no-no’s:
- He was sending the weekly email out to the congregation using his personal email program.
- The software would only let him blind-carbon-copy (BCC) so many people at a time, so he had to maintain two different email lists to encompass the entire congregation.
- He had to manage subscriptions by hand, adding and removing people to his lists when they requested it.
- Unless people responded or said something, he had no idea if people were actually reading his emails.
- The email lists he maintained were on his own computer, so he was literally the only person who could send the emails.
We had some work to do.
The good news for my church was that my pastor already realized this was not the best system. He felt the pain and thought there should be a better way, he just didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t have to do much convincing, I just had to offer some expertise.
Within weeks I set my church up with a free MailChimp account, imported our email addresses, and showed my pastor how to use it. We now had a simple, streamlined, and legal email marketing system, and we had statistics to gauge effectiveness.
Now this wasn’t a game-changer for my church. But it did improve a system my pastor used every week, saving him time and making his efforts more effective. Baby steps.
(And I think he reveled in the power of knowing who had clicked on the links in his emails.)
How to Improve Your Church’s Email Marketing
OK, that’s my church. How can this work for your church?
Download the full resource, How to Take Your Email Newsletter From BCC to Better.
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This month our Courageous Storytellers membership site is focused on digital marketing. If your church needs help (and who doesn’t?), we’ve got a wealth of super-practical resources just like this one that can help your church communicate better. Join Courageous Storytellers today to get full access to our ever-expanding library of resources.
