Creating Engaging Church Emails

Your email list is still the most powerful and effective way of engaging with your audience. With more than 20% open rates, email marketing can be at least twice as effective as your social marketing efforts.

In the busy world of Facebook, Instagram and all the other social media channels, we can often miss the tried and proven method of the good ‘ol email. Where we get let down in our result is how the email is written and clearly identifying a subject heading or failing to identify who you are reaching.

So what can be done to improve your emails?

Let’s face it, we are all busy, and the last thing we all need is just another email polluting our inbox. However, if we can add value in our communication then the ‘cut-thru’ has a higher likelihood.

What could adding value to your audience look like?

If you are a church, perhaps you could be writing an email about what news and event you have going on, which is the typical school of thought. What if however we can add value to young families? A great example maybe to write an email that fosters family cohesion such as providing a list of ‘kids eat free’ list of local restaurants. This is adding value and it perhaps something that can be more intentional in reaching your desired audience.

Other options could be to then follow up that particular audience with a parenting course or family based course towards the parents offering free child-minding.

I believe also, keep our emails simple. Too often we want to over populate our emails, but if you look at your inbox as some of the regular blog based emails you get, the best ones and the ones the get the most open rates, are usually the emails with one main thought. Buffet style emails, where every topic about the church is included in one email.

If you must, send an email with an embedded video of your church news. But too much text, will result in a high delete and abandonment rate.

The next area of conversation is in terms of your subject line. That is the first thing that people see, so ensure your spend a good amount of time investing into a great subject header. Let’s face it, you spent quality time investing into your content. Give your subject header the value it needs. Try and limit your header to just 10 words tops. What can you do to create an engaging header? To continue with the example of the illustration for young families a great subject header could be: “Kids we are going out for dinner, who’s in?” or “We (heart) family time, places kids can eat free.”

Something like this, is likely to get the parents of the church to open that email and stir engagement. But more so, it adds value from the church that you are placing value on your audience.

YOUR SAY.

What has been a great way you have engaged with your audience? Give us some comments below: