3 Key Steps to Developing an Email Strategy for Your Church

Let’s talk about how to build an effective email strategy.

First, if you think email is dead, I would encourage you to check out our last blog post where we discussed the importance of email outreach and why EVERY church and organization should be regularly using email as a method for staying in touch.

Now this does not mean you should just start sending emails to every email address in your database. You first need to have an email marketing outreach strategy in place, and we’d love to help you with that!

Step #1: Compile member and interest data

It is impossible to develop an email strategy if you don’t have all your contacts organized in one place. Most churches have interests (all the people who have indicated interest in the church) and contact information coming at them from all directions: Some people fill out guest registry cards. Others find your website and send you a one-off question. Others are obtained at numerous events. And all these contacts may be stored in a multitude of spreadsheets that may be owned by various church members.

Getting ALL this contact information into ONE place really is critical to beginning your email strategy and starting to segment these interests.

Common Types of Data That Churches Have:

1. Member data
2. Interests
   • Previous event registrations
     • Evangelistic-focused events
     • Concerts
     • Health-related events
     • Addiction and recovery events
     • Free car washes
   • Individuals who have contacted your church in the past
   • Church guest registrations
   • Community contacts and related interests
   • Any other areas that interests have responded to in the past

It's important to gather and organize all this information to the best of your ability. Once you do, then not only will you know who has shown some level of interest in the past, but you will also know what caused them to show interest in the first place.

Keep Your List Clean

It's important to remember that keeping your interest email list clean is an ongoing initiative. According to HubSpot, an email list naturally decays every year, on average, by 22.5%, so it is important to clean up your database regularly.

This is done by looking for duplicates and checking for outdated information, particularly email addresses that are no longer valid. Sending emails that are undeliverable (also known as emails that “bounce”) will trigger many email marketing platforms to regard your content as spam, so sending your emails only to valid email addresses is key.

step #2: Segment Your Data

Segmentation is one of the single most effective email marketing strategies there is. What is it?

According to Campaign Monitor, "Segmentation is the division of email subscribers into smaller segments based on set criteria. Typically, segmentation is used as a personalization tactic to deliver more relevant email marketing to subscribers based on their geographic location, interests, history and much more."

What Does This Mean?

Here's an example: I attended a marketing conference years ago where one of the presenters was a marketer for an NFL team. They were trying to figure out a way to improve their fans’ email engagement, so they decided to add one additional question to the form that fans used to become an email subscriber.

The question was "Who is your favorite player?"

What they did next was very fascinating. After fans took the survey, subsequent emails they received were personalized with a photo of their favorite player in the banner at the top of each email. Can you guess what happened? Email engagement dramatically improved! What a brilliant strategy!

This is segmentation at work, and it's a very important concept.

how does this apply to your church?

It’s imperative to realize that EVERY email you ever send will not be applicable to EVERY interest in your list, so segmentation is vital for driving engagement. Let's talk through two different examples:

Segmentation Example #1

Ask yourself how you would structure an email to a member of your church differently than an email to someone who is interested in learning more about your church. Big difference, right?

When I was younger, one of my family members wasn't a member of any church. Do you know what their biggest complaint was when they actually heard from the church? Here is a direct quote: "All they ever do is ask me for my money." That’s probably not the message the church intended for that individual.

So, in the email segmentation world, how would you handle this? For example, in your email to members, it is applicable to have a tithe update. But for interests, maybe not so much.

Segmentation Example #2

Let's say John (an interest) previously registered for a Bible study while Jane (another interest) previously registered for a health education seminar.

In some cases, we see engagement increase by a factor of 10 for organizations who have a strong and meaningful segmentation strategy!

Individuals are always more likely to engage with content that is actually relevant to them. Segmenting your interests as much as possible will go a long way toward delivering messages that are tailored to their individual areas of interest.

Step #3: start

Now that we have a high-level understanding of who has responded in the past, how do we start?

In the early stages of email, I think it is good to begin building an email strategy surrounding something that happens consistently at your church and present it in a way that is most applicable to your interests. Examples include invitations to church, prayer meeting, Bible study, etc.

In future blog posts, we will share specific ideas and examples that will help you get a fast start. Make sure you don’t miss those future updates by subscribing! 

And if we can be of help, we would love to work directly with your church. Just contact us and let’s have a conversation.