We’re all used to sending email, but do you know how to construct the perfect outreach email that resonates with your audience?
We’ll walk you through it step-by-step. When you combine these basic building blocks with the metrics we talked about last time, you’ll be fully leveraging industry best practices to dramatically increase the impact of your email and the engagement of your outreach.
The first set of email building blocks are:
You might be surprised to know that even though this information isn’t included in the main body of the email itself, it’s what recipients use to determine if they actually care enough to open the email as they scroll through their inbox. There’s a lot riding on these basic building blocks of email development!
From Name
This is the name that shows up in the recipient’s email inbox to show who sent it. In many cases, our preference is to use your Church’s name. There are a couple of good reasons to do this:
From Email Address
This is the email address your recipients will see. Continuing on from our recommendation above, we suggest in most cases that you send your emails from a branded, church-specific email address. This email address should use the church’s domain – as in the same URL your website uses – like info@yourchurch.com or connect@yourchurch.com.
Stay away from generic Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook email addresses. Not only does it miss out on a branding opportunity, but it’s also simply not professional or trustworthy. Would you feel comfortable if your bank was sending you statements using an @hotmail.com email? Probably not!
Reply-To Address
In many email marketing platforms, you can choose a different email address to receive replies at than the one you actually send from. There are some reasons to do this (for example, you want a specific person on your team to receive RSVPs for an event), but we strongly recommend using the same email as the From Email address in most cases.
Subject Line
The subject line is one of the most important elements that impact whether a recipient opens your email – or not. As we shared in our last video, 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone.
Our best advice is to:
We recently did a study of 91,632 church-based emails to discover what works lead to a higher open rate for outreach emails. The top 15% of all emails (earning an open rate above 45%) used words like:
Keep your subject lines short (under 45 characters) and put the most important information at the beginning. We could spend a lot of time talking about subject lines, but instead we’ll direct you to a helpful article on how to craft compelling subject lines. If you want to go really, really deep on this subject, there’s an excellent book on it called Tested Advertising Methods.
Preview Text
In most inboxes, you’ll see the first few lines of the email underneath the subject line. This is the preview text. If you don’t set this, email services (often called “email clients,” like Gmail or Outlook) will automatically pull content from your email – which can look a little out-of-context.
This is an opportunity for you to provide a high-level synopsis of your email and encourage people to open it. The exact amount of space varies between different email clients, so we recommend keeping the total character count below 130.
Now, let’s dig into the main content of your email. There are infinite possibilities. For our discussion today, we’re going to talk through the content of an email designed to invite someone to church and show you how the different pieces can be leveraged.
Branded Header Image
We recommend including elements from your unique identity such as the name of your church, logo, colors, and other visual elements.
Personalized Greeting
Even though including the recipient’s first name seems like common sense, this basic level of personalization is important to make the recipient feel like you’re speaking directly to them, it’s also crucial for getting through spam filters.
Opening Paragraph
At a high level, this breaks down what the email is about and follows the “Inverted Pyramid” metaphor used in journalism. It’s a way to communicate the basics about a topic in those initial sentences.
Calls to Action
Embedded in the content of your email, you’ll include actions you want the reader to take and construct them so that they feel urgent. We’ll include some examples below.
Compliance
There are some laws that require you to provide your recipients the ability to unsubscribe from your email list. This is called CAN-SPAM Compliance. We aren’t lawyers, so this is not legal advice, but we can provide you with a link to review what the government says on this and some advice from HubSpot.
Additional Recommendations
For images in your email, be sure to optimize them by reducing the size of the image as small as possible without losing quality. This reduces email load times as well as avoids spam filters.
Test how your email renders on mobile devices. Not only is pixel density higher on some of the latest smartphones, but the way content renders can also change as well. You might find your beautiful, carefully constructed newsletter is messy and disjointed on a cell phone! It’s always worth it to test on a few devices.
As you begin building emails for your church, take a modular approach and use recurring types of content. It’ll become easier to maintain over time and email will quickly become a recurring communication for your church.
Our team is passionate about helping churches grow. Our blog talks about ways to build and reinforce your community’s perception about your church – so be sure to follow along for more tips, tricks, and advice. Subscribe so you don’t miss out!
If email content creation is something you’re interested in, but you don’t have the capacity to take this on yourself, we’re happy to work directly with your church. Simply contact us to start the conversation.