Should Your church Use Email? Or is it just plain dead?

I get this question a lot: Isn't email like the modern equivalent of the fax machine? Does anyone actually use email anymore? If we send an email, will someone actually look at it? Email is just dead, isn’t it?

Let's take a look at some data...

did you know?

• There are 4 billion daily email users.
• 4 out of 5 marketers said they’d rather give up social media than email marketing.
• 74% of Baby Boomers think email is the most personal channel to receive communications from brands, followed by 72% of Gen X, 64% of Millennials, and 60% of Gen Z.
• 87% of B2B marketers say email is one of their top free organic distribution channels.
• The single message autoresponder email has an astonishing 98% open rate and a 37% click-through rate. (More on this later!)
• 99% of email users check their inbox every day with some checking 20 times a day. And of those people, 58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning. Source: HubSpot - The Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats for 2022

Based on this data, email should unequivocally be a steady part of your church's outreach efforts. In fact, I'll take it one step further and say I believe it should be a foundational part of your digital outreach.

email is a big opportunity for churches

We have found that most churches do not have a regular email strategy—period. And where we have seen an email strategy, they are geared toward members only.

We have yet to find a consistent email strategy focused on interests (all the people who have indicated interest in the church) from any church before we started working with them.

This is a huge opportunity! Email can be a powerful communication channel to reach out to interests and engage them in a very simple way.

If your church has, at some point, captured a person’s email address through a previous outreach effort (event, Bible study requests, etc.), then you know that person already has at least some level of interest in your church. This is huge! And it’s very important that we remember to nurture those relationships.

why is email such an impactful channel?

1. Like I mentioned earlier, email is used by almost everyone.
   
   The first-ever email was sent by Ray Tomlinson in the early 1970s. Since that time, email has grown to become one of the most used forms of communication available.
   
   
2. Email is fast, personal and discrete.
   
   Email allows you to share information directly with a person but in a way that is not disruptive to the person’s day. It allows them to engage with the information at a time that is convenient for them.
   
   Depending where someone is in their spiritual journey, they may not feel comfortable publicly following, commenting or even participating through social media.
   
   
3. Email is easy to measure.
   
   There are many technologies available that help you track the metrics of the emails you send. You can easily measure the success of each email sent:
   
   •   How many people opened an email
   •   How many times they opened it
   •   How many email addresses bounced (the number of people who  did not receive your email)
   •   How many people clicked on the links you shared (stay tuned as we are going to dedicate an entire blog post in the future to - understanding email statistics)
   
   Being able to easily see the people who are engaging with your email content really helps a church identify the most interested people over time.
   
   
4. Email can be automated.
   
   There are many email technologies that allow you to develop and schedule emails ahead of time, even ones that allow for full email automation where the right emails will be sent to the right person at the right time after they have taken a specific action like visiting a specific page on your website, registered for an event, etc.
   
   Tools like this allow churches to develop the content ONCE and then let technology go to work to do the rest. If done properly, it can have a tremendous impact.
   
   

If your church doesn't have a strong email marketing strategy in place, then we highly recommend you begin to build one. Accomplishing this is about a lot more than just beginning to send emails for the sake of sending emails.

Your email marketing strategy needs to be clearly defined to help you reach your goals. It is important to remember the words of Matt Blumberg here: “Reaching the inbox isn’t your goal. Engaging people is.”

Successful emails inspire the recipient to take action—to do more than just skim over your content and then hit the delete button. You want them to actually ENGAGE with the content of your church's emails.

Churches can Send a variety of emails

There are many types of emails that churches can and should be sending in order to constantly engage with their interests:

Confirmation / Auto-response emails
Any time an interested person makes a request or asks a question of your church, you should be sending an email to confirm the receipt of that request and set an expectation of when they can expect to hear from you in the future.


Invitation / Outreach emails
Any time your church is having a special evangelistic event, concert, etc., you should absolutely be sending emails out to all your interests to invite them to the event. This can be one of the most effective ways to get the word out when you’re having a big event.


Personal emails
These may be likely to happen less frequently since they cannot be automated, but due to their personal nature, they are perhaps the most effective in driving a specific engagement. These are emails where you can let people know that you have missed seeing them, that you are praying for them, or that you want to extend a personal invitation to an event.


Recurring emails
This is the area we recommend churches really focus on since it does not require constant reinventing of the wheel or development of new ideas. This is where you simply begin scheduling recurring invitations or reminders to things that are recurring in your church all the time—things like inviting people to attend church each week, sharing the Bible lesson for the week, advertising the weekly or monthly devotional from the pastor, inviting to prayer meetings, etc.


Automated emails
With proper planning, these can have a tremendous impact, can be working 24/7 and can be triggered to send automatically based on specific types of actions. (We'll have more on advanced automation and personalization in a future blog post.)

With a little thought and creativity, your church could come up with a thousand ideas to start reaching out to more people, more consistently, in a very personal way through email that is less expensive than just about every other outreach channel!

Now that we have explained WHY email is so important for churches, we will discuss in future posts HOW your church can begin to craft a successful email marketing strategy. We will look at:

• Understanding email metrics and best practices for optimizing them
• The components you need to build a successful email
• How to drive people to take action from your emails
• How to develop an email marketing strategy
• How to develop recurring email content
• How to use advanced email automation

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.