Church Email Best Practices: 8 Strategies for Vibrant Church Email Engagement

Best Practices for Church Email Marketing

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Your church newsletter can be one of the greatest assets or liabilities of your church, depending on how to use it.

Email can accomplish several important things for your church’s relationship with its members:

• Emailing your church can humanize your church’s experience with “the church.”
• Emailing your church can help your members feel connected to what’s going on.
• Emailing your church can increase your volunteer team.
• Emailing your church can increase giving by letting your members know what special ministries you’re building.
  

The list is endless.

Why You Need a Church Email Marketing Strategy

Believe it or not, the right email marketing strategy can actually simplify your church emails. Once you know why you’re sending emails, and to whom, you can automate the process and ensure that your communications are always in line with your vision. Here are a few key steps for creating a killer email marketing strategy. 

Establishing a Purpose

The purpose of your email marketing strategy will most likely focus on two things: your community and Jesus. 

• Community-Focused Approach: What does your congregation care about, and what are their needs? Make sure to tailor your message to the specific needs of the people you serve and pastor.
• A Christ-Centered Mission: Just as in all your communications, keep God at the forefront of your church emails. Remember that something as simple as a written prayer or Scripture can draw someone closer to Jesus. 

Automating your Email Strategy

If emailing your church members regularly sounds overwhelming, the good news is that you can automate the entire process to make it fast and simple. Before you do so, however, make sure you’re safe and compliant!

• Automated Workflows: Implement systems that automatically send out communications like welcome emails and event reminders.
• Scheduled Delivery: Plan your email campaigns with a strategic schedule to maintain high open rates and consistent engagement without overwhelming your audience.
• Compliance with Spam Regulations and Secure Data Handling: Ensure that your methods for collecting emails adhere to legal standards, prioritizing the privacy and security of your subscribers' information.

Building Your List

Your email list should always be growing! You might even reach people outside of your regular church community, attracting new visitors and seekers with your church emails. 

• Growth-Driven Strategy: Your emails should include content that’s relevant, fresh, and engaging, driving people to share your email newsletters with friends and family. Think outside the box–while church updates and news are great, linking to content like sermon series can drive more engagement.
• Subscriber Segmentation: Organize your audience into distinct groups based on demographics, interests, or engagement levels to deliver more personalized communication.

Delivering Good Content

In a world saturated with content, it’s all too easy to get overwhelmed by the prospect of creating your own text, graphics, and video material. Here are a couple things to keep in mind as you come up with new content. 

• Engaging Content with Visual Appeal: Craft emails that captivate your audience with compelling visuals–photos of church members, links to videos, and beautiful graphics catch the attention of readers.
• Consistent Branding and Mobile-Friendly Design: Ensure that all emails reflect your church's identity and are accessible on all devices, enhancing the user experience and reinforcing your community's identity.

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How to Collect Emails for Your Church or Ministry

Collecting emails is one of the trickiest parts of implementing an email strategy. Here are a few different ways to reach people with your email list.

Social Media

Social media is a great way to connect with potential recipients. Here are a couple things to keep in mind. 

• Cross-Promotion with Engaging Content: Utilize your social media platforms to showcase the value of your email content, encouraging followers to subscribe for more in-depth insights and updates.
• Effective Call-to-Actions (CTAs): Implement clear and compelling CTAs on your social media channels to guide followers towards subscribing, emphasizing the benefits of joining your email list.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When done right, SEO can help drive new visitors to your website…and new signups for your email list. Here are two things to remember as you work on your search engine optimization.

• Mobile-Friendly Design and Responsive Templates: Optimize your website for search engines and ensure that the email sign-up process is seamless on all devices, improving the user experience and conversion rates.
• Actionable Insights from Integrated Analytics: Use data from your website's analytics to understand how visitors interact with your site and refine your strategies to increase email sign-up rates.

Church Emailing Software

Using church email software makes it simple to stay organized, timely, and effective in your church email strategy. 

• User-Friendly Interface with Responsive Templates: Select a platform that offers an intuitive interface and responsive email templates, making it easy to create and send messages that look great on any device.
• Measurable Outcomes and Actionable Insights: Choose software that provides detailed analytics on email performance, allowing you to track engagement and refine your approach for better results.

Here are 8 highly effective strategies to build a vibrant church email relationship with new visitors and long-time members alike.

1. Use email opt-in on all your church forms

Make it extremely easy to opt in to your church email updates.

Every time someone visits your website, registers for an event, or asks for information about your church, make a signup form available for them to get weekly updates.People want to be in the know.

If you make your church email list difficult to subscribe to, people won’t know how to get the most up-to-date information about your church’s events, opportunities, and giving agendas. 

Liberally include your email opt-in forms in as many places as possible.

One simple way to do this is to include a link to a signup landing page, as well as to embed an email signup form in the footer of your website. That way, every digital communication someone receives from your church will prompt them with an opportunity to stay connected.

2. Limit yourself to one weekly church email

People don’t need more than one email a week.

If your weekly email is designed well, contains links to more information, and is compactly written, people won’t feel the need to dig through sporadic emails or through hundreds of words of texts to find the information they need.

The worst thing you can do with your email list is to become an annoyance to your congregation.

The easiest way to avoid this is to pick a single day on which to send your email, and send it on that day every single week.

Most churches send emails on Tuesday and Wednesday, because it gives the staff enough time to send congregants an update on the Sunday service. More than that, mid-week emails are a great opportunity to remind your congregation about what’s happening at church when the church may not be top-of-mind.

3. Segment your church email audiences

Split up your email list by tagging people according to their level of involvement in your church.

• Hasn’t yet visited.
• First-time visitor.
• Interested in joining.
• New member.
• Long-time member.
• Small Group #1.
• Small Group #2.
  

Assign multiple tags to people so that you can easily send group-relevant emails to people who may need information that isn’t appropriate or meaningful for the entire congregation.

In this sense, it is entirely appropriate to send out more than one email per week according to the specific needs people have. Email recipients separate these two kinds of emails into two groups: For Everyone, and For Me.

It’s acceptable to send one general email to the entire subscriber base as a weekly newsletter, and to send one “For Me” each week to individual groups.

4. Write emails “From” the pastor as often as possible

The “writer” of the general church newsletter email should be the pastor. This is a way for the pastor to personally connect with people he may not have had the time to speak with during or after the Sunday service.

This practice also cultivates a sense of accessibility to the pastor. This is true even if response emails are directed to the church secretary. Writing the general newsletter “From” the senior pastor gives people a sense that, should they need to contact the pastor, there is a pipeline of communication that enables them to do this.

5. Repeat important information

People need to hear the same information more than once.

While it’s easy to be fearful of annoying your readers, people are often more annoyed when they miss important information.

Make sure to repeat important information in your emails. This is particularly true for event sign-ups, one-time (or sparsely held) classes, and deadline-driven actions your congregation needs to take.

It’s your responsibility to make sure that they don’t miss this information, so don’t be afraid of repeating this information in more than one email.

This will require that you begin mentioning important deadlines up to two or three months before the actually deadline occurs. 

6. Invite people to subscribe to text updates in your email

If your church has a text messaging service that enables you to communicate with your congregation via SMS, you should provide a link that enables people to opt in to this service at the bottom of every email.

The copy can read something like this: “To receive important updates via text message, sign up here: [LINK].” 

In fact, it would be appropriate to make this opt in the primary message of one of your general church newsletter emails in order to kick things off.

7. Send your church email mid-week

As we’ve already mentioned, Tuesday and Wednesday are optimal days to send your general church newsletter. 

While people may be distracted by their jobs and families at this time, this actually presents an even greater need to receive a communication from your church.

Your congregation need spiritual encouragement. They need reminders. They need church-relevant information to be brought top-of-mind in order to discuss with their colleagues, families, and accountants.

If you send an email on Monday, you may not have enough time to design and digest everything that happened during the Sunday service.

If you send an email on Thursday or Friday, your church may be too busy planning for the weekend or finishing up work to respond to any of the action items in your email.

And last, and certainly least, nobody opens their email account or takes serious action on Saturdays.

8. Give people spiritual encouragement in your church email

You don’t have to use church email merely to communicate the raw data of church events and needs. It doesn’t all have to be news and updates. Especially mid-week, people are often spiritually tired.

Include a spiritual note from the pastor. Tie each email together with a theme—generosity, legacy, service. Give your congregants something to reflect on as Sunday’s message sinks into the back of their mind throughout the week.

This spiritual message may become the very reason that people look forward to receiving and opening your church emails altogether.

Best Church Emailing Software

Tithe.ly 

Tithe.ly's email software tool for churches offers functionalities designed to facilitate communication with congregations. It includes features for creating and sending out email campaigns like newsletters and announcements, customizable email templates tailored for church-related communications, integration with Tithe.ly's other church management services, and analytics to track engagement metrics such as open and click rates. One advantage of Tithely is that it is integrated with other church technology tools, like a free giving platform and a CRM. This tool helps churches maintain regular, effective communication with their members.

Breeze

Breeze provides a straightforward email software tool within its church management platform, focusing on ease of use. It enables churches to send personalized mass emails to their entire congregation or specific groups. The tool integrates with Breeze's other features like member directories, allowing for efficient management of recipients. It supports attachments for newsletters or bulletins and offers delivery reports to track the success of sent emails, ensuring churches can communicate effectively with their members.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign functions as a comprehensive email marketing tool that offers advanced features such as automation sequences based on user behavior, detailed segmentation to tailor messages to specific groups within your audience, and CRM integration to personalize communication. It also provides in-depth analytics to measure campaign performance, helping users optimize their email strategies for better engagement and conversion rates. This makes ActiveCampaign suitable for organizations looking to implement sophisticated, data-driven email marketing campaigns.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a user-friendly email marketing platform that offers a variety of features to create, send, and manage email campaigns. It includes a drag-and-drop email builder for designing professional-looking emails, automation capabilities for scheduling and sending targeted emails based on subscriber behavior, list management tools for organizing and segmenting subscribers, and comprehensive analytics to track campaign performance. Mailchimp's accessibility and scalability make it suitable for both beginners and advanced users in email marketing.

Get Response

GetResponse is an all-in-one email marketing platform that provides a wide range of features including email automation, which allows users to create personalized email workflows for their subscribers, webinars for engaging with audiences in a more interactive way, landing pages to support marketing campaigns and capture leads, and A/B testing and analytics for optimizing email campaigns and understanding subscriber behavior. This platform is geared towards businesses and organizations looking for a comprehensive solution to manage and enhance their email marketing efforts.

What to Look for in an Email Service Provider?

Here’s what to consider when looking for an email service provider. 

1. Tools to Communicate Upcoming Events and Services: Easy-to-use features for announcing church events, services, and other important dates, helping to keep your community informed and involved.
2. Engagement Features: Capabilities to engage the community with inspirational messages, devotionals, or other content that resonates with your congregation's spiritual journey and encourages participation.
3. Targeting Specific Groups Within the Church: The software should offer segmentation tools to target specific groups within the church, such as volunteers, youth groups, or new members, allowing for more personalized communication.
4. Personalization Options: Advanced personalization features to tailor messages for different audiences within your church, ensuring that each member feels acknowledged and valued.
5. Scheduling Capabilities: The ability to schedule newsletters and announcements in advance, helping to maintain consistent communication without the need for daily management.
6. Analytics and Tracking: Tools to track email open and click-through rates, providing insights into how your congregation is engaging with your emails and what content captures their interest.
7. Engagement Analysis: The ability to analyze engagement and interaction data to continually improve outreach strategies and ensure that your communications are effective and impactful.
8. Growth Tools: Features to grow your email list, such as customizable sign-up forms that can be embedded on your website or shared on social media, helping to expand your reach and engage more community members.
9. Audience Segmentation: Robust segmentation tools that allow you to divide your audience into smaller groups for tailored communication, ensuring that messages are relevant to each segment's needs and interests.
10. Ability to Send Targeted Emails: The platform should enable you to send specific messages to congregation members based on their interests, involvement, or group membership, ensuring that the content is relevant and engaging.

Church Email Segment Examples

One important aspect of sending church emails is to know your audience–who is receiving this email? What do they care about and need to know? What kind of language and graphics will resonate with them?

Segmenting your email database is a powerful way to cater to the diverse needs and interests within your church. By creating specific segments, you can deliver more personalized and relevant content, enhancing engagement and participation. This segmentation can include specific groups such as parents, young adults, teens, and volunteers, each with their unique interests and needs.

Here are a few ideas for church email segments. 

Parent's Email List

Purpose: To communicate information relevant to families with children, including Sunday school schedules, family-friendly events, and parenting resources.

Content Examples: Updates on children’s ministry activities, family retreat invitations, and parenting workshops.

Young Adult's Email List

Purpose: Aimed at engaging young adults (typically ages 18-30) with content tailored to their interests, such as college and career guidance, social events, and service opportunities.

Content Examples: Invitations to young adult fellowship gatherings, career networking events, and mission trips targeted at young professionals.

Teen's Email List

Purpose: To connect with teenagers in the congregation, offering content that resonates with their age group, such as youth group events, confirmation class details, and teen outreach programs.

Content Examples: Notifications about youth group meetings, teen Bible study sessions, and community service projects designed for high school students.

General Church Email List

Purpose: Serves as the main communication channel for the entire congregation, covering a broad range of topics including weekly sermons, general announcements, and church-wide events.

Content Examples: Weekly newsletters summarizing the upcoming sermon topics, church-wide event announcements, and general messages from the church leadership.

Ministry-specific Email List

Purpose: To provide updates and information related to specific ministries within the church, such as the music ministry, women’s ministry, or outreach ministry.

Content Examples: Invitations to join ministry-related activities, updates on ministry projects, and specific prayer requests related to the ministry’s focus.

Event-specific Email List

Purpose: Used to communicate details and updates about specific church events, such as a church picnic, holiday celebrations, or revival meetings.

Content Examples: Event schedules, registration links, volunteer needs, and reminders as the event date approaches.

Church Membership-specific Email List

Purpose: Aimed at official church members, this list is used to communicate important matters that pertain to church governance, membership meetings, and voting matters.

Content Examples: Notices about membership meetings, updates on church leadership decisions, and invitations to participate in church governance.

Volunteer-specific Email Lists

Purpose: To keep church volunteers informed about volunteering opportunities, schedules, and appreciation events.

Content Examples: Volunteer schedule rotations, training sessions for new volunteers, and appreciation event invitations to thank volunteers for their service.

Over to You

Use these church email best practices to grow a healthy relationship with your church through email. And be sure to check out the top email marketing tools rated by EmailToolTester. It's a great resource.

If you stick to these guidelines, not only will your church sign up for your emails—they will look forward to opening them.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should you send a church email newsletter?

To maintain engagement without overwhelming your congregation, it's essential to strike a balance in your email communication frequency. Consider the significance of designing visually appealing email content that keeps your members informed about church activities and ministry progress. A regular but not excessive schedule, such as bi-weekly or monthly, allows you to update your congregation effectively while keeping your content fresh and relevant.

Are there legal considerations for church email marketing?

Yes, adhering to legal standards is crucial in any email marketing effort, including those by churches. This includes obtaining consent before adding individuals to your mailing list, providing a clear unsubscribe option, and ensuring privacy in handling personal information. It's also vital to optimize emails for mobile devices to ensure accessibility and compliance with best practices in digital communication.

How can churches grow their email marketing list?

Growing your church's email list involves a combination of encouraging member participation and utilizing opportunities for new visitor engagement. Invite feedback and questions via email to foster a two-way communication channel, making your members feel heard and valued. Additionally, collect information for new visitor follow-up during church events or through your website, ensuring a welcoming approach to newcomers. Automating email sending can also help manage new subscriptions efficiently, allowing you to focus on creating content that encourages donations, volunteer sign-ups, and greater involvement in church life.