Excellent church email doesn’t come naturally. It takes time. It takes work. It takes practice. We’ve brainstormed, researched, read, and experimented, and have come up with some solutions for creating excellent emails. Here are Sharefaith’s top ten tips for excellent church emailing. Sharefaith, a leader in church email marketing, makes easy email communication with your church members easy. Find out more about church email marketing on our Church Email page. Our partnership with ConstantContact gives you a powerful tool for excellent emails. Read on for ten tips.

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church email · church email best practices · church email marketing · church email tips · church email usage · church powerpoints

As you’re preparing for Valentine’s Day, check out this new Valentine’s Day Video (click to be redirected to the Sharefaith site and watch the video).

Be sure to look at our growing collection of Valentine’s Day media at the Sharefaith site.

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It’s less than two weeks away: Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day isn’t just about chocolate, romance, and elementary school Valentine card exchanges. For a church, this can be a great opportunity to emphasize God’s love. After all, God is Love, the Bible is all about love, God saved us in love, Jesus gave His life in love, and the defining mark of Christians is love.

As you observe this day, consider using some Valentine’s Day media in your service–a welcome video, a worship video, a bulletin cover, or bulletin clipart. Next week, we’ll share with you some of the new releases and Valentine’s Day materials we have. It’s not too early to get started now on preparing for Valentine’s Day.

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Groundhog day is next Tuesday. We’ve got some clipart for that day, Tuesday, February 2nd. Click here to check it out.
And, since this Sunday is the last day of January, you may be getting ready for February calendars and events, too. (We all know what happens on February 14th.) Be sure to check out our whole library of clipart to see if anything there will meet your needs.

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For all it’s impressive features and amazing qualities, sending out church email newsletters is useless if you don’t have the email addresses of your church members. Here is a collection of suggestions on how to grow or maintain your list of church members’ email addresses.

• Put an announcement in the bulletin, requesting everyone to send an email to the church email address in order to have a record of their email address.
• Provide a tear-off or request card in the bulletin that enables people to write down their email address. They can place this in the offering plate or leave it with a church leader.
• If you have some form of contact with members (phone, Facebook, etc.) send them a message or give them a call and ask them for their email address.
• Pass around a sign-up sheet in your meetings, especially small group meetings or Sunday School classes, to collect email addresses.
• Request an email address on the church membership form.
• Include an email address request line on your visitor information cards.
• Include a contact form on the church website in order to collect names and email addresses. You may also wish to include a “Join Our Mailing List” button or “Forward to a Friend” feature for broader distribution.
• Put email request cards in high traffic locations of the church facility, such as lobbies, near restrooms, etc.
• Make an announcement from the pulpit requesting email addresses.
• Use a video (click on the image above) that displays the church email address and website as a means to gaining additional email addresses.
• If you do not have a church directory, consider starting one. Request email addresses as part of the information in the directory.

Constant Contact, in addition to being one of the best email marketing tools available, also has one of the finest email list management tools. Each email you send gives recipients the choice to opt-out of future mailings.

Remember, “church email marketing” isn’t a term meant to denigrate the dignity of the Body of Christ. It is a term that is used to spread the life-changing Word to as many people as possible using the medium of email communication. And if you haven’t yet started using Constant Contact, click here to get started on your free two-month trial. (No credit card information is required.)

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Over the past few weeks, we have been discussing tips and tutorials on using Constant Contact, a church email solution. Much of what we have covered deals with reaching out to church members and attenders. That is one of the most obvious uses for such a powerful platform as Constant Contact. Now, let’s think about a different group of people–church volunteers. Constant Contact is also an incredibly powerful tool for keeping in touch with this group of people. These could be Sunday school teachers, small group leaders, nursery workers, ushers, deacons, maintenance workers, etc. Why is it important to keep in touch with them?

• Your ministry runs on volunteers. They are integral to the life of your church.
• Your volunteers have chosen to be involved in the life of the church.
• Your volunteers want to know that their role is appreciated and recognized.
• Your volunteers need some regular contact with church leadership and administration so the leadership can hear their feedback, and so the leadership can give them instruction or advice.

For this reason, consider using Constant Contact to maintain regular contact with this group of people. Start by collecting the email addresses of each one of your volunteers. Then, sit down to think about what kind of information and contact would be helpful to have with church volunteers. Here are some ideas.

• An occasional “thank you” note for their service to the church.
• Special testimonies from other church members on how the ministry of the volunteers has been meaningful.
• A regular update including a short devotional or encouragement from the Bible.
• Information regarding church news, changes in policy, answers to frequent questions, etc.
• Updates regarding upcoming birthdays or special events of other church volunteers.

Essentially, you can send them a mini-newsletter which would include more ‘insider’ information than the regular churchwide newsletter. Doing so is a way to help your volunteers know that they are included and valued in the ministry of the church. Beyond the occasional email update, you can also send them a survey. We’ve discussed sending surveys churchwide, but there is important information that you can gain from a volunteer-specific survey as well.

• Find out how many hours they spend each week in their volunteer ministry.
• Determine if the church is providing them the resources and instruction that they need for their responsibility.
• Find out what would be most helpful to them in terms of support for their ministry.
• Take suggestions for improving the church ministry in some way.
• Ask them for their input on enhancing their specific area of responsibility (e.g., Sunday School curriculum, more mops for cleanup, a nursery paging system, etc.)
• Rate their level of satisfaction with the volunteer ministry in which they are involved.

It can be easy to overlook this group of people who comprise the ministry core and the essential machinery of the church. Regular email contact is a way to maintain contact and help to sustain their ministry in your church. If you haven’t started your free trial with Constant Contact, get started by clicking here.

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As much as I don’t like to admit it, it’s still winter. Thankfully, spring is on the way, but meanwhile, time is running out to use the great winter media that we have available.

One suggestion that I have is to use this winter PowerPoint for announcements or sermon notes. For a unified look, use the matching bulletin, or Scripture PowerPoint in your service as well.

Another idea is to use a winter video, like the one here, as a welcome video. Each video is loopable, and creates interest and variety before the service begins.

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You might be involved in sending out a church email newsletter. And, by the way, if you’re not, you may want to think about it. If you are, we would like to share some tips regarding your newsletter. This post has to do with how often you should send out your newsletter.

Although you may want a simple one-word answer to the question, the real answer actually depends on various factors. How much time do you have? What kind of information do you include in your newsletter? How big is your church? Here are some things to keep in mind as you ponder the issue:

Not Too Often

• Email is all too often abused. We call it spam. People don’t like to receive things that take up their time, yet apparently don’t deserve their time. Don’t allow the church newsletter to be guilty of that perception. And, yes, an every day newsletter is too often.
• Do you have time to send out a newsletter every day, week, month? Consider your own time constraints, because putting together a newsletter does take considerable time–or the time of other church administrators. Consider the importance of a newsletter compared to the importance of other church ministries, and prioritize accordingly.

But Just Often Enough

• The point of a newsletter is, among other things, to keep church in people’s minds. If you go dark for months on end, you will not achieve this important quality.
• The church has a message. There are many compelling reasons to send out a newsletter. Neglecting a newsletter is neglecting the opportunity give your people spiritual encouragement, prayer requests, relevant church news, important updates, and deeper integration within the life of the church.

The Simple Answer

• A monthly newsletter is a good frequency for many ministries. This provides the “often, but not too-often” approach, and gives contributors the time to work on developing content for the new newsletter edition.
• A seasonal newsletter (four times annually) is another suggestion. By having more time to work on the newsletter, you can provide more material or make the newsletter longer.

Some Suggestions

• In addition to sending out a church newsletter, your church may also want to consider sending out occasional important updates via email. This does not need to be a newsletter, but rather a way of maintaining email contact between newsletters, and providing only that information that is necessary for people to know immediately.
• Keep it interesting. A boring church newsletter is one that lacks pictures. Use Sharefaith’s vast library of images and graphics to make your church newsletter readable.
• As we have discussed in recent posts, Constant Contact is a helpful way to manage your entire church email effort. With intuitive tracking tools, professional templates, and other helpful features, it is the perfect way to sustain every aspect of the church’s email needs.

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We’re just four weeks away from Valentine’s Day. Are you getting ready? We’ve been ready for a while, and we wanted to give you a sneak preview of what we’ve been working on. Here are this season’s brand new releases to get you ready for anything Valentine’s Day. Check it out.

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Today, we want to give you one of the most powerful tips for enhancing your email newsletters, devotional emails, or whatever other type of email marketing you may be doing for your church. It has to do with emailing graphics. Graphics add interest to your email. Knowing how to keep your email correspondence interesting, fresh, and informative has to do with knowing how to add graphics. In a future post, we will explain the whole process for creating vibrant looking emails using banners, headers, and footers. For now, here is a quick and simple tutorial for how to add graphics in Constant Contact emails. Continue reading “Church Email Marketing: Adding Flair” »

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