Continuing our theme of creating compelling and quality newsletters through Constant Contact, I wanted to address one point. How do you craft an email newsletter in such a way that church members will forward on to their friends? The goal in a church newsletter is not just to inform church members, but to spread the word to others as well.

There are two means to accomplishing this. One is a bit more difficult and takes some practice. The other is very easy.

1. The sort-of difficult answer: create absolutely riveting, high-quality content.
People will forward things that they find personally impacting–a poignant testimony, an inspiring story, a Scripture lesson with powerful implications. Develop newsletter content beyond the bland. One way to do this is to simply let Scripture speak for itself. God’s Word is powerful and incisive (Heb. 4:12) and can address any human condition (2 Tim 3:16). Compelling content is the best way to create a newsletter that people will forward.

2. The easy answer: let Constant Contact do it for you.
Constant Contact has a built-in feature that inserts a “forward email to a friend” button into your newsletter. You can remove or edit this feature on the “Email Message Settings” in your newsletter. Or, you can click the “my settings” tab in your account and then navigate to “email features” to set up the forwarding options.

Here is what the forwarding option looks like.

Forward Email to a Friend: (Check the box to include the following links)
	Link text that displays in your email
	Link text that displays in the forwarded email

This is the easiest and most effective way to encourage email forwarding. In fact, when you send it to others, they are then able to easily join your mailing list, too. You should have both great content and easy forwarding options in each newsletter that you send out.

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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.

1. Error free. There is only one rule for typos in a church emails: don’t. End of discussion.
2. Design aesthetics. God made human beings as visually-oriented creatures. We crave good design. Design aesthetics is one of the most important features of church email. It has to look good. Unprofessional design and cluttered layout is the fastest way for your newsletter or devotional email to lose credibility and readership. Make it sharp. Constant Contact will help you do so, as well as the extraordinary graphic designs and templates from Sharefaith.
3. Design unity. Make each of your emails look generally the same. If you have a church logo or church colors, use them in the newsletter design. You want people to recognize the email when they receive it. A consistent design will give your church a unified branding in all of its media.
4. Design simplicity. Some of the best designs are those that are simple. While you may be tempted to insert every clipart, color, font size, or flashy font face, resist the temptation. Simplicity is key. Sometimes the best designs are the minimal ones.
5. Stellar content. Having the most beautiful email in the world isn’t going to do any good if the content stinks. What your email says is even more important than how it looks. For devotional emails, make them Bible centered and inspirational. For informative newsletters, make them engaging and fresh. If you create a pattern of boring emails, people may get into the dreadful habit of clicking “delete” when they see them. Not good.
6. Brief. Email is intended to be a quick communication medium. People will simply not read a War and Peace-length email.
7. Optional. To be courteous and respectful, give people the choice of whether or not to receive the church emails. Provide a button or link at the bottom of the newsletter by which people can remove their address from the mailing list. (This is one of the built-in features of Constant Contact.)
8. Relevent. Like number five, content is important. One of the ways to have excellent content is to make it relevant to your readers. Your content should cover items that are important to them–change of service times, new building project, special services, an article on the youth group’s week at camp, etc. Covering topics that are outside the realm of their experience or interest will not comprise a good email.
9. Often enough, but not too often. A sure-fire way to cultivate annoyance over church emails is to send them out too often. Be judicious in your frequency of newsletters, announcements, or devotional emails. Check out this article on frequency.
10. Wide reach. Church emails are ineffective if the church people aren’t receiving them. Make a concerted effort to get the word out to as many people in the church as possible. Realize, of course, that (even today) not everyone has email, but for those who do, email is the optimal form of communication. Here are some tips on gathering email addresses.

Those are Sharefaith’s top ten tips for email best practices. What are your suggestions?

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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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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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