Jump Start Your Email Strategy This Year: Part 3 – How to Engage with your List
As spiritual leaders of faith communities you are no doubt always looking for outreach opportunities to share your message of hope, healing and light. Social media has great value and engagement when used well; and just when you think you ARE doing well, well darn – the algorithm changes and your message never gets to its destination.
So in this series on email strategy, we’re offering best practices and ideas to help you build, nurture and this week – engage – with an audience through email.
Here’s part 1 if you missed it.
Here’s part 2 if you missed it.
Click here for the video version of this post!
Our third part, how to engage with your list, goes a bit deeper and may possibly stretch you outside of your comfort zone.
And that’s good, because you will gain confidence and courage in conquering other digital ministry challenges you will face.
Engaging with Your List
Even though email may seem like a one way communication, it can be used to:
- build trust
- foster relationships
- extend invitations.
We at Digi advocate for your social media posts to follow the 80/20 rule. That is, 80% of your posts should be engaging, interactive, fun or helpful content. While 20% should be specifically about events that you’re inviting people to.
In the same way, your email communication should offer value; perhaps by education; reflection, devotional, or spiritual guidance. And don’t be shy about sharing a meme or two along the way. All this, of course, in addition to the general news from the pastor, council or church office.
For sure you want to keep your members informed about events, special worship services, and celebrations.
Be aware, though, of the people on your list who may have signed up because they came across your website via a search or because they liked a social media post you made.
These people may never walk through your physical doors. They could attend virtually if that will continue to be offered by your community. The point is, they should be tagged appropriately so valuable and helpful content is emailed to them and not an invitation to your annual meeting.
Email Engagement Example
Let’s put some substance to this concept by walking through an example email sequence.
Since the Lenten season for the Christian church is coming up soon, perhaps your church may have purchased or create da weekly series, for a Wednesday night or to incorporate into Sunday service.
Since Lent lasts 6 weeks, it’s very probable that not all attendees will be able to make every service. That being the case, you might want to keep them informed about the content of the series ; even if they haven’t been attending at all during Lent. Perhaps they will only appear during Holy Week, or just Easter Sunday.
In the weeks leading up to Ash Wednesday, you can start to warm up your email recipients with small bits of information about what’s planned.
Then at least 1 week before Ash Wednesday, plan to send out the order of worship or outline of the program you’re presenting.
This may take a bit of effort, but will be worth it if it helps in reaching people in this season.
When you think about it, you will likely have material ready for the actual program, so leverage what’s already been prepared so you’re not making extra work for yourself.
- so, lets take a look at what that workflow sequence may look like.
Your email sequence may look like this:
Monday of Ash Wednesday week:
- Send the entire outline/summary of the program.
- They should have been ‘warmed up’ to what’s happening by the time this email arrives.
- Send the entire outline/summary of the program.
Thursday of Ash Wednesday week:
- Follow up thanking those who were able to attend
- Take the opportunity to invite others who were not there
Monday of each successive week of Lent:
- Send highlights of the upcoming Wednesday’s program.
Thursday of each successive week of Lent:
- Similar to above, but add in more substantial content from the series that they may have missed.
- Encourage at home activities if appropriate
This is also a great way to get people comfortable to attend during Holy Week or Easter Sunday service, as it could help them feel more connected if they have had exposure and participation to the content offered all during Lent.
Ideas for Weekly Emails during Lent
Even if your Lenten season will be a bit more low key and not involve a scripted series, you still want to stay in touch during this time.
- Repurpose sermon content from the prior Sunday or give a sneak preview of the upcoming Sunday.
- Take one aspect of the sermon a bit deeper
- Perhaps include the parts of the sermon that ended up on the cutting room floor
- Ask thought provoking questions to deepen the faith journey for your readers
- It’s likely there are plenty of ready to distribute (aka email) resources for your community from your own denomination’s central website.
- https://www.elca.org/ (the local synod level can be helpful as well)
- https://www.episcopalchurch.org/
- https://www.ucc.org/
- https://www.umc.org/en
PRO TIP: Include a Pastor’s video message in the email on occasion; this would be a nice touch especially around the holiday seasons. The not so tech savvy folks might appreciate this as it would give them a “personal” message without them having to navigate to a social media platform to hear what’s going on. Or reuse a Facebook Live snippet. Seeing and hearing a person in an email is not expected and is more likely to get clicked!
What is a Lead Generator?
In our first post of the series, we mentioned the idea of a Lead Generator to grow your email list.
At first glance, you may think it seems a little odd for a faith community to be using a lead generator for the sole purpose of getting email addresses.
But remember there is a person attached to that email. A person who may very much need what you’re freely willing and equipped to share; hope, healing and light.
Also, remember we said an email address is a valuable commodity. People may not want to give it up too easily. This is why it’s a good idea to offer something in exchange for their email.
For example, the Lenten series material you are sharing with your existing email list perhaps can be turned into a more substantial resource to prepare folks for Easter.
Maybe offering a special devotional depending on the season of the church calendar would be appropriate or a resource to promote mental health awareness or self-care..
The possibilities are endless and the material likely already exists and needs only to be repurposed, or reformatted and made into a PDF, or downloadable file.
Lead generators aren’t limited to PDF documents, but can take the form of video, playlists or anything else you can dream up that is copyright free and shareable.
How to Distribute a Lead Generator
Here’s where it gets a little technical, but we have faith in you, spiritual leaders!
A lead generator needs a landing page to live on and be distributed from.
There are a plethora of free and paid tools available which you can find with a simple Google search.
Your email management system very likely has landing page templates already designed and ready for use.
Canva is also quite capable of making an attractive landing page for you. Your website platform likely also has templates available for this task.
Essentially, you build a graphic or presentation, add your engaging text, prompt for a name and email address, and upon submission, redirect the visitor to the source of the downloadable resource or viewable video. That’s highly simplified!
So we’ll dig into that a bit deeper with next week’s bonus blog/vlog:
- How to Create a Landing Page
Whether you’re just starting or have started and want to keep going and growing, we invite you to stay in touch for weekly email updates about the latest digital ministry tips, tools, and trends!