Church event organizers typically depend on conventional marketing techniques like putting up flyers and banners in the neighborhood, assuming that digital marketing techniques like email marketing are reserved for businesses. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. In this blog, we’ll discuss how churches can utilize email marketing to promote their events.
Email marketing is one of the most potent marketing tools you can use to promote your church events. But having a successful email marketing campaign isn’t easy. It requires a lot of focus and time, most of which goes into building up a subscriber’s list and crafting the right emails that make people want to come to your church’s event. If this is the first time you’re thinking about launching an email campaign, this guide will inform you of all the fundamentals you need to be mindful of.
Understand what you’re dealing with
Before you do anything, you must understand the nature of email marketing itself. Let’s say you receive a sales email from an unknown fitness company. What do you do? 99 out of 100 times, you’d delete that email without even opening it even if you’re a regular gym goer or are into fitness.
Understanding that email marketing is like aiming for the bull’s eye from 500 meters across isn’t an exaggeration. You have one shot (and one shot only) to convince your reader why it’s worth opening your email and why they should be attending your church event. Only when you understand that can you craft the perfect email for your audience.
Visuals are everything
Now that you’re in the right mindset, it’s time to start crafting that perfect email. One of the most important things businesses forget is that people are visual creatures. They’d rather read a phrase written on a visual and colorful flyer than plain old boring paragraphs of text.
The first thing you need to do is use an online graphic design tool like PosterMyWall to craft a dynamic church flyer. You’ll have dozens of catchy email templates on PosterMyWall and won’t take you more than half an hour to create your banner. Make sure you include all the relevant details on that flyer, such as the event location, purpose, venue, date, and timings. Next, insert this flyer in your email’s body.
Are you writing engaging subject lines?
After having drafted your email, it’s time to think about your subject line. Ask yourself, what can I put on there to make people click open my email and read it? It’s one of the most difficult tasks and you might need to take some time to think about it. Your subject line is the first thing a viewer looks at before deciding whether it’s worth opening the email or not, so make every word count.
As a rule of thumb, your subject should be catchy so that it hooks the attention of the reader at first glance and is concise (no more than 40-50 characters). Another thing to be mindful of is to write a subject line that’s relevant to your email and doesn’t mislead the reader in any way. Remember, you need to develop trust with your viewers and that can’t happen if you misdirect them in your emails.
A call to action is a must-have
Every email you craft must have a call-to-action (CTA) button. An email without CTAs is a dead email. A CTA gives your viewers direction and instructions on what to do if they’re interested in coming to your church event. Other than that, a CTA makes it easier for a person to register for your event.
Think about it — no one would want to go to your website and keep scrolling until they find a registration page. They would expect you to provide the link that would take them to the registration page without them having to work for it. That’s what a CTA is for! But make sure you begin it with a verb and make it as creative as possible.
Your emails should be mobile-friendly
People usually read their emails on their phones these days. Therefore, your emails must be mobile-friendly. What does that mean? In a nutshell, it means using an email template built for reading emails on your phone, especially if you’re going to add images and banners to it, which may appear distorted to someone reading your email on their phone.
Using a pre-built email template designed for phones will help you cater to the screen dimensions of a phone. That doesn’t mean people won’t be able to read your emails on a PC or laptop, but rather it would ensure that your emails can be viewed (the way you want to) on all devices.
Send out newsletters announcing updates
Email marketing isn’t a one-time thing that you do whenever you want to score an audience for your church event. It’s a continual effort that requires constant engagement with your audience. Newsletters are the sole medium via which you can interact and engage with your audience regularly.
A newsletter is supposed to keep your audience updated about your church’s events and activities. For instance, if you held a charity event last year, you could post pictures and results, demonstrating how the money the church collected has been used to improve the lives of other people. Alternatively, if you have an upcoming church event, you could inform your audience about it in your newsletter.
Just don’t make the mistake of being inconsistent with it. If you have been sending out a newsletter every week, stick to that frequency — it helps to build trust and traction with your audience.
A final piece of advice
Email marketing is undoubtedly one of the most powerful marketing channels if you know how to use it to your advantage. But keep in mind that every enterprise or church is different with a unique target audience. Therefore, there’s no one right answer that would make your email marketing campaign a success.
Try using several strategies on a small pool of subscribers list and see the response you get. If it’s a success, incrementally increase your pool, tweaking anything you might find might help promote your church’s event. Once you have figured out what you need to do, roll it out at mass to get the maximum outreach.
