Sharefaith Adds Effective Email Communication By Partnering with Constant Contact

Our goal at ShareFaith is to help Churches communicate effectively with their community. Technology has brought us to an age where just about everyone has an email address, not just college kids and techies. It’s likely that most people in your church community use email every day. As we expand our services in 2010, we’ve made it a top priority to help you deliver outstanding church email communications, and we’re pleased to announce the selection of Constant Contact as our email marketing partner.

“Email marketing” may land with a thud on the ears of church administrators. Email marketing is for stores and businesses. But the tools are all the same for churches, only serving a different need. Sharefaith’s collaboration with Constant Contact is designed to serve the needs of a church administrator who has, for example, a weekly email update of announcements and church news, plus the need for special event and holiday emails that don’t fit the weekly schedule. In this email go pictures, graphics, all the important text and church identity concepts, all in a convenient, reusable layout.

Why not use Outlook or the church email system? You can, of course, type up your church email and blind cc: your entire congregation from most standard email clients. The problem is that this is not very effective. Your text layout may go haywire depending on what your recipient is using. Your graphics may disappear along with your entire message. You may waste valuable time managing email change and removal requests. Your emails may get blocked by ISP spam filters. You may find that you end up doing a lot of everything except what you what you really want: send a powerful, instructive, good-looking message to your church community on a timely basis.

The value offered by a top notch email services company like Constant Contact can be huge. This was magnified many times for us as we researched the idea of building our own tailor-made system for Sharefaith. It’s not that we couldn’t. Team members of Sharefaith created one of the pioneering Internet-based email marketing companies back in 1997. But our research uncovered how far these service providers have come in easy setup, on-time delivery, list management, spam filtering, and much more, not to mention it’s decidedly cheap. Constant Contact offers a 60-day Free Trial, and prices starting at just $15 per month. Constant Contact also showed us a very positive, can-do attitude toward working together and serving our faith-based community. Throw in the fact that they have great experience, serving over 300,000 small businesses and non-profits, and that we’ve been test-driving their service for years with our own “Word of the Week”, and you might say this was a match made in heaven.

Now it’s our job to make Sharefaith the best possible resource for your church email needs. You’ll soon find a wealth of new email-related assets available for download, including headers, backgrounds, salutations and even full layouts. You’ll hear us talking about email best practices and tips in our blog. You’ll find a rapidly growing volume of effective email ideas and how-to articles in our email marketing guide. On the horizon, we hope to create more seamless integration with Constant Contact, offering ways to edit email templates at Sharefaith and then send them through your account with Constant Contact.