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.
- Error free. There is only one rule for typos in a church emails: don’t. End of discussion.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Brief. Email is intended to be a quick communication medium. People will simply not read a War and Peace-length email.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. Even if you have a powerful email, it will only be as effective as it is read. Use Constant Contact for the most powerful tool in church email marketing today.