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) |
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| 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.