- Today you and I are gonna construct
an email newsletter policy
for your church, step by step.
Why do we need something like this?
Well, because in my experience,
church email blasts function
similarly to church bulletins,
they are the dumping site
for all the information
a church needs to get out,
but rarely are they effective.
Here's the good news,
there is a way to format
and send your church emails
that will lead to dramatically
higher open rates,
click rates, and response rates.
I've seen it again and again
with the students that I coach and now,
I wanna show you how to make
these same improvements.
And stick around until
the end of the video,
because I'll be sharing with you
a downloadable policy template for email
that you can customize
for your own church.
Let's dive in.
(upbeat music)
Well, here there, I'm Brady Shearer,
this is Pro Church Tools and
we're here to help your church
navigate the biggest
communication shift in 500 years.
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Again, that link is Nucleus.church,
and you'll also find it
in the description below.
So, I've structured the
content of this video
into a series of rules,
the seven rules for writing
better church email newsletters.
And this is the latest video
in a series on church policy,
as it pertains to digital media
and creativity in churches.
The first video was on church growth
and how to properly measure it.
And that is a crucial video
to watch, required viewing,
because it's in that
video where we establish
the weaknesses of church
attendance as a tool for evaluation
and recommend instead a more holistic
and accurate measuring stick, next steps.
And then I published two more videos
in this series on policy,
one on church communications
policy as a whole
and another on social
media policy specifically.
They're all linked in
the description below
and I highly recommend
you watch all of these
in the series so far
because they're all different
pieces in the overall puzzle,
miss one piece of the puzzle,
and you'll never get the full picture
of how this is all supposed to look.
And today we're tackling email.
So let's begin with rule number one,
every email should be
sent from a real person.
So instead of sending your
newsletter from Grace Church,
edit the from field, to read
Pastor Jamie in Grace Church.
Now, why would this matter?
Well, simply because humans
connect more with other humans
than they do with brands or organizations,
and personalizing your emails in this way
will immediately translate
to higher open rates,
click rates and response rates.
Now, let's be clear,
this type of personalization wouldn't work
for every type of company or organization.
For example, if I find myself
on the newsletter for The Gap,
I'm not really interested
in hearing from their CEO
or the head of communications
in my region personally,
but my belief is that
church should be family,
a close knit community
of like minded people
all following the way of Christ.
So, instead of writing your emails
like a big brand would of
corporate like, make them personal
because that's closer to how
we communicate to our churches offline.
Not to mention,
it contributes to higher
open and click rates.
To that end, make sure
to sign off each email
with the sender's name also.
For example, at the end of each email,
you could put something like,
"Talk soon, Pastor Jamie, Grace Church."
Now, when it comes to who
this email should come from,
if we're talking strictly
about effectiveness,
sending it from your lead pastor
will yield the most clicks,
opens, and responses.
And that's simply because your lead pastor
is likely the one that does the majority
of your day churches preaching,
and thus is the most visible
person at your church.
Now, if you're a lead pastor does not
have the bandwidth or the know how
to write and send out these emails,
it's totally okay in my books
to prep the emails for them,
have them sign off,
and then send them out.
As long as they look it over first,
so they know what's being said.
In fact, I was speaking
with a mentorship student
about this last week
and they told me they sent
out an email this way,
where the pastor didn't
write the email themselves,
but they signed off on it,
they followed these rules that
you're learning right now,
and the pastor was so surprised
by how many more people
opened the email,
clicked it and responded.
And I'll be sharing
with you a real example
of what an email can look like
when it follows all these
rules later on in this video.
Of course, it's also
perfectly fine to send
from another person in leadership
at your church as well.
Just try to keep that consistent,
send from the same person week after week,
that's how you build rapport.
All right, rule number two,
ditch the fancy graphics,
plain text only please.
And here's the bottom line,
plain text emails feel personal.
Emails filled with fancy formatting
and graphics feel promotional.
And when you receive an email
from a brand or organization,
it's more likely than not
gonna be filled with fancy
formatting and graphics.
When you receive an email from
a friend or family member,
it's more likely just gonna be plain text.
So my question to you is,
do you want to posture your
church like a big brand
or send emails that feel like
they're coming from friends and family?
Because to me, again, our
churches should feel a lot
more like friends and family than target.
And if effectiveness is your highest aim,
ditch the creative designs for plain text.
And plus, this will be easier for you
because now you won't need
to design fancy emails,
you can just write.
And this gets to the bigger question of
what we're as churches trying to do
with our email newsletters.
For me, I always wanna
prioritize effectiveness.
That means driving more next steps
to affect life change in my church.
And for that reason,
I try not to get too attached
to a certain way of doing things.
If it's effective, I do it,
so long as it's not morally questionable.
If it's not effective, I won't do it.
And I really don't care
if we've always done it another way,
because if I can demonstrate
that a different approach
is more effective,
and will translate to more next steps
and thus life change in my church,
then that's what we should be doing
because effectiveness
is our highest priority,
not tradition, not familiarity
or comfort for church leadership.
And this is why going
through the first video
in this series on
evaluating the effectiveness
of our churches is so imperative
because if you can't demonstrably prove
that what your church is doing is
or is not contributing to more next steps,
you can't make smart decisions.
You're just guessing,
which is the place most of our
churches find ourselves in.
And if you're watching this
video right now and thinking,
"Yeah, I'm on board with that Brady.
But how do I convince
my senior leadership?"
Here's what I'd say to you,
it's your job as a communicator
to lay out why this kind
of stuff is important.
And the first step in doing this
is to make sure that
everyone's on the same page
with what the church is
trying to accomplish.
And that's the first video in this series.
And then once you're all on the same page,
you will want to get to
the same destination,
you can then show senior
leadership your ideas
for ways to do this.
And they might be hesitant
or skeptical at first,
but if they're good leaders,
they'll at least let you
experiment and give you a chance.
And then it's your job to create
light bulb moments for them,
where it all makes sense
because you sent out an email
and it got twice as many opens
and way more responses
than any other email
we'd sent before.
Now you've got some more
trust with senior leadership,
and they're more likely to let you
experiment with something else
and you work this process
repeatedly to effect change.
But this all starts with
challenging the idea
that attendance is our ultimate barometer
for life change.
And most of our churches
still believe that.
And if that's your fundamental belief,
then out of that will come communications
that promote and promote and promote.
And what better time to
make some permanent change
than in a pandemic when
in-person gatherings
are limited to varying
degrees all around the world.
And just to back up what I've been saying
in this rule with some data,
as it pertains to plain text emails,
HubSpot published a report that I'll link
in the description below.
A few excerpts that stand out to me,
"Through all of our testing,
there's one hard truth we've discovered,
nothing boosts opens and clicks as well as
an old school, plain-text email.
And in every single A/B test,
the simpler designed email won.
The emails with fewer HTML elements
won with statistical significance."
Rule number three,
send your emails at the
same time each week.
The truth is, consistency creates routine.
And by sending out your email newsletter
at the same time each week,
your church will become accustomed
to a predictable pattern of communication.
I have a pastor friend that
always sends out his emails
to his church on Wednesday afternoons.
For me at Pro Church Tools,
I always send mine out
on Tuesday mornings.
And look, don't stress too much about
the ideal sending times,
it's much more important to pick a time
and then stick with it once
you've made your decision.
Rule number four,
include a P.S. at the
bottom of each email.
So I want you to think about
how you and I read emails for a moment.
Because we don't really read them, do we?
I mean, at least not word
for word, instead, we skim.
And I've found, over the
tens of millions of emails
that I've sent to hundreds
of thousands of people
that the P.S. portion is consistently
one of the most read
portions of the email.
And I know this because
the links that I include
in the P.S. portion
are often the most clicked links.
And this makes sense from a
logical standpoint, right?
We skim through the email
trying to pick up what might be important,
and then we see a P.S. at the bottom
and our mind immediately registers
that this must be an important part
because it stands out.
So, how should you use the
postscript portion of your email?
Well, this isn't the time
to talk about something new.
In fact, the best way
to use your P.S. section
is to restate and reinforce
the main call-to-action
you want your recipients to
take when they get this email.
So if you want them to click a link,
put the link in there again.
If you want them to respond to the email,
make that same call-to-action to respond.
Put it there again.
Rule number five, include
the fewest items possible.
Okay, this is probably
gonna be the hardest pill
to swallow for a lot of you.
But if you want your emails
to be the most effective,
each email should only
contain a single item
with a single call-to-action.
Bottom line, that's gonna be
the most effective strategy.
Now, if you feel like
that's an impossible task
because your church has way
too many things to promote,
then I'd point you to the second video
in this series on church comms policy.
Because it's in that video
where we tackle this issue.
My promise to you is this,
if you follow the principles in that video
and implement them,
you will be able to send out
a weekly email newsletter
that contains just a single
call-to-action and single topic.
And this will be the
most effective approach.
With that being said,
if you say to me that this
is completely impossible
in your context, just unreasonable Brady,
then just consider this principle,
the fewer topics you cover,
the more effective your emails will be.
So peak effectiveness with
your church email newsletters
is just one topic per email.
But, if you're currently
sending email blasts
with four, five, six, seven
topics and links every week,
then whittling that down
to two or three items
is still going to be translating
to better effectiveness.
So the rule to remember here is,
include the fewest items possible,
because again, our highest
priority should be effectiveness,
not appeasing other ministry leaders
to ensure they get their event included.
Not making our jobs as
the communicators easier.
Our job is to be effective,
to communicate in such a way
that leads to more next steps.
And guess what, when you
prioritize effectiveness,
things get more difficult for you
because it's much easier to pile on
link after link announcement,
after announcement,
and fill up our
communications with promos,
but guess what?
While that might make things
easier for you this week,
it will make your job
dramatically harder next week
and the week after that,
because people will eventually
stop reading your emails,
stop opening them,
because you're writing
newsletters for you,
and not for them.
And that's not what good communicators do.
And that's what this whole
series of videos is for,
to create policy and
frameworks and systems,
to free you up,
to write emails how they're
meant to be written,
to use social for ministry
instead of just to promote ministry,
and to build a communications policy
that drives more next steps church wide.
And good work like that,
it's not always easy, but it's worth it,
because the stakes are too high here,
because the work we do has
heaven and earth consequences,
so don't take the easy way out
because it will come at a cost.
(sighs) I am worked up today,
come to an inflection point in this series
and I'm just going in on people I guess.
Rule number six, inspiration
over information.
Look, I get it, there's
a lot to communicate
and talk about in your
church, especially now.
The increased pressures of the pandemic
are putting added weight on
our communication systems.
Still, don't allow your
weekly emails to devolve
and to dry information
heavy bulletin replacements.
Because again,
this may serve as a short term solution
for making sure you get
to promote every event,
but in the longterm,
you'll worsen your open,
click and response rate
by conditioning folks
to ignore your emails.
Prioritize inspiration and storytelling
in the emails you send instead,
and I'll be showing
you a real example here
in just a second.
But first, we've gotta
get to our last rule,
rule number seven, practice A/B testing.
So in every church,
there are certain ways of doing things
that are tremendously difficult
to challenge and change.
And for many churches
email newsletters fall into that camp.
And I will say, emails
have nothing on bulletins,
Lord help me for the next video
I need to make on that topic.
So here's my challenge to you,
perhaps, there was a
rule or two in this video
that you heard and you were
immediately skeptical about it.
You thought, "Sure, that
might work at another church,
but you don't know what I'm
dealing with in my church."
And look, you're right,
I don't know the precise
situation you're in,
but I have mentored hundreds of students
in churches personally,
and across my podcast,
YouTube channel and blog,
tens of thousands of
churches have taken my advice
for digital communications
and implemented it
and seen increased effectiveness.
So here's my challenge,
email is one of the easiest
platforms to do A/B testing on,
meaning, you can send out email newsletter
to your entire list, send
half of your list one version,
and send the other half, another version,
see what does better.
So let's take rule
number two as an example.
I'm a huge advocate of plain text emails
because I think they're more effective.
But let's say you don't believe me,
it's totally fine.
Let's put it to the test.
Send out your next email newsletter
where half of your recipients
receive a plain text version
and the other half receive
the fancy graphics,
heavy HTML version,
and then look at the data
and see which performs better.
Because one of two things
will happen, number one,
you'll prove that you were
right this whole time,
but you'll now know that
it wasn't just a hunch,
but your church proved
it with their actions.
And that's an important
data point to have.
Alternatively, you'll see that
my approach was more effective,
and now you have a more
effective approach to email,
which means more next steps
and life change in your church.
So either way, you win,
because here's the thing,
you owe it to church to be the
most effective communicator
and leader you can be.
And one of the best ways
to make improvements
is to practice A/B testing,
and get unbiased data on best practices
for your specific church context.
And, if you don't currently use a tool
that can do A/B testing,
allow me to recommend ConvertKit.
This is the email software we use
at my organization Pro Church Tools.
In my opinion they have surpassed
the likes of Mailchimp
in the last few years
and they even offer a free plan
that lets you have up to 1000 subscribers
which will be perfect
for many of our churches.
Now, I promised that I'd show you
what a real church email
newsletter looks like
when it follows these seven rules.
So that's what we're gonna to do now.
This email you're seeing comes from
one of my mentorship
students Julie, and it reads,
"Hey, first name,
I think it's time for some
good news, don't you?"
And Julie talks a lot about the
negativity we're all facing right now,
and then ask her church to respond
to any or all of the following questions.
"What good have you witnessed recently?
What good has God brought into your life?
What good has God prompted
you to do for another?"
Julie then puts on her storytelling hat
and answers one of these questions herself
by talking about a way
that she brightened the day
of her mother-in-law who had
recently broken her femur.
Julie then asks her church to respond
to one of these questions by hitting reply
and sharing their story.
She signs her name,
and adds a P.S. in the bottom
reiterating that same call-to-action.
And here are the results from this email.
The last time I spoke with Julie,
she had received 21 replies to this email,
way more than she had ever
gotten with previous newsletters.
And that means 21 people
were sharing their stories of life change
and how God is moving even
admits to season of great change
and difficulty for many.
And now with permission,
Julie's gonna take these stories
and turn them into future social posts.
And this is the perfect example
of a church email newsletter done right.
And pay special attention
because there's no event promotion
in that email whatsoever.
Maybe you've heard me say before
that we should be using social
and email to do ministry,
not just promote ministry
and perhaps you're not
certain what I mean by that.
Well, this is what I mean
by that, because remember,
we need to get past the mindset,
that in-person attendance is
the best and only barometer
for life change in our churches.
It is not.
And here we have 21
individual conversations
where people are sharing their
testimonies with each other,
relationship is being built,
faith is being built
as we hear how God is moving powerfully
in the lives of others
in our church family.
And then we turn those
into public social posts
so our whole church can
grow closer together,
and closer to God as we collectively see
our faith and trust in God increase
because we see what he's doing uniquely
in our faith community through
the people that we know.
That is demonstrable life change.
That is people putting their faith in God
and becoming more like Christ.
And it all started with a
simple email newsletter.
In the description below,
you're gonna find a link
to the full written guide
of this video.
And in that blog post,
there's a download link to this policy
in written Google Doc form.
So I encourage you to
download that, customize it,
and formalize this policy in your church.
And remember, this is just one
of four videos in this series
on policy and building a church
comms ministry from scratch.
Make sure you watch through
the other three videos
so you'll get a full picture
of how each of these puzzle pieces
is meant to fit together.
Thanks so much for your time.
As always, if you learnt
something from this video,
please give it a thumbs
up, it really helps.
Talk to you soon.
(upbeat music)
