If you haven’t heard of MailChimp, then you probably have never listened to an episode of the podcast phenomenon Serial, and you’re probably pretty new to this whole Internet thing. If that’s you, I’ll keep this simple: MailChimp is a—arguably the—service designed to help you send out well-designed emails to a set list of recipients.
If your church isn’t doing this, stop right now. Read this post on how to set your MailChimp account and mailing this, and then come back to this. We’ll wait.
Ready? Sorry. Didn’t mean to rush you.
Now? Ok, great. Here we go.
What I’d like to talk to you about is how to improve your MailChimp email. Now, I’m not going to address your design elements—colors, fonts, artwork, etc.—because that too quickly devolves into a subjective argument about what looks good, and honesty, that really depends upon your church’s culture and where you are on a design evolution spectrum. Our focus, instead, will be on the content of your email.
Weekly Email Essentials
If you’re going to send out a weekly email, make it worth your effort. If you’re forgetting these two things, you’re wasting your time.
1. Focus on Sunday
How you do this might depend upon your church, but for our church, I generally know what my pastor is going to preach about—at the very least I have his scripture reference—around a month before he does it. To that end, our email gives a small preview of his sermon, without giving anything major away. Why? Because the whole reason we send this email out is to remind/invite/persuade people to attend service on Sunday. With that goal in mind, this means that our weekly email should give the receipients preview of what they’re being drawn toward.
2. Looking Ahead
Brevity is crucial in everything in this digital age, and email is certainly no exception. However, if you’re not including a reminder/announcement about upcoming events, you’re basically telling the recipients, “Nothing happens here after you leave on Sunday.” Why not just cancel your events? Don’t think that just because you’ve announced three other ways that you can skip it here. Wrong! Individuals are smart, but people are dumb. Announce, invite, remind—you have to be thorough, even overboard, when it comes to communicating to the masses.
Email Extras
Before we dive into the “extras,” I’ll clarify that these are basically “how” elements to the essentials above. The beauty of this is that it keeps things simple by not adding new elements, but deepening essentials instead.
Sunday’s Scripture – In our current sermon series, my pastor has selected a series of passages in John to preach on. He hasn’t pre-written his messages, but he knows where he’s going. I decided to take advantage of this by including a link to Sunday’s scripture so that people can read it ahead of time, giving God more fuel to use in preparing their hearts.
Last Sunday’s Sermon – Faithful church attendance, when I was a kid, meant every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. Now, we’re lucky to get people to attend every Sunday morning. To that end, acknowledge the problem by providing the receipients with quick access to the previous week’s sermon. Perhaps they are weekly attenders and were sick or called out of town. Help them avoid feeling behind or left out by providing them the best alternative to Sunday morning attendance, whether that’s a video or audio recording or a transcript or even a summary written based upon the pastor’s notes.
This Sunday’s Worship – One of the best things—and I’m serious about this—I’ve ever done was to start blogging our Sunday worship list the Wednesday before. It’s netted us a bunch of positive response, and it was my brother’s idea. By including a link to this in the email, you’re removing a barrier that might prevent them from coming to church. Public singing, which is basically what “worship” means in most modern churches, is TERRIFYING to most people. Give them some confidence by letting them know what songs you’ll be singing ahead of time. (Here’s a link to what I do. It’s nothing amazing, but it works.)
Calendar Link – Beyond just making a key announcement, make sure you’ve got a link to a list of all of church’s upcoming events. It may never be clicked, but it can’t be clicked if it’s not included.
Website Link – “Duh, Phil. These people have probably already been to out site.” Maybe. Or maybe they signed up on a connection card. Who cares? You should never send out a piece of communication without your website listed.
And that’s it. Nothing too difficult here, honestly, especially when you factor in how simple this is once you’ve got an email template set up.
Chandos says
One of the issues we found when using MailChimp, is that Gmail puts the emails in ‘Promotional’ tab. Anyone else experience that? We retired MC because of that, and use our church management to send them out. Which is a bummer, because the MC ones look so much nicer!
Jeremy Smith says
I’d say that this is actually not a bad thing as that is honestly what it is.
Chandos says
It’s good for people (my personal inbox included), less so for the church 🙁 We were having our leaders (others too, I assume, but leaders are easier to check with) miss events because the emails weren’t showing up in their main inbox. Which kinda defeats the purpose of the emails getting sent out :/
Mike Howard says
You can instruct them to add your From email address to their Google Contacts. Emails from a subscriber’s Google Contacts always go to their Primary inbox.
Phil Schneider says
This is a great point Chandos, and I think Mike has the solution, frustrating as the situation may be.
Ben B says
Do you have links to past emails that you could share so we could see examples of how you are using Mail Chimp in your setting?
Phil Schneider says
Here are two that might be helpful. Looking back over them, I’m still not entirely pleased, but as with all things in ministry, it’s a work in progress.
http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=05d2b15c9326a80154357cd92&id=3c18db5a55&e=%5BUNIQID%5D
http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=05d2b15c9326a80154357cd92&id=f7e16406df&e=%5BUNIQID%5D
Mike says
Can you show some examples of your past emails?
Phil Schneider says
I added some in reply to Ben’s comment one thread up.