EmailLast summer, at the eleventh hour, I had to become an “email marketing expert.” I’d decided to support a particular candidate at the exact moment his communications team needed someone to manage his email campaign. Kismet? Who knows.  They reasoned that my web experience fit their need, and while I’m not sure I ever fully qualified, I read everything I could find and learned even more on the fly.*

Fast forward to this spring. My congregation had an aging system for weekly emails, and it needed an overhaul. What an opportunity. Of course I leapt in, and the result will have to speak for itself.

Putting these various experiences together, here are the steps I’d advise for a congregation wanting to either launch or revamp its mass emails.

1. Get the Buy-In of Leadership.
This is a must. If your minister or senior church leadership is suggesting the church do this, jump at the chance. If not, persuasion will be the order of the day. Find allies in your congregation and explain the advantages. Given the recent economy, saving money is likely to be a compelling argument. Also, presenting a plan, with particulars of who can do what is likely to allay fears and get you a thumbs up.

2. Research Email Marketing.
This is probably overkill, but for those like me who enjoy reading up for their latest project, here are some of the best resources on the Web that I’ve happened across:


3. Find a Free Email Marketing Service.
Our congregation opted to use VerticalResponse’s free for non-profits service, and we love it.

We tried doing doing mass emails on our own. The administrator kept a contact lists and sent emails as text, but the more people that signed up for it, the more unwieldy it became.

Now that we’ve moved over to VerticalResponse, not only can we do “pretty” HTML emails, but also a team of us can produce mass emails whenever needed. This is particularly important when emergencies come up.

4. Iron Out a Process.
It’s all well-and-good to want to produce a weekly church email or e-newsletter, but in the end what matters most is the content. That’s why step #1 is so important. If your ministers and other church leaders are itching for broadcast email, the content will almost write itself. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to get the right information to whom and when. (In an upcoming post I’ll explain my congregation’s process in more detail.)

5. Build a Template.
Most email marketing services have sets of templates you can adapt fairly easily. If you want to polish one up, perhaps customizing it to look like the website, find or hire someone in the congregation who is adept at HTML and explain the look-and-feel you are hoping for.

6. Put a Sign-Up Form on Your Home Page.
All good email marketing services include HTML that your webmasters can easily adapt for your site. Do be sure to double-check it once it’s live.

7. Import Pre-existing Lists of Email Addresses.
Again, all good email marketing services make it straight-forward to both export and import lists of email addresses. If you have a membership database, for example, those emails can be exported. Just be sure that everyone whose email you import has opted in to receive congregational emails.

8. Launch Some Tests.
At this point you’re almost ready. But be sure to send out some test emails and check them on a variety of platforms. That means not just Outlook and the usual suspects like Hotmail, but also a variety of mobile devices. Keep refining and testing until you and key leaders are comfortable. Then, drum roll….

9. In Email Marketing Speak, “Launch Your Campaign.”
In other words, take a deep breath and send our your congregation’s first blast email.

In a few days, you can view reports of how the email is doing. One of the more important, but deceptive, statistics is the “open” rate. A user has to display the embedded images to be counted as “opening” an email. Since many people don’t turn on images, the numbers will look lower than they actually are. That said, the reports have other potentially helpful data such as how many people clicked through on which links and if people forwarded the email.

* One aside about my first foray into email marketing: not only was it great fun to be in the trenches with this team, but our candidate won.  May you have fun with it too.

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