A weekly broadcast email can be among the most effective means of communication with your members and guests. In North America email penetration is 82% of all households (2008 data), meaning on the very old or very young don’t have email. Considering that radio penetration is only 78% and newspapers are at 55%, email represents both the most broadly accessible broadcast media method available and the lowest cost method as well. Here are a few tips for making your regular broadcast emails effective.

Have one. If you’re reading this and don’t have a regularly scheduled e-blast from your church, start one immediately.  When you look at both cost and reach, not availing your church’s opportunity to connect through email is simply irresponsible. Use your Sunday bulletin to promote the email prior to launch, build your email list and begin with a regularly scheduled broadcast email.

Use a reputable email service. There are several reasons for using an email service for broadcast emails versus just dumping a big list of addresses into Outlook and clicking send.  Many ISPs don’t accept large “sends” from individual email addresses as this is a key trait of the majority of spam emails.  Email services use reliable servers to send emails. They also typically provide a number of attractive templates that make your emails appear more reader-friendly. They can send in both HTML and text-only formats, giving your emails greater reach. And services allow you to schedule your emails in advance, so you can create them when convenient and set them to send at the best possible time.

Email services I would recommend include:

> Constantcontact.com

> Bluehornet.com

Format for sound-bite reading. Keep your emails short and to the point. No epistles here—short bites with clear, intriguing titles and simple, descriptive paragraphs. Don’t discourage readers with emails that are too long.  There are other great online formats for casual reading—like blogs or websites. According to Nielson Research the average reader spends just 51 seconds on an e-newsletter. You must format your broadcast email to communicate quickly and succinctly.

Be professional. Double check dates, times and spelling—especially spelling of names. Errors really stand out in the shorter email format. Mistakes are more than type-os. They communicate that your organization has not thought things through.

Encourage click-throughs to your website. Include links in each email “article” or paragraph to more information or interaction on your website. What many church emailers don’t realize is how much of a traffic driver email can be to their websites. Every email info bite should have a corresponding web page on your site. The site encourages interaction and response, by providing more detailed information than is available in the email, along with online registration or giving, or other types of feedback and interaction.

Send on the right days.  Know that the day of the week on which you send your email matters, and can radically affect how many people read and respond to it. Your “best day” is probably going to be specific to your church and you’ll need to experiment a bit to confirm it.  You do this by sending on different days, week to week, and tracking the results. Your “best day” may change over time as well.

Our church’s “best day” is Thursday. We have found that Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays are our best email send options, while Saturdays and Mondays are worst. However, statistically across the nation Sundays and Mondays are actually the best days, according to data from MailerMailer. A little informal focus-grouping doesn’t hurt here—ask some of your members when they would typically not read an email. Schedules, job demands and family commitments often play a role.

Don’t over-send. One email per week is plenty. Any more often and you risk people ignoring your emails because they are too frequent.  You also want to allow room for an occasional “special bulletin” that might occur. Recently we did such an email as a part of our response to the Haiti earthquake, and a special outreach opportunity as a part of our Christmas Eve services. 

Emails should be regular and consistent to build trust, but at the same time infrequent enough to build expectation and interest. Avoid the temptation to send a separate email for every ministry opportunity.  Also, and just as important, be careful that individual ministry areas sending emails (a separate e-blast for preschool ministry, student ministry, music ministry, and your churchwide email) don’t clog your recipients’ in-boxes. Email efforts across your entire spectrum of ministries should be coordinated and contain substantially different information for each of their intended audiences (another reason for all of these to be scheduled and created through an email service).

Evaluate effectiveness and adjust. Finally, examine and use the email tracking information provided by your email service to evaluate the effectiveness of your emails. Tracking information provided typically consists of how many people open your emails, which links within the emails they click on, when they open the email and how many emails “bounce” (don’t get to the recipient).  The ability to know how many people read an email is alone worth the cost of an email service.  Virtually no other medium you use for communication can give you this level of understanding of how your audience is responding to your broadcast.

One piece of information I have learned from our own email tracking data is that our church members respond more to local, practical ministry opportunities than anything else—like our Food Pantry ministry and our Clothes Closet. Readers click through for more information on these ministries than any other.  This helps me in both featuring those ministries, as well as adjusting our presentation of other ministry opportunities to build interest. 

About the Author. Eugene L. Mason has more than two decades of experience in ministry communications and technologies. More...