Last week we asked how often your church sends e-mail updates, and the majority (38%) send weekly e-mails.
But a lot of churches aren’t taking advantage of e-mail: 28% don’t even use e-mail and 26% only send intermittent announcements, for a total of 54% that don’t use e-mail regularly.
6% send e-mails monthly and only 1% daily, making weekly e-mails the most common practice. Which makes sense: You’ve got a service every weekend to announce.
E-mail isn’t for everyone and with rising spam the effectiveness of e-mail is taking a hit. But it’s one more avenue to communicate with your congregation.
This week we ask about the place of puns in church marketing.
Dennis Cummins
March 31, 2006
We send an HTML e newsletter via constantcontacts.com. Very inexpensive to use and fairly flexible too. We only send a weekly e-letter every week and tag it to our website as the “NEWS” link which allows our website to be more of a dynamic site rather than just a static site that never changes. It has really helped our church. We don’t have to maintain a crazy monthly web calendar that is pail and boring, and never up to date. We are currently updating our website with a new site, but we will still keep the news link tied to the weekly e-letter. Also constant contacts suggest that we send it out on Wednesday morning so that they recieve it around 9-10AM. This seems to have the best hit ratio too. The other thing is one in a while do to a death or special announcement like reminder of time change, we will send an addition email out. But we found if we send more than one, the people on our e-list will ignore them, people are busy enough as it is. They don’t need something else to read.
Kevin D. Hendricks
March 31, 2006
For the record, we use Constant Contact to send the Church Marketing Sucks e-mail newsletter. It’s a pretty nice system.