How Email Automation Can Improve Ministry Communication

How Email Automation Can Improve Ministry Communication

May 2, 2016 by

You should be using email automation. It’s efficient, lets you send timely messages and will make your life easier as a church communication professional.

Learning From Infomercials

Email automation makes it simple to craft customized, relevant engagements with your email recipients.

As a kid, I remember watching infomercials late at night and seeing Ron Popeil making rotisserie chicken with the Ronco rotisserie oven. You might remember his famous slogan: “Set it and forget it.”

It was a winner because it took something that previously was time-consuming and attention-heavy, and made it incredibly simple. In fact, it opened opportunities for people who’d never tried to make a rotisserie chicken because of how complicated it was.

Email automation is the same way. It lets you do things you’ve never done before because they were far too complicated to do manually.

What’s Email Automation?

Email automation lets you do things you’ve never done before because they were too complicated.

Email automation makes it simple to craft customized, relevant engagements with your email recipients.

A great example of an automated email is the email receipt you get from a retailer when you purchase a product online. It’s personalized, timely, relevant and triggered by an action you took.

That’s a simple example, but you can automate more intricate types of email communication, too. For example, let’s say someone signs up for a 14-day Bible reading plan.

Instead of sending that person an email each day manually, you can setup a 14-day email drip that begins on the day they signed up… no matter when that took place.

Another example is our Small Discipleship Wins freebie. When you signup, you’ll get one email every five days with a simple, actionable tip for making disciples. That email automation workflow took me about five minutes to set up (minus the time to actually write the wins).

How to Use Email Automation in Ministry

Once you create an email automation, you realize the incredible opportunity it provides for your ministry.

If you’re a church communication pro, then you’re probably already thinking of a dozen ways to apply this method. But if you’re a student pastor, children’s pastor or church planter, you can use email automation in a ton of simple settings.

Here’s a few ideas to get your juices flowing:

  1. Greet new visitors to your church with a multi-part email workflow. Each email can tell them about something important they should know about your church.
  2. Help new believers with the next steps in their faith. Help them understand the basics like Bible reading, baptism, church attendance and small groups.
  3. Deliver a daily Bible reading plan and devotional. Give people a boost in their daily quiet time with a sequence of devotionals to help them connect with God. Make sure your emails are delivered early in the morning before people wake up.
  4. Help new givers stay consistent. Once someone has given for the first time, you have the opportunity to help them give again on a regular schedule with automated, timed emails full of encouragement and gratitude.
  5. On-board new volunteers with simple training and orientation emails. Teaching new volunteers everything they need to know all at once can be overwhelming, but a drip email can make it more manageable.

Once you create your first email automation, you’ll realize the incredible opportunity it provides for your ministry.

I’ve currently got 12 email automation workflows running. Most are simple one-time auto-responders based on actions people take on our website, but a few are high-value drip campaigns like Small Discipleship Wins.

How to Get Started

All the top email service providers should offer some form of email automation. I love MailChimp. It’s $10/month to get access to their automation tools, but it’s super easy to use.

If you’re curious about how it works and you’d like to learn more about the intricacies of the setup, check out Email Automation for Ministry (with MailChimp). It’s a free course I made specifically for people just like you to learn how to implement email automation and make it awesome in your ministry.

You can also check out these free email templates, offering a series of sample emails you could automatically send to specific groups:

Post By:

Scott Magdalein


Scott Magdalein is the founder of TrainedUp, a simple online training platform used by ministries and teams of all sizes to develop leaders, train volunteers, teach the Bible and equip believers. Connect with Scott on Twitter.
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2 Responses to “How Email Automation Can Improve Ministry Communication”

  • Bonnie
    May 8, 2016

    I am absolutely not a computer tech you and had always been able to just “wing it” but am finding out rather quickly how badly I am in need of someone who’d be able to get me through this tech mess I have going on here. Please let me know what I can do in order to help.
    Thank you,
    Bonnie


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  • CK
    May 9, 2016

    This was excellent. Thanks for posting the email scripts. I’m going to run these by our new members’ ministry!


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