The Fifth Step of the Church Social Media Framework - Email and SMS Marketing

In this episode Nick unpacks the importance of Church wide email and text (sms) messaging. What is the role of these common marketing practices? Does it have a place in church? How should your church, in 2023, approach it? Along with what role does the church website play in all of this? All that and more in this episode!

Follow Along on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick?lang=en
Show Notes & Transcripts: http://www.hybridministry.xyz/039
TikTok E Book: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/ebook

SHOWNOTES
Step 1: YouTube: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/035
Trailer: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/034
Planning Center People: https://www.planningcenter.com/people
HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
SMS Marketing Rules and Regulations: https://act-on.com/blog/sms-marketing-regulations/#:~:text=The%20Telephone%20Consumer%20Protection%20Act%20(TCPA)%20is%20a%20United%20States,sending%20them%20marketing%20text%20messages

TIMECODES
00:00-02:46 Intro
02:46-08:43 Email and Text Messaging's Place in Church Communications
08:43-15:19 What is Email Marketing for Churches?
15:19-17:57 What should you expect from Email Marketing?
17:57-22:05 What is SMS or Text Message Marketing's place in churches?
22:05-23:22 The Role of your Church Website
23:22-24:20 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:00):
Well, hey there everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Hybrid Minister Show. I am your host, as always, Nick Clason. So excited to be here with you. And in today's episode, we are going to be talking about email and text messaging. So you're like, wait a minute, hold on. I thought that this was the sixth part, church social media framework for churches in 2023. And yes, you would be correct. And then you're thinking, wait a minute, I email and text. That doesn't count. And actually I think it does. And so we're gonna dive into that why I think it matters, why I think you should be utilizing it for your church and why it can be beneficial. But before we do, if you don't know, we are on YouTube every single episode. So hey, to everyone watching on YouTube, it's good to see you over there on video.

Nick Clason (00:54):
If you're just listening to this in your ear holes, click the link in the show notes to head on over to YouTube to take a look, to watch, to even to subscribe. That'd be amazing. We'd love to have you over there. If you discovered us on YouTube or on shorts, we wanna let you know that we are also on website and we have a podcast. And so you can head to http://www.hybridministry.xyz. This is episode 39, so http://www.hybridministry.xyz/03. If you click that direct link, it will take you very specifically to this episode with transcripts for this episode, or if you just head to that website and head over to the blog section. There are two articles there, both with links to free, completely free resources to help you and your church navigate this social media landscape that we are in, including the ebook.

Nick Clason (01:40):
Have I already ruined my church's TikTok account by what I've done and what I've posted? No, you should download it so that you know exactly what to do from start to finish all the way through. Uh, and maybe you know what you're doing, but maybe you have some volunteers or some staff and you, uh, want to help them understand what they're doing. You can put that ebook in their hands and it will help take them from a complete novice to an expert on TikTok in just a few short steps. And so that is a resource that we hope that will be beneficial to you. And, uh, hopefully something that, you know, that you can use and utilize for years and years to come, or at least for this year probably, because TikTok will then make an update and we'll have to update the book along with it.

Nick Clason (02:22):
Um, if you find that helpful or if any of this helpful a share or a rating or a review would be incredible, it would just be your way of helping, uh, us get the word out, um, and letting your friends know that, hey, this is something that's useful, beneficial, and I am, uh, listening to it and you should as well. So without any further ado, let's dive into email and text messaging. Okay, so email, texting. I thought we were talking about social media. Well, if you go all the way back to the very first episode of this, and if you haven't had a chance to listen, um, you can go back. We dropped a trailers like a two-part trailer on kind of previewing this and then also the first episode, um, on YouTube where we sort of like laid the framework. But one of the things that we talked about was we talked about this idea of a funnel.

Nick Clason (03:08):
And so if you are watching, you'll see me try to create one with my hands, but a funnel kinda like a triangle, right? The top is wider. You're gonna catch more people and the bottom is more narrow. Uh, the thing that most churches don't understand is that they actually start probably, um, depending on your marketing strategy. And I know that churches probably bach at that term marketing in some cases, but, um, churches almost always start with people more mid to bottom of the funnel. And so what then becomes tricky is you already have a very committed group of people that are already very deeply invested in your organization. They're just not, um, you're just not getting people on the top of the funnel, especially if you're a church that's, that's dying or hasn't seen new, um, people, you know, come through your doors in a while.

Nick Clason (03:55):
And so social media might be one of your avenues to try and do that. And it very much can be YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, all four of those phenomenal platforms. But in order to, and also might I add before I continue on, they're great marketing platforms too. Like some of the best marketing that our world has ever seen, cheapest marketing that our world has ever seen. So you can utilize those two year advantage. However, email and texts, I think are ways to drive people down the funnel more. Um, once they've found you on Instagram, once they found you on YouTube, once they've found you on t TikTok to drive them down the funnel more, um, and then ultimately become more and more, um, super fans of you. And I know that's not what we're trying to do in church, uh, but before they become a committed Christian, cuz ultimately the goal is to drive them to become a deeper, more devoted disciple of Jesus.

Nick Clason (04:51):
But if they're just discovering you on social media for the first time as a church, uh, you just want them to like you, right? You just want them to trust you as a church. You just want them to think your content is useful, beneficial, um, and helpful to them in their life. And so you just wanna drive them deeper and deeper. And so maybe you offer them something free like an ebook or maybe you offer them something, um, you know, like a checklist that they can get, uh, on their own and they, they sign up for an email list or a text messaging list or something like that and you drive them deeper down the funnel, right? And so that you a little bit, you gotta think about it, you might have a couple different tracks kind of going on. And that's what like super next level marketers do is they have like this, this track of people that are already their contributors or people who've already bought things and they got people who are just like in an awareness sort of like track trying to like discover more about your company.

Nick Clason (05:39):
Okay? But here's the thing about email, and here's the thing about text is that they cost almost $0 to facilitate, uh, especially if you're like not looking to go full out, you know, become like a business on this. You're just trying to become a church to supplement what else you have going on on social media where some of these other platforms, yeah, you can do them all for free, but to really get some of that like, like legitimate organic, um, or I'm sorry, not organic, but some of that legitimate like far-reaching reach that people are often looking for. If you wanna like have an amazing Easter ad or something like that, you're probably gonna have to put some dollars behind it. And that's true just about everything in life. If you want something that is incredible and is gonna work for you to the best of its abilities, it's gonna probably be behind some sort of premium paywall, whether that be a tech service or an email service.

Nick Clason (06:34):
However, as a church, you probably already have some of these tools at your disposal that you may or may not be tapping into depending on how much know-how you have. Cuz just about every church in America, um, has or should have some sort of church management software people, uh, a people software, a data captures sort of thing, you know, church, community builder, the rock, whatever. All of those have email, um, woven into it as well as text messaging woven into it. However, are they the most useful and beneficial advantageous of, you know, taking those emails, creating a funnel type content, moving people through a pathway and a process just depends if you kind of know, if you know what you're doing on there. So let's dive in a little bit more on that before we do a couple of just quick hitter stats so that you're aware of why text messaging and email can be so effective in your church today in 2023.

Nick Clason (07:31):
First thing is this, 94% of people on the internet use email. 94%. That is crazy, right? That is more than TikTok. That is more than Facebook. That's like a wider adoption percentage of people. Almost everyone on the internet has an email account. Furthermore, 75% of adult users on the internet say that email marketing is their preferred form of marketing, which is fascinating because I don't think that we often think of email or texts as, as sexy as some of these other social media type platforms. But, uh, three, three quarters of people that use the, uh, internet so that they would just prefer email marketing to be done to them via email. The return on investment, the ROI is higher on these platforms, texting and email than they are on other social channels. And then finally, text message, open rates can go as high as get this, are you ready for it?

Nick Clason (08:31):
98%. So let's dive in. Let's unpack what's going on here and why this can be so important and advantageous for your church. All right, so what is email marketing? If you were to just go on and you were to, to Google email marketing, there's a potential that you could get kind of lost in the weeds of, of terminology and words that are maybe not super familiar to you. But at its core, basically email marketing is an opportunity for an organization to connect regularly with its fans and at a church level, right? Like maybe they're not fans, but it's an opportunity for us to connect with members of our congregation. There's a lot of ways that churches actually believe it or not, have a upper hand on some companies with email marketing. And the reason of that is because they, like I said, they already have kind of a core base of people.

Nick Clason (09:24):
We already have a core base of people that we are pulling from, all right? And so it's not solely dependent upon us to craft and curate and build our own email list from zero. We already sort of have a base that we're starting with. And that's, that's an amazing place to be and that's an amazing advantage that we as a church, I I think sometimes we lament our, our position in the space. Like, oh, what was us? We're just a church, blah, blah, blah. Like, we have advantages that like other companies don't have. We're often handed email list with already done work for us. And so we just need to steward that well and continue to build upon that. And so I think that there's a, there's a space and a way to do that. Um, the church, like right, oftentimes we might have a hard time with social media or marketing or websites, but in this particular case and in this particular space, I think the church might actually have an upper hand.

Nick Clason (10:15):
So who is email marketing for you might be asking. It's for, honestly, it's for everybody. We said 94% of internet users say and claim that they have an internet account or an email account on the internet. So yeah, you should be using email in your church, you should be sending out regular updates. And here's the thing, um, and we're gonna talk about this a lot in the next episode, but if we have stuff on social media, we can use our email to supplement, to push, to promote people towards what we're already doing online so we can help connect our people, especially in our church, to what we're doing online. And then we can use online to help connect people to our email marketing list to help connect them to our church, our local body, our local assembly. Okay, so how do we start this? What do we do?

Nick Clason (11:03):
If you're like, okay, great, I'm in, I'm sold, what do I do? Well, first and foremost, if you're part of a church, you're probably watching this as a church, you know, social media manager, a youth pastor or a volunteer who's been handed the reigns of running social media on your church, what are you supposed to do? In most cases, like I said, I believe most churches, um, probably do, and if they don't, they probably should have some sort of church management database system. You know, I currently at the church, I'm at used church Community builder. In the past I've used Rock, I've used, um, uh, we've used ACS realm, we've used planning Center people. These are all different ones that I've used in different places. I've been in my, my ministry, my life. Uh, the reality is you probably want to at least start there because there's going to be the vast majority of your data, of your people, of your email addresses living and existing in there.

Nick Clason (11:59):
And depending on the, uh, decision making prowess of people, there are gonna be people who in your church, who've already invested in that, paid for that and want you to be using it. I think that that's a great place to start. Um, what if your church doesn't have a database? Well, I definitely would encourage you to do it, and I know that there are some free ones out there. I know that Planning Center people, I believe, at least when I looked at it, this is like five plus years ago, but they said that they would be forever and always free. Um, there are other modules, which is part of the, the downside is like you can get all your data in planning center people, but then to use it for giving or to use it for events or whatever, like those aren't free. And so for them to pair and work well with each other, uh, you have to start paying.

Nick Clason (12:46):
And so that's the downside. However, let me just say my favorite, the planning center you pay like individually, so like a giving is a, a different price and events is a different price and registration is a different price and services is a different price and all these things, it, it adds up quickly. However, let me just say it's, it was my favorite database I ever worked with, ever, ever, ever. Um, I currently, and most churches I feel like have adopted like c b Church community seems to be a really popular one. Um, very much not my favorite one. It's, it's good, it's sleek, it's got web interface, that's fine. But like on the email side, on the marketing side, and I know that, um, if you guys have been around from the very, very beginning listening to our podcast, if you go back and listen to episode one, the episode like seven or eight, I had a co-host, his name was Matt, he moved and his new job wouldn't really allow him to, to be on this podcast regularly.

Nick Clason (13:39):
So we've sorta, um, amicably parted ways. He's doing his thing, I'm doing my thing. But Matt was a marketing a marketer first that worked in a church. And I know that his big thing was that databases don't always give him what he wanted as a marketer. So as a marketer, like someone who works in the business space, what he recommended was HubSpot. Um, and that is, that's for making money for businesses and churches are built, uh, with a different, um, need on those church management softwares. And he thought that we could do everything we needed to do for churches in HubSpot. Now, um, to, uh, you know, to push back on that a little bit, he might not have known everything that we needed as churches, right? Like for example, HubSpot might not have a baptism date field in the church community in the like database thing, right?

Nick Clason (14:33):
But it is, it will give you everything that you need for email addresses, websites, you can create ClickFunnels, you can create, uh, all types of things where you can very easily capture someone's name and email address and then move them down a pathway or a process. And that's what Matt was trying to do at the church that we were both at in Chicago, at Parkview. Ultimately, that's part of the reason why he ended up stepping away. And myself as well. We just, we, he couldn't get people on board with the idea. All that being said, you, if you don't have something, you should have something and you should at least start with exploring some of these free ones. So I'll drop some of these links in the show notes, uh, HubSpot, I'll drop planning center people in the, in the show notes so that you have those things to check out.

Nick Clason (15:16):
Um, hopefully that's something that's useful and beneficial to you. What should you expect? The, the one main thing I want you to know is that you should not get discouraged by what seems to be low email open rates. So according to studies that have been done for years and years and years, the average email list open rate is 21.3%, which I get that seems crazy low, but when it pertains to email marketing, if you're anywhere in that range, you are succeeding. Surprisingly. I know it's crazy. Uh, this is why delivering things like valuable content with interesting subjects and things that are gonna actually cause people to actually click open the emails is so important. I mean, just think about it for yourself, right? You probably get inundated with emails and you probably just bulk delete them. You're not gonna open them. That's exactly why email openers are at 21.3%.

Nick Clason (16:07):
That's why it's important to be creative with your subjects. So a couple of things, send it from a person. I've found, uh, if you send it from such and such baptist church.com, uh, this week's announcements that is so easy to ignore, I'm sorry, no offense, no one cares about your announcements enough to open your email list because they're also swimming through their child's elementary school email list and they're Cole's coupons that they're getting. And like all these things, right? They don't care. But if you send it from Pastor Jim and he says, this one key thing helped me grow my faith, all of a sudden you're like, wait, what was that? I wanna know what Pastor Jim's, one key thing to growing in his faith was maybe I should click open that. And then what that is is that's a short little blurb and then boom it to link out to a YouTube short or a full YouTube message that you've done.

Nick Clason (16:54):
All of a sudden, wait a minute, now we're cooking with gas. See what I'm saying? And if you're not just always only capturing moments from your sermons, then when you send it to your church, people who have already maybe seen that because they've already attended your service. However, keep in mind, at least in most churches I've been to the average person attends 1.4 times per month. So that means they probably more than likely didn't see the sermon. So that is not a bad strategy. However, if you have the bandwidth in time to create something more like a podcast or something else or some other like, um, some other resource that explains more to them, that's gonna be even more valuable. Where your pastor's sitting down having a conversation with another person on staff or a host and he's talking through some of these things and it's maybe sermon related or sermon adjacent, but not just sermon.

Nick Clason (17:43):
So that's an example of how you can start to kind of bump your email open rates, think through sending it from an actual person and think through crafting sub uh, subjects that spark and evoke curiosity. So that's email marketing. What's text message marketing? So same thing, short message service or sms. You probably heard that before. Marketing is another word to just say text message marketing, but it's a form of marketing that businesses use to send promotions to customers via text message. There's three main benefits of SMS messaging as far as I can see. Number one, it's fast, okay? As opposed to waiting and hoping for people to discover your content and social media, you post it, you kinda wait, you see, does this thing hit the lottery tickets? Do the views go up? SMS messaging your fans, followers, people that likeactually post SMS hap uh, messaging happens almost instantaneously.

Nick Clason (18:37):
Secondly, the open rates are ridiculous. Open rates are an alarming 98%, which compared to email marketing seems like a messaging hack that is almost too good to be true and you might be right. And then finally, response rates are also good too. You can send a message and rates are are good. Around 45% of people say that they respond to text messaging, uh, messages compared to only about 7% of click rate through email marketing statistics. So those are some of the, um, upsides. Who is it for? Well definitely for, for I think younger people in your church, gen z, gen Alpha, who may only have like an email address to create an account. Um, and they don't, they only like nominally check it. Um, also for parents, um, for people in your church, people, almost everyone has a cell phone these days so you can use it.

Nick Clason (19:27):
The downfalls of it though can be tricky because you are gonna be navigating some red tape and I will drop a link in the show notes for more of that. Um, and kind of how to navigate that so that you don't get in trouble with like, um, the government and people who are trying to regulate text messaging and text messaging marketing. Um, but while that 98% open rate seems like something you may want to take advantage of it, you also want to be careful not to abuse it either. For example, um, I order my t-shirts from an, actually this is one of those t-shirts, um, from an online t-shirt company and I clicked up, I clicked on a text messaging thing, um, when I ordered to get like a discount and they text me every single day. I ignored them honestly, like I'm not, but the thing is, I'll probably go back and order from them.

Nick Clason (20:12):
And so when that time comes, I'll scroll back through my messages and see are they offering any sort of promo right now before I go back in order. However, you gotta be careful to not blur that line. So I would suggest probably somewhere between one and two times a week a absolute maximum, maybe even less. But you can, again, if you add value and you send something that's interesting, people are going to be much more inclined to open it. If you're just listen to me. If you're just sending announcement after announcement after announcement about in-person event, in-person event, in-person event, they're not interested in that. However, if you're like, Hey, have you seen this hilarious TikTok that we just posted? Check it out. People might be more inclined to click through some of those things that may seem unspiritual to you. You just have to weigh the benefit of it.

Nick Clason (20:59):
Cuz here's the thing, if you do send that a few times and that becomes something that people look forward to, then when you do send something meaningful and valuable, they're actually going to click on it and not ignore it because you've sent them things before that seem normal that aren't just invitations back to the church picnic. So the best way to start, I would say, is to build this through your database. Um, some databases require weird things like ours, church community builder, they require needing to know the carrier. So like Verizon at and t, um, others, you can, you can collect them through other text messaging services that you pay per text or whatever. Um, whatever the case may be. A great place to start is probably your church database cuz you've already gotten permission to collect some of that data and so thus to then start parcelling off and using some of that, uh, is not a bad place to start with already a base of people.

Nick Clason (21:50):
Just make sure that someone has a hook into being able to sign up for a text messaging service if that's something that, uh, they're gonna be able to want to do. Like I said, there are some rules for it. So make sure that you check those out. Link in the show notes. Last but not least, I would definitely be remiss to not mention website. You wanna have a website, um, not necessarily an app and um, our friend Brady Sheer talks about this all the time, so go search stuff on him about church apps. But you wanna have a good mobile friendly website that you can sort of operate as your central stop for everyone in your church and they can know that they can always go to that website and they can get the information that they need. So then your email and your text messaging things are not your primary vehicles and drivers of communication.

Nick Clason (22:38):
And so if someone's like, crap, where's that information? They're not having to dig back through emails and be like, is that the one? Is that the one? Is that the one? They can know that they're gonna go to your website and it's gonna be useful and reliable. And so I'm not gonna talk much on that cuz that's gonna sort of be the glue to everything in the next episode. But we can't, um, we cannot neglect and we cannot forget to talk about the importance of a good mobile friendly website that people can access on their phones at just about any given time in the world. That links and curates and pulls together all of these social media, email, tech, all these things and they all sort of swirl in and the website is your central spot where all of those are pointing back too. Well, hey everyone, thanks again so much for hanging out in this episode.

Nick Clason (23:26):
I hope you found this info about email and text messaging helpful. I know I didn't give a lot of like very like, Hey, go to this website and do it because a lot of it is gonna be dependent upon your church. So start exploring, start having those conversations and if they're not existing, hey, guess what? You are the pioneer of this. Don't let it die like it is your, uh, you. This is something that you can steward and that you can take to help spread the message of Jesus to both the people in your church. Drive them deeper down that funnel to be more devoted followers of Christ as well as helping people outside of your church connect more and more with your local church. You are doing an incredible work. Keep it up. Um, and don't forget as always to stay hybrid.