Introduction
Your guest follow-up process may be the most vital system you have in your church. But, which part of the process is the key? I can tell you it isn’t the smiling face when they turn in the guest card, the greeter at the door, or the coffee mug and cookies they received at the guest booth.
The most important piece of your guest follow-up system is your email sequence. Well-timed, well-written, and engaging emails are the key to getting people to return to visit your church the second and third time until they attend regularly.
Why the Guest Follow-Up Email Sequence Matters
Social media is becoming the primary way of communication and marketing. At least that is how it feels, however, the data points to stark contrast to how things feel. According to research performed by ExactTarget, email is the first medium checked by 58% of people. 44% of people look in their email for deals from companies they trust. 91% of people use email daily as opposed to 57% who use Facebook. Here is a whole chart showing how email is still the primary venue of communication for most people.
As a ministry leader, here is why this is important to you. One of the primary goals of a guest follow-up process is to establish trust with those who visit your services. Each point of contact you make with your guests is designed to add value, make a connection, and establish rapport with them.
What the data is showing is that email is trusted communication. Though social media is an important part of any marketing and communication strategy for a church, email is still king when it comes to building a relationship and presenting what your church is all about.
For many churches, getting a handle on social media is challenging and time-consuming. If this is the case for you and your faith community, it should be refreshing to learn that email, a medium you are familiar with using, is so vital to your connection with those you hope to welcome into your faith community.
Looking to boost guests returning post pandemic? Here is an article solely looking at that.
Personal invitations
Part of the value in emails is the personal touch they can provide. Social media is a medium to pass valuable information, quick entertainment, and inspiring statements, however, they are broadcast to an audience rather than an individual. The messages are not personalized to build relationships.
Email, on the other hand, is designed to be personal. It is designed to be communication between two individuals where a relationship is either established or developed. This is why it is ideal for a guest follow-up process.
When communicating with a guest who has decided to visit on a Sunday morning, the idea is to bring them out of the crowd and help them feel noticed and valued. With emails, you can do just that. By addressing them by name throughout the email, it draws them in, makes them feel engaged, and you are able to talk directly to them rather than a crowd they happen to be in.
In the end, when you invite them to return for another service or some other event, you have the ability to write the email saying ‘I would like to invite you’ or ‘you are invited’. By using email for your communication you are able to move away from shotgun broadcasts to laser-focused connections.
Efficient Communication
Now that we have established the value of using email for your guest follow-up, let’s look at how creating a set email sequence can streamline your communication.
When a guest visits your church, there is so much valuable information you want, and need, to communicate to them. If they have kids you want to tell them about your wonderful kids ministry. If they are newly married you want to tell them about the marriage seminar you do once a year or the Financial Peace class you host. Whatever it is that you have going on in your faith community, you want to let guests know all about it. Especially if you are excited about what God is doing in your church. This is hard to do in a quick conversation or even in one welcome email.
With an email sequence, you can strategically communicate vital information about your church over the course of a week, two weeks, or however long you feel is necessary as a part of your guest follow-up. This will allow for quality, personal, communication while also putting vital information in their hands without seeming like a salesman trying to get them to buy a timeshare.
So, for instance, you want to tell your guests about kids ministry, student ministry, small groups, and the upcoming Christmas program. Well, this would be overwhelming for them to receive all of this in one sitting. But, if they were to receive the same information in personal, engaging, and informative emails over the course of a couple of weeks, they would be able to take it all in and make a better decision about whether or not your church is a fit for them.
Now, you may be thinking this sounds very time intensive and with your busy schedule, something is bound to fall through the cracks. Stick with me and I will explain how it can be done with minimal time commitment but maximum impact through your guest follow-up experience.
How to Create an Effective Guest Follow-up Email Sequence
In order to create a powerful email sequence that keeps people coming back, you have to move from the position of a ministry leader and step into the shoes of a guest. What questions would you have? What ministries are you looking for? What opportunities are going to peak your interest? When you have answered these questions you are now ready to craft your email sequence.
At this point, it is important to think through the progression of your emails. You will want to create a welcome email from you, the Lead Pastor, that is simply your thanks for having them attend the services that week. You do not want to try to sell them an idea, ministry, or program because you will immediately fall into a possible misconception that pastors are just trying to reel in people. A genuine thank you is sufficient in this first email accompanied with a heads up that they will be receiving a few emails from you over the next few days (weeks) to answer their questions about the church.
Next, work through the questions you answered before moving from the most important questions to the least. So, let’s say a good kids ministry is what most of your guests are looking for. Then you will want to place your email about your kids ministry at the front of the sequence.
Now, my suggestion is if your guest follow-up sequence is going to have more than 4 emails, I would expand it to a multiple-week sequence. I would avoid sending a guest more than 3 emails the first week to avoid overwhelming them with information.
If your guest follow-up sequence does span multiple weeks, place emails in the sequence inviting them to the next weekend’s services on Friday or Saturday afternoon. This way you are connecting with them when their minds are already on the weekend and they are in the process of deciding whether or not to return to your church. An email invite from you could be just what they needed to make that decision. Each week your sequence is live, let your last email of that week be an invite to the next services you are holding.
When you are approaching the end of the sequence, be sure to include an invitation to the next step they can take to remain engaged in your faith community. This may be a foundations class, it may be a small group, or it may be a gathering with the pastor, staff, and leaders. Whatever the next step is, do not let the sequence be the end of the experience, but make sure it is clear what their next step is.
Finally, at the end of the sequence, let your guest know you want to invite them to discuss any questions or concerns with you. This is an unusual practice for most pastors so this will communicate you are not afraid of tough questions, you welcome valuable feedback to make your community better, and you have an open mind to other people’s ideas.
Below is a recap of the steps we just discussed:
- Answer “what questions do guests have”
- Write a genuine ‘Thank You” email
- Sequence your next emails by the most important need of your guests to lowest
- Write those emails
- Include a service invite at the end of each week of your sequence
- Clarify their next step in the final email of the sequence
- Finish the sequence with an invitation
Make It Easy
So, I promised to show you how to make this efficient and less time intensive than it seems. At first glance, it appears you are sending multiple emails out to each guest at set times and hope not to miss anything in the process. Well, that is true, but there is a very simple way to make this happen.
The first way is to use prewritten email templates and save them in your email program. Whether it is Outlook, Mac’s Mail program, or Google’s Gmail, you can create prewritten email templates and then pull them up each time an email needs to be sent and place the necessary information in there like names. I believe this is a fabulous way to communicate through email if you are sending a single email such as a question about small groups what time services are held. For a sequence, this doesn’t cut down the labor intensity very much.
What I recommend is the email software Convertkit to automate your guest follow-up sequence. What they provide a simple to use process that creates email sequences that are personal along with the ability to send them in bulk at specified times.
For instance, if you have 5 guests come on a Sunday morning, then on Monday morning you could input their information into Convertkit and the sequence you have already created will begin to go out and you won’t have to do anything more. While you are going through your days getting other tasks done, working on your sermon, developing leaders, and connecting with others in the community, your email sequence will be informing and connecting with your guests.
Best of all, you will be able to personalize the emails by using the tools in Converkit. Each email will be addressed to the individual who is receiving it and it will feel as though it is a personal email to them rather than a general broadcast.
One of the best features for me is the ability to visually see how the sequence will go, and the ability to create other elements into the interaction that will gather additional information about the guest as well as provide targeted information they need.
Here is a look at the automated sequence I created to get you started.
There are three elements in this sequence for you to utilize as well as endless other options you can add.
First is the ‘First Time Guest Form’ which you or your office staff can use to input the information from the completed guest cards from your services. This makes input easy and the only continuous step needing tended to.
Once the information is placed in the form, each guest is tagged as a ‘First Time Guest’. This is automatic and doesn’t require any time to execute.
The third piece of the automation is the Guest Email Sequence, which is where the magic happens. In this template I created for you, there are 9 emails already written and only need a few personalizations by you or your staff and they are ready to go.
As far as Converkit goes, this is an incredibly simple automation. If you wanted to make it much more personalized, stretch through a course of other sequences based on the interests of your guests, or even target the information a little more, all of that is possible. I kept it simple to allow those who are new to Convertkit to get acclimated with ease.
If you would like to take this automation and pull it into your own Convertkit account, all you need to do is click here and the automation can be yours. I have done a good deal of the work, all you will need to do is fill in some of the blanks and start sending it next week.
Whether it is Converkit or another way to accomplish an effective email sequence the goal is to get more accomplished, gain more time, and connect with more people on a weekly basis. If you would like to start a Converkit account and try it out for free, simply click the banner above and then return to this post to import your ready to go automation here. However you do it, engage your guests and build a relationship with them so they will return Sunday after Sunday.