Email Newsletter Integration:
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Another vital aspect of turning online visitors into offline guests is following up with them about events going on at the church. The more contacts that you can make with potential guests, the more likely they are to visit. Likewise, the more that people know about what’s going on at your church, the more opportunities that they’ll have to pay you a visit.
In the “offline” church, this is typically done by collecting contact information at outreach events and on Sunday mornings, then mailing, calling or visiting guests to follow up with them after a visit. As long as your are still holding services in a physical building, it’s a good idea to maximize this sort of follow up. It’s far easier to get someone back to your church who’s already been there once than it is to get a guest there for the first time. You can find best practices for offline guest follow up in the excellent book Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church
On the internet, this sort of follow up is still important to move people from potential guests to Sunday morning visitors. Online, follow up is typically done either with email (think e-vites and those weekly sales emails you probably get from at least one merchant) or with Facebook Fanpages. Fanpages are discussed in another help desk item, but email should not be ignored as a tool to reach potential guests directly, given the constant email access that the rise of smartphones provides us. Your church is missing out if it doesn’t maintain a contact list of guests, former attendees and interested parties and maintain some form of regular contact with them.
It’s highly recommended that you create and maintain an email list of guests and people interested in your church and contact these people about upcoming events, new sermon series, and news just as you would a physical mailing list.
If this is something you’re interested in doing, let us know and we will set up a free account with MailChimp for you, and integrate it with the website. Interested visitors can simply subscribe to your email newsletter database by giving their name and email address. You can also manually add people interested in your church who trust their emails to your church to this list.