My recommended email marketing approach includes:

One email to your members/insiders every week (much like a traditional newsletter)

and

One email to every email address you've ever been given consent to contact.

☝️ That's the one we're talking about today.

You can hear me talk about this approach in more detail in my Mission & Ministry presentation on the Speaking page on my site. (Starts around 24:40)

This second weekly email can contain almost anything: from a short devotion to a roundup of community events to scripture journaling prompts to Christian parenting tips... the list goes on.

The idea is to pick a consistent subject that your community will enjoy and publish it every week.

The goal is that those on your list gain enough touch points (Rule of Seven) with your organization that they consider joining you in-person.

Here are 20 (yes, t w e n t y) reasons this is a good idea:

1. You'll naturally boost your KLT (Know, Like, Trust) factor. Over time and with consistency, your list will come to feel like they know you.
2. You can repurpose the content on your website. Have a page that archives your past emails in an easily navigable format (and boost your SEO while you're at it).
3. You'll probably get unsubscribers at first—and that's OK. This can help to clean up your email list.
4. You get to fine-tune your ideas. Pastors have shared with me that they use this email to do some preliminary brainstorming for their sermon. "You don't write to say something, you write to find out what you have to say."
5. It'll actually get read, unlike your social media posts. Social media has an impression rate of 1.5-3%. Emails are usually well above 65%.
6. On that note, you can actually repurpose this content on social media. If social media will barely be seen, you might as well save time by writing primarily for email. Then, you just have to copy/paste that content into a social media template.
7. If it's valuable, it's shareable. Encourage people to forward it to someone they know or repost the social media version to their stories.
8. You can repurpose it as physically published content. Self-publishing with Amazon is easier now than ever.
9. It's a cost-effective way to offer value. Most email service providers are free, at least for the base plan.
10. On the scale from following you on Facebook (low commitment) to visiting in-person for the first time (high commitment), signing up for regular communication is just right.
11. It gives you a chance to experiment with topics and see what resonates. As you write more and repurpose it across your platforms, you'll start to see trends emerge.
12. It's SUCH an easy word-of-mouth elevator pitch: "Hey, my pastor writes this thing and I love it, check it out!"
13. Connect what you talked about on Sunday mornings to the rest of the week. You can call back to that "take home" section from Bible study on Monday mornings.
14. It can be your Connection Card Call-to-Action: "Write down your email to receive {insert subject here} every week."
15. Stay top of mind for a lot of people all at once, with relatively low effort. You're not writing to 100 people, you're writing to one person one hundred times.
16. Prove you understand the needs of your community. The only way this works is if the subject of this email is consistently right on the money with what your community wants & needs.
17. You can repurpose it as an SMS strategy. Have a short-and-sweet version of your content automatically sent out to a list of phone numbers.
18. Everyone has email, not everyone has social media.
19. You can hype up your own events. These emails are meant to primarily provide value, but you can also afford a tiny bit of real estate to plug your next in-person event.
20. You get read & click data—sneak a peek at who is most interested in what you have to say.

Have I convinced you?

Don't get overwhelmed by doing this. I'm talking about something that can be written in 20 minutes or less.

If you have trouble thinking creatively about what your weekly email could be, just reply!