Earlier today on our CTS Technology & Your Ministry blog, one of our regular authors, Ann Ciaccio, offered some tips on How to Avoid Being Labeled as Spam. We thought it might be interesting to take some of her main points and apply them to the emailing features in Church360° Unite.
Keep Your Members' Email Addresses Up-to-Date
When sending an email, perhaps the most important part is to make sure that your message is getting to the right people! To do this, you'll need make sure that you have the correct contact information on hand. After all, you don't want your beautifully crafted email to go to waste simply because no one received it!
One of the great parts of Church360° Unite is that users can update their own email and contact information through the member directory. The goal of this feature is to save the church staff time by equipping members to manage their own profiles rather than calling into the office every time a change takes place.
As a site administrator, another way to ensure your emails are updated is by monitoring the email log. If you notice that certain email addresses have failed permanently, use this as your cue to reach out to those members individually to find their updated information. Then, the next time you send an email, you'll be sure to send it to those people that are ready to receive it.
Determine Your Audience with Groups and Lists
Once you've established that you have the correct email addresses on hand, the next step is to determine who your email's audience will be. If every one of your church's email communications goes to everyone on your email list, people may become bogged down, stop reading your emails, or even request to unsubscribe. However, with the right lists, people will receive only the content that's relevant to them and get into the routine of looking forward to emails from you!
Church360° Unite has a couple great tools to help you with this task of segmenting your email communications. One option is to use groups pages, which allow you to gather certain members of a ministry group together. You might choose to have a group page for your church council, planning committees, or Bible study groups. From within this page, the group leader can easily email members of the group with the updates that are most important to their ministry.
In other cases, you might be sending an email to people in multiple ministry areas or multiple groups. For these types of emails, use the built-in Mailing Lists feature to segment your list. Mailing lists can be compiled from individual email addresses, group pages, or even other mailing lists.
Create an Email Communications Calendar for Your Ministry Groups
As a final step, I'd recommend that your church creates a simple email communications calendar in Church360° Unite. With this calendar, you'll be able to see who is sending emails, to what audience they are going to, and when they are going out. By scheduling your posts, it could prevent your members from feeling overloaded by getting five emails in one day and none for the rest of the week! If you're not familiar with setting up calendars in Church360° Unite just read these articles for creating a new calendar and creating a new event to get you started.
We hope that this post has given you some ideas on how best manage email communications to your members in Church360° Unite. If you have any further suggestions or questions, please contact our support team support@cts.cph.org or call us at 800.346.6120.
If you would like to receive blog updates automatically in the future, please subscribe! You can choose to receive updates on an instant, weekly, or monthly basis.
