Guest Follow-up: Email
How important is guest follow-up?
Answer: SUPER IMPORTANT. So important that we’re dedicating multiple articles to it and how you can use ChurchTrac to both create and track your Guest Follow-Up Process.
Today, we want to focus exclusively on
Email.
Is Email still relevant?
We get asked this question a lot. For good reason too. Email has been around since the 90’s...and it seems archaic compared to iMessage, WhatsApp, and everything else in-between. Seriously...who even uses email anymore??
Answer: 90.1% of the US. Check out this graph we found...
If you do a quick web search like “is email relevant” or “is email still effective”, you’ll be met with piles of statistics that proves it is still worth your time. We’re not here to debate that. Long story short; Email is still relevant.
?
5 Reasons Why You Should Use Email To Follow-Up With Guests
It costs nothing: Seriously, sending emails costs literally nothing except the time you dedicate to setting it all up. Once you setup your processes in ChurchTrac with email action steps, you can send dozens of emails to guests in like 2 minutes!
It’s another point of contact: By emailing your guests, you provide them with a direct line of communication to your church. This type of accessibility often results in replies back to request more information, meet the pastor, or simply ask for prayer.
Emails can be personal: With ChurchTrac, you can personalize each email to have a person’s name in the body of the email. This makes them more likely to read or respond to it.
They expect it: When a Guest willingly gives you their email, they expect you to reach out. If they didn’t want you to, they wouldn’t give it to you.
Emails save time: Let’s face it, Guests can be hard to get in touch with on the phone. Emailing your Guests can start a dialogue which ends up in scheduling a time for a pastor to connect with them. Phone tag is so 2007 ?
How to Email Guests Follow-ups Like a Pro
The best way to send Email Follow-Ups with Church Trac is through Processes. If you don’t already have a Guest Follow-up Process, go ahead and create one and create a step called something like “New Guest Email”.
For the action step, you want it to look like this:
Though there is no “Perfect” email subject line to use... we’d recommend including the persons name in it so that it is more personal. ChurchTrac can automatically do this by simply putting in this:
{Name}
Here’s what we wrote for our subject line and Message:
When it comes to the Email Message...it’s really up to you. We would recommend keeping it lively and simple. Here’s an example:
Hi {Name},
This is Chris at The Potential Church. We’re super glad that you worshipped with us Sunday!
One of our Pastors will be reaching out to you soon, but I wanted to check in to see if you had any questions or any prayer requests you wanted to share. If so, you can simply reply back to me.
Over the next three weeks, I’m going to send you 3 more emails (one each week) to let you know a little more about us, what we believe, and how we serve our local community.
Be sure to visit potentialchurch.churchtrac.com to see our past sermons and learn more about our ministry.
Have a good week!
-Chris
When Do I Email My 1st Guest Follow-Up?
As quickly as possible. If you take the time to create a process in ChurchTrac with an email action step, you can email a guest immediately after adding them to your database.
How many follow-up emails should I send?
Put yourself in the shoes of a Guest and ask yourself this...How many emails would I want to get if I was visiting a church?
There is no hard science to this...but we would stray away from sending more than 4-5 emails to a guest within a month.
Want to learn more about processes in general? Check out our previous webinar to learn more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alOZjrnxCwk&t=53s
One last thing...
Don’t be afraid to change things up. As your guest's transition to becoming regular attendees, ask them what they thought of the follow-up emails. Their feedback can help you make your follow-ups even better. Oh, who knows...maybe they're are awesome and need no changing. Time will tell!
Till next time! 👋