Email Marketing for Churches – how to write newsletters for churches and religious organisations?

Have you noticed how communication has changed in churches? From social media to email newsletters – the church community has embraced technology to share its message with believers far and wide.

And it’s working! Today, people rely on technology to communicate, especially digital media. Can you even imagine a time before email? Don’t worry, I’ll wait 😉

Table of Contents

1. Changing communication in the church
2. Church email newsletter examples
3. Best & bad practices
4. Get a Newsletter newsletter templates
5. How often to send church email newsletters?

Communication is changing in the church

Today, churches have websites, apps, YouTube channels, TV channels, blogs, social media media pages, crowdfunding pages, and more. They use these tools to enable the community and reach people. We even use Bible apps on our phones and get emails with reading plans. I mean, you have to admit that technology + church = amazing!

Up until a few years ago, we would go to church, hear the message and all the events happening in the church and go home. The following week, the same thing.

Then I got a newsletter from my church. It just made so much sense – it’s a convenient way of letting people know what’s happening in the church, even more so than social media where stuff can get lost in your feed.

Let’s look at some real church email newsletters!

Example 1: Celebration Church

This newsletter has a video embedded in it, how cool is that? It also has a recap of a blog article with scripture for easy reference. In the third square, there are links to the church website and finally, the newsletter has all the contact information of the church.

Example 2: First Christian Church

At First Christian Church, there are a lot of events and news to share with church members so on the first page of their newsletter, they use a table of contents to outline everything that’s in the newsletter.

They have a section for prayer requests and upcoming events, with a nice layout that’s easy to read. The graphics and colors really jump out and grab your attention, which is exactly what you want!

Example 3: Renaissance Church

This design is minimalist but beautiful, the white background makes the photographs stand out. It’s not text-heavy but instead, it uses links to direct readers to their website and social media for more information. It also has the social media handles at the bottom along with a banner showing service times and the address.

Example 4: First Baptist Church Alexandria

Definitely the most colorful out of the examples, this newsletter has lots of graphics and images. Instead of writing paragraphs of news and events, they include links in every graphic redirecting the reader to their website. By doing this, they increase traffic to their website and cut down on the traditional text-heavy formats of email newsletters.

Church email newsletters: Best practices

It’s exciting to start thinking of what you’re gonna put in the church newsletter and imagining layouts and fonts..but before you dive right in and start selecting templates, let’s look at what to do and what NOT to do.

Here are some best practices:

Recap sermons

Use your church newsletter to share a summary of a sermon series or special services, like Easter or Christmas services. You can include the bible verse, the main takeaway, and mention the pastor. This works well if you have a multi-campus church with different sermon series. It’s also nice as a feature for guest speakers in the church

Include interesting content

Give people something you haven’t said elsewhere. Like an exclusive feature of the new pastor or the latest news on the outreach ministry. Include prayer requests, praise reports, anniversaries or birthdays, and birth announcements. Content that is personable and interesting will make people want to read your church newsletters.

Decide on a layout and stick with it

Use the same template for every newsletter, don’t confuse people. If you have special features like a member of the worship team on the last page of the newsletter, it should be in the same place for every newsletter. If the announcement is on the first page, keep it there. Keeping the layout consistent means people know where to find the information, every single time.

Link to the church websites/social media

Give people more than what they ask for, they don’t *have* to click on the link but in case they want to, at least it’s there. You can include website links, it works well if you are promoting a specific event and you have a landing page for that, but also links to social media pages and blogs. Links are also great as a replacement for the ‘contact information section – save space and include links in the footer.

Be selective of what you include

You can’t include everything in a newsletter so choose the most important info that people will want to read. That said, the information should be relevant to the church community. You might want to include community events, like a charity drive for the homeless. But decide against promoting a candidate for local elections (yes, this has happened!).

Be consistent

Decide how often you want to send out church newsletters and commit to them. By skipping a newsletter, you have the trouble of having to jam everything into the next newsletter and risk people missing dates of upcoming events, etc.

Use multiple newsletters

I know you’re thinking: I already get so many emails! But let me explain. It makes sense to use multiple newsletters if:

• you have lots of ministries – send separate newsletters to each ministry e.g. youth ministry, women’s ministry, young adult ministry

• you are a big/multi-campus church – so you can have one newsletter for announcements and events, one for sermon recaps and pastor features, and one newsletter for each campus of the church.

Church email newsletters: Bad practices

Choose landscape

The landscape is not the most mobile-friendly layout, you end up having to scroll across the screen to read the newsletter. Landscape only really works on a laptop/desktop. The portrait layout looks good on all devices.

Jam too much in the newsletter

Latching on to the point of being selective of what you include in your church newsletters, don’t overload people with information in a single newsletter. It just ends up making the newsletter super long, like six pages long. If you send quarterly newsletters, six pages might be ok but most churches send weekly or monthly newsletters. To avoid information overload, link out to your church’s other platforms where people can find events/news not included in the newsletters.

Use photos without permission

You should definitely use photos in your newsletters. But you should have a disclaimer on your church membership form asking people to give their permission. People are especially sensitive about using photos of children, so you should respect their wishes. As a rule, don’t use photos of visitors/guests unless it’s a guest preacher and you’ve asked permission.

Include controversial topics

The church newsletter is not the place to voice your personal opinion or engage in political debates. It’s definitely not the place to promote political candidates, even if they are members of your church. So stay away from offensive content, it’s not a good look for your church.

Share testimonies without asking

Testimonies are a great way of including personable content. People love hearing other people’s stories. But imagine you open the church newsletter and read the testimony you shared with your life group. Always ask permission before you include testimonies because people might not be comfortable with the entire church knowing about a personal struggle.

Examples

Example 1

Get a Newsletter has ready-to-use templates which makes designing a newsletter so much easier. Templates can be edited, to add more text blocks or more photographs. This newsletter is sent out to the entire church, so it has general information and appeals. In this example, there are call-to-action (CTA) buttons with links to the church website.

Example 2

This example has a banner, inserted as an image into the Get a Newsletter template. It is for the youth ministry in the church, so instead of text, we opted for images to make it more attractive. The CTAs direct the reader to sign up pages on the website if they want to get involved in activities.

Example 3

Here, I wanted to show how to do announcements and birthdays with photographs, keeping the text short. At the bottom, we have icons for social media and the website with links embedded.

12 content ideas for your church email newsletters

The golden rule for content in newsletters is simply to not add too much at once. Because you’re probably gonna have to plan your church newsletters in advance, you’ll have a good idea of what to include and when. Some content ideas can be in every newsletter e.g. the message from the pastor or sermon recap. But some can be a spontaneous feature e.g worship song playlist.

1. Sermon Recap – give a quick summary of the month’s Sunday services
2. Testimony Corner – share testimonies of members
3. Member feature – feature members, pastors, and leaders
4. A message from the pastor – a motivational message from the lead pastor
5. Inspirational quotes – from people inside and outside the church
6. Bible study – reading plans per book in the Bible
7. Announcements – news, upcoming events, and special services
8. Worship songs – create a bullet point playlist with a link to the song
9. Scripture of the month – following the theme/sermon series of the month
10. Intro to new month’s sermon series – quick intro of the theme/scriptures
11. Outreach updates – community outreach events/appeals
12. Prayer requests & praise reports – for the church or individual members

How often should you send a church email newsletter?

There’s lots of research on the topic and many people will tell you “it depends”. But on what exactly? We are bombarded with emails every day and getting newsletters too frequently leads to people unsubscribing. You don’t want that to happen.

Get a Newsletter has features that help you create and send newsletters like:

• Custom email marketing templates to use
• Photobank where you can save the images that you want to insert
• Mailing lists that are easy to update
• Mobile and desktop-friendly layout for newsletters
• Scheduling tool to send your newsletters

Talking to people who are in charge of newsletters for their churches, I learned that some churches send weekly newsletters and some monthly ones. Others opt for quarterly, that is every three months.

How often you send newsletters depends on:

1. How much news do you have to share – if you are a multi-campus church you might have a lot going on. Events happening at your different locations and so on. Here you can definitely send a weekly newsletter. Because you have more than one campus, you can compile the week’s news and events into one newsletter and use GAN to schedule it to be sent to your mailing list.
2. How big your congregation is – big churches =lots of members. If you take the example of international churches, how can they communicate effectively and consistently with people across the world? They use weekly newsletters, sometimes two to three newsletters a week because they have to translate content.
3. How many staff you have – you might want to send out weekly newsletters but you only have one person working on them. So you settle for a monthly or quarterly newsletter because it is manageable. You have to think about who’s doing the work and be reasonable about what can be done.
4. How much content do you want to include – Sending weekly text-heavy newsletters is a lot of work, someone has to write everything. But a weekly newsletter with minimal text and more links to the church website and social media pages might be a good compromise. If you want to include lots of different content, you might send the newsletter every month or quarter to allow enough time to plan the layout of the newsletter.