How often should a church send its newsletter?

TL;DR

Choose your email frequency deliberately rather than letting a few old complaints decide it. Make each email worth opening before increasing how often you send, and recognise that complaints about volume may be complaints about value.

You email too much...

I was on a call recently with Ryan, who runs Flock & Canvas with me, and a church we work with.

We were talking about church newsletters, and Ryan said something I haven’t stopped thinking about since.

When he used to run the communications for a local church, how often they emailed members was effectively decided because two or three people had said the church emailed too much.

Nobody ever put it like that. There was no meeting about it.

But every time anybody suggested sending something, those complaints were holding some sway, and so the church sent less.

So today I want to talk about email sending frequency.

Because one thing we don’t want to do is have our communications decided because of an off-the-cuff remark someone made a few years ago.

What a monthly newsletter means for visibility

If you email once a month, you get twelve attempts a year.

Twelve times, you are hoping that your email arrives, avoids the promotions folder, and lands at a time when that person happens to be looking at their inbox with enough attention to notice you.

That’s a very thin hope.

Microsoft published some data last year showing the average employee receives around 117 emails on a working day. That’s office workers, but there’s still something important in it. We all receive a lot of email.

Emailing once a month is hoping that, by chance, somebody sees it in the flood of everything else.

So it's pretty easy to know that once a month newsletters aren't really working.

Check whether frequency complaints are about content

If once a month isn’t enough. But what is too much?

The first thing to be aware of is that the person who tells you your church emails too much is very rarely somebody who enjoys reading your emails.

In my experience it’s almost always somebody who isn’t engaging with them at all, which is precisely why they see them as noise.

The truth is, the complaint usually isn’t about frequency.

Nobody complains about receiving too many emails they enjoy.

They complain about receiving too many emails that don’t do anything for them.

So “you email too much” is actually a comment on the content, delivered as a comment on the volume.

Which means the answer isn’t to send less.

It’s to make the email worth sending.

So, some practical applications.

Find out who set your frequency.

In most churches the current pattern traces back to a handful of remarks made years ago by people nobody has checked in with since.

Count the complaints properly.

Two people out of three hundred is not a finding. It’s two people, and they may well be commenting on the content rather than the frequency without realising it.

Earn the increase before you make it.

More of the same is not a strategy. Frequency only helps if each email is worth opening, so fix that first and then send more often.

And let people go.

We’ve talked about this before, so I won’t labour it. Somebody unsubscribing because weekly is too much for them is a good outcome for both of you.

If you take nothing else away, remember these three things.

• Emails are rarely too frequent. They’re just not delivering enough value.

• Email is an incredibly powerful way to communicate, as long as what you’re sending is worth reading.

• And sending more often gives you a far better chance of being seen, simply because your church’s name turns up more than twelve times a year.

Review why your church sends at its current frequency

Ask yourself one question, and answer it honestly.

Why do we send at the frequency we send?

If the answer is a decision somebody made on purpose, for a reason you could still defend, then that’s great. If it turns out to be a comment made by one person some years ago, you’ve found something worth improving.

It's been a while since we covered email newsletters. So I think I'll write something more detailed on that in the coming issues.