Every month, we send out MarriedPeople Monthly to church leaders so they can encourage and equip the couples at their church. We’ve shared posts in the past telling you how to use MP Monthly. But we also know that this knowledge is useless without having an email list to send it to.
Maybe you’ve already got a huge email list from your church’s married couples. Maybe they all love to open the emails you send them and never unsubscribe. But that’s probably not true for most churches. Many of you may struggle to collect emails.
If that’s you, we’ve pulled together a few ideas that can help you to collect emails from married couples and grow a healthy marriage email list.
1. Website Forms
The first step to getting people to sign up for your email list is to add a sign-up form on your church’s website. This makes opting in to your email list easy and highly visible.
If your church has a specific marriage ministry web page, that’s a great place for the form to go. It may not result in a huge rush of people signing up, but it gives you a quick place to point interested people to.
If you use MailChimp for sending out emails (which we recommend), they’ve got step-by-step instructions for how to add forms to your website. MailChimp also gives you the ability to create sign-up landing pages.
2. Promote at Events
If your marriage ministry hosts marriage events or retreats (which we can help you with), that’s a great place to tell people about your marriage email list.
At a marriage event, you’ve got a captive audience. You know they care about marriage, at least enough to attend an event about it. And by the end of the event, they’re probably wondering what to do next. Signing up for your list is a fantastic next step to leave people with at the end of your event.
Marriage events are great at giving people short-term ideas and inspiration. But they usually run out of steam after about a week. Monthly emails will keep that inspiration going through the rest of the year. Send them less content, more often.
3. Personal Referrals
People trust the recommendations of their friends and family, even over the church. It’s easier for other couples to convince someone to sign up for your emails than it will be for you.
So encourage people who are fans of your email content to share it with their friends. Make it easy for them to forward the emails and get more people to sign up. You could even include a message in each email, telling them to forward it to a friend.
4. Social Media
To reach people, you have to go where they are. And for better or worse, people are increasingly spending their time on social media. So why not give the occasional plug for your email list there?
One key to promoting email sign-ups through social media is to not come across as purely promotional. People are already being bombarded with messages online. It’s easy for you to get lost in the white noise, unless you share content that is unique and/or valuable.
This could be sharing a piece of content from an email—like a link to a blog post. Tease people with valuable content and then let them know where they can get even more like that. Do ask them to do something without showing what’s in it for them first.
How does your ministry get people to sign up for your email list?
Robert Carnes is the editor on the MarriedPeople team. He’s worked in marketing and communications for a number of churches and nonprofits. Robert lives in Atlanta with his wife, Victoria.
