Are emails an effective means of communicating with your congregants? Yes, but only if they open your emails. Corporate America spends millions of dollars studying the open rates of emails. The open rate is a term that describes the percentage of emails opened after receiving them. If emails aren’t opened, their message is ignored. Thus, it pays to know your open rate on email sends. Do you know the open rate of the emails you send to your congregation?
Are emails still a thing? Here are some facts about why emails should still be a part of your communication strategy…
- More than 4 billion people use email, representing almost 52% of the world's population.
- 61% of those 4 billion people say they enjoy getting weekly promotional emails.1.
For the present, emails are and will remain a reliable way to communicate with your flock if they open and read them. That leads to the question,
What is the open rate for emails? A good email open rate average across industries is right around 17%. Some industries do better, and some do worse. Ready for a little good news? Religious organizations, which include churches, have the industry’s best open rate of 29.42%2. That’s great, but what about reaching the other 70% of your congregation? Increasing your open rate would mean your message has a better chance of being read and acted upon.
What if you could increase your current open rate to between 75% to 80%? Is that open rate possible? Yes! Recently I sat in on a conference call that our team at Online Giving held with a potential new church partner. On that call, Stephen Ballard, one of our founders, commented, “We find that 75% to 80% of our email receipts, sent within seconds of someone’s gift to your church, get opened. The reason is that people want to ensure that their contribution went through correctly. We make that email receipt process easy and automated for you. And, using our system, you can edit and update that email to communicate other things since 75% to 80% of your members are going to open it up and read it.”
Initiating this kind of strategy would be like killing multiple birds with one stone. By using the tools provided by Online Giving, our church partners can customize the giving confirmation receipts sent after each gift. You can use these receipts to communicate a heartfelt thank you for the contribution and key events or other opportunities needing support and service. Your giving receipts can become vehicles to tell stories of how God uses their gifts in the local community and beyond.
In my over twenty years of helping churches increase giving, I have found that nothing moves hearts to give like stories of life change. Telling your story encourages people to give to support your story. Compelling stories motivate people to give. Your church has a compelling story, and sending emails allows you to show and tell that story. One result will be an increase in your offerings if you can get them to open up and read that story. By placing information and stories in your automated giving receipts, you could have 75% to 80% of donors reading them, which increases the likelihood of their responding. This is one of the many ways our platform, tools, and coaching help expand your missions and ministry. If you want to get your message read and heard, don’t just send receipts; tell a story!
Does your digital giving provider offer similar opportunities? If not, give us a call, and we can help increase the open rate of your emails. To learn more about all our tools for increasing member engagement and giving, contact us at (615) 206-4000 or at support@onlinegiving.org.
The Stewardship Coach
Our emailed giving confirmation receipts have an open rate of 75% to 80% - which is amazing! With our tools, your giving receipts can be infinitely customized to tell stories of how God uses your donors' gifts in the local community and beyond. https://t.co/PdUIq2Fj6H pic.twitter.com/Yn6GJf2BhC
— Online Giving (@onlinegivingorg) February 16, 2023
1. https://influencermarketinghub.com/email-open-rates/
2. Ibid.