Don’t Underestimate the Power of Email

Email is such a nor­mal part of the aver­age person’s life that we tend to for­get about its strate­gic value. As a mis­sion­ary, you may be stay­ing busy try­ing to keep up with the most cutting-edge meth­ods of com­mu­ni­ca­tion such as social media, SMS, and maybe even those QR code thingys. But among all these new options, clas­sic email is some­times for­got­ten. In my last post, I encour­aged mis­sion­ar­ies not to aban­don snail mail. Today I want to shed light on the value of email, par­tic­u­larly as a tool for send­ing reg­u­lar updates or e-newsletters.

To be hon­est, I didn’t real­ize just how impor­tant email was until I saw this info­graphic from the SmarterTools blog. The truth is, many more peo­ple use email than social media, and the ones that do use social media, still have to use email.

Unlike social media, email gives you the abil­ity to stake a claim in some­one inbox. For exam­ple, if you post a Facebook sta­tus, there is a good chance your post will be lost among the always shift­ing con­glom­er­a­tion of posts on your friends’ news feeds. You don’t have much con­trol over whether Facebook chooses to high­light your post or not, though there are ways to improve results. Email on the other hand is sta­tic. As long as you get into the inbox (and not the spam folder), that mes­sage is stay­ing there until the reader deletes or moves it. See the dif­fer­ence?

What’s your Strategy?

It’s more impor­tant than ever to make email count. Value the fact that sup­port­ers are entrust­ing you with pre­cious, con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion when they share their email address with you. Do some research and strate­giz­ing about how to use email cor­rectly. If you don’t, you may find peo­ple unsub­scrib­ing from or sim­ply ignor­ing your emails.

Quick tips:

1. Use email soft­ware such as Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, or even Mad Mimi. They are worth the min­i­mal costs.
2. Avoid attach­ments. Many times peo­ple don’t open them any­way.  Email soft­ware (see #1) should elim­i­nate any need for attach­ments.
3. Don’t expect read­ers to feel con­nected with you because you send them an e-newsletter once in a while. One-on-one, per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion is still crit­i­cal, whether by email, phone, or oth­er­wise.

Ways to fail at email newslet­ters:

1. Use poor writ­ing and gram­mar.
2. Include too much infor­ma­tion. Quick bullet-points or high­lights are best.
3. Use only text because you were too lazy to snap a photo.
4. Send too fre­quently. (Depends on your audi­ence, but more than once or twice a month could be overkill.)
5. Attach large files or images that make the reader’s email down­load slowly. That’s just annoy­ing. Don’t do that.

I hope these help you as you find the best ways to con­nect with your net­work of sup­port­ers!