Ever had trouble remembering to send followup emails to guests of your church? Or getting a staff member or a volunteer to? Setting up a church drip campaign is a great way to create a consistent, timely series of followup emails or SMS messages so you don’t have to remember.

With a church drip campaign, you can save time and make your followup better.

What’s a Church Drip Campaign?

You’ll need special software to send a drip campaign (more on than below). It’s basically a series of communications that you templatize and set on a fixed schedule. Once you start the process for each person, they get all the messages in order based on when you’ve set them up to go out.

For your church drip campaign, think through your visitor followup system and lay out how many messages you want to send out and on what schedule. As an example:

1. Thanks for coming [same day of visit]
2. Here’s our calendar of events [Wed of that week]
3. Come again this Sunday [Fri of that week]
4. Here’s how to get a hold of our staff [Mon of following week]
5. Serve in the community with us [Thu following]
6. etc.

Write the text of each message, add any merge fields (Hey, ≤≤firstname>>!) so your messages feel customized, and then set your timing for each one.

For each new guest, simply get their contact info of of their connection card and start them into the campaign. They’ll get each message right on time whether they come back the next Sunday or not. If they respond to any of the messages, it comes to your inbox so that you can answer their question.

Drip Campaign Software

I was a little surprised to find this such an expansive industry. Here is a write-up on the 25 best apps, both paid and free. Yes, only the twenty-five best.

I have only run across one to date that specializes in the church ‘market’, and they use SMS instead of email: textinchurch.com

MailChimp.com has been a popular tool among church planters, primarily for email newsletters. They have a great freemium model that lets you use their software free to a point. They have built-in automation that could be used to set up a church drip campaign. It is an affordable but paid feature. A key advantage to mailchimp is that church software developers are beginning to write integrations with mailchimp so that the church software syncs up with it automatically.

Some Pitfalls to Avoid

Beware of time-sensitive content in your messages. It might be a great idea to promote your next sermon series, but you’d better not forget to update the message when you move on to the next series. The same goes for fixed-date calendar events: how embarrassing for someone to get an invitation to the Christmas Eve service in the first week of January. Use hyperlinks to calendar or sermon pages on your website to fix that.

The other major pitfall to keep on your radar is changes to the sender and any other contact information. Maybe you’ve set up the ‘from’ name and email address to your volunteer in charge of connections, but the following year they leave. Or perhaps you change the church phone number – don’t forget to make that update in your message templates, too.

We live in an exciting era of gadgets, software and automation. There are so many things you do over and over again that can be automated. Set up a church drip campaign for your guest followup and make your life a little easier. And your guests better connected.