Enewsletter Insights

November 28, 2005 in Communications with 2 Comments

Granger sends out two weekly enewsletters. One is targeted to people who are connected to Granger’s local ministry. One is targeted to church leaders throughout the country. I thought you’d like some insider facts to compare with how you’re doing with your email communications.

  • About 700 more people subscribe to our weekly newsletter than receive a bulletin every weekend.
  • We use Constant Contact to distribute our email newsletters.
  • We typically experience 10% bounces, emails sent but not received. The average for other sites that use Constant Contact is 18%. Even with those bounces, more people still receive the enewsletter than receive a bulletin.
  • On average 40% of subscribers will open the email messages we send. That compares to 37% for other sites.
  • Of the people who open the messages, 18% will click through to our websites. Other sites only have a 9% click-through rate.
  • Granger discourages separate ministry-specific email promotions/newsletters so people don’t view email communications from the church as spam. Instead, we encourage every ministry to promote their events and connection opportunities through the weekly all-church enewsletter.

By the way, if you haven’t already, now would be a great time to subscribe to the weekly WiredChurches.com enewsletter. It’s free. Here’s a sample from last week.

2 Responses to “Enewsletter Insights”

  1. Carrie Christiansen November 28, 2005 at 1:06 pm #

    Hi Tony. I just wanted to let you know that I’m one of the people who still subscribe to GCC’s e-newsletter, but doesn’t receive a bulletin ever. I moved to Portland, OR this past March after attending GCC since 2001. I love getting the newsletter to keep up on what’s happening, as well as visiting your site once again to keep up on the “box score”, and happenings of such an amazing church.

    Might be something to check into…that is, how many people get the newsletter that actually live outside of the Indiana area! Just a thought.

    Have a great week!

    Carrie

  2. Tony Dye December 1, 2005 at 9:44 am #

    Tony, we also do a weekly mailing to our membership and others who want it. We do a weekly pull from our church database to rebuild the mailing list each week (based on a subscribe profile), then we use the NDR data to update our database. Therefore, our NDR results are quite different from yours. Our typical mailing:
    4000 messages sent
    <50 NDRs (including a few “mailbox full” issues)
    75-80% get opened
    55-60% of those opened click on one or more items
    Rarely do we have more than about 250 clicks for any single item in the newsletter
    We’re using listserv maestro for our mailing list.
    - Tony