Direct Mail & the church, a Love Story.
This post is part of our series ‘Direct Mail and Church, A Love Story’. Tune in next week for the next installment.
Scene 1: To Mail or Not to Mail
It can not be found in any canonized Scripture, but we are pretty sure sometime after the Ascension, the early Church purchased a demographic study of the Roman Empire, designed a 5.5” by 11” mailer, and sent it by chariot and carrier pigeon to the most densely populated ZIP codes around their local catacombs.
The result was “thousands added to their number daily,” as it says in Acts 2.
Obviously I exaggerate, but the fervor and blind ambition with which many churches mail these days would almost suggest my hermeneutic is not that blasphemous after all. Like clockwork in the Fall and Spring months, suburbanites across America can expect their mailboxes to be filled to the brim with all sorts of cheesy headlines and attention-grabbing images from local churches trying to woo them in to their “church that isn’t like any other church anywhere.” Somewhere along the way, direct mail has become a sacred cow and this series of posts is designed to help you determine if it still has a place in your community and if so, how to do it right.
Right now, churches are beginning to put together their mail pieces for Fall (aka Back to School). This season and Easter are the two periods when churches typically mail and experience attendance surges. When trying to decide whether or not to mail, it is a good idea to look at your church’s attendance patterns. If you are like most local bodies, you experience the same bump around mid to late August when families settle back into their routines and return from vacation. Typically, churches who mail try to capitalize on this trend by sending out a mail piece, but that might not make much sense. If the growth trend happens naturally around this time, it seems it might make more sense to seek out ways to retain newcomers than to woo new ones. A different approach may be to drop your mailer during an off-peak season. By doing this, your mailer would have a monopoly in religious mass mail section of the individual mailbox and you could better isolate the effectiveness of the mail project by comparing to previous off-peak attendance numbers.
The stats in favor of mailing aren’t that strong either. In the business/commercial world, a response rate of 1% is considered decent. Basically, if I mail out a coupon for 10% off merchandise in my store to 100,000 people and 1000 use the coupon, it was a success. But the average return for church mailers is even smaller. In terms of customer commitment, a 10% off coupon requires little of the customer except to come to the store and shop. But a church mailer asks people to step out of their routine or comfort zone, pack up the family on a weekend morning and enter a new church with all its stigmas and flaws. A much tougher sale. If a church gets .5% return on its mailer it can be considered a miracle.
Direct mail pros always contend that a single mail piece will not be as successful as a direct mail campaign… a planned and timed series of mailers to the same group of high value targets. Unfortunately, not many churches have the budget for this sort of marketing.
At recent planning session with a church staff, I asked those in attendance to list all the possible ways people in the surrounding community send and receive info on a daily basis. The final list looked something like this:
- cell phone/text
- face to face
- websites
- TV
Then I asked the same group to arrange those things in order of how much time/money/staff they spend on them:
- website
- face to face
- cell phone/text
- TV
Do you see the disconnect? The two lists are basically inverted mirror images of each other. A better use of the church’s time and money would be spent developing a communication strategy that uses the channels that the community is already used to: text, grassroots, email, and web 2.0. According to the first list, little or no resources should be devoted to mailing because they all concede that mail is largely ignored in their community. I would suspect that the majority of churches in America would also generate similar lists.
Newcomer response (used with permission)
This begs the question, why do we mail at all? The short, inadequate answer is: because that is what we have always done. But a direct mail campaign can be effective and is not always a waste of money. For starters, a church or organization who has the capital available can use a target mail campaign to extend it’s brand and profile within the community. The more people see and and get used to the logo/brand, the more comfortable they will be with it and the more prominent it will be in their conscious. This is marketing 101 and is the basis for the “all publicity is good publicity” theory. Still, there are better ways to accomplish this that do not consume as many resources as a mail project. Recently, a megachurch in my area launched a marketing campaign to assist the grand opening of their new building and Stc was there to track how things went. Several forms of marketing were used including TV, grassroots, social, web, and direct mail. In the end, the stats showed that the mail piece was not a great success and those resources could have been better spent on the grassroots stuff. (see chart)
Ultimately, it boils down to what works for your church and your community. This first post is not meant to talk you out of direct mail but to get you to think about this question before charging head long into an expensive mailer without thought: “Is a direct mail piece right for our church right now?” The best way to approach this question is to start with the desired end result and work backwards. If your goal is to raise awareness about your church in your community some other options may be to do a major service project and attract local media attention (free advertising), or to make thousands of invite cards and give them to your regular attenders to distribute to friends. If your goal is to bring 100 new families to the church for one weekend, then a well-done mail piece that hits 50,000 homes in your area may be the best option after all.
If you have decided to mail, stay tuned for out next post in this series: Always Judge a Book by its Cover. If not, what is your church doing, if anything, to communicate with the community?
