You’re just heading into a busy season in your church, maybe fall kick off, Christmas, or Easter. Your church has been working hard to create an amazing guest experience and follow-up process. You’ve got connection cards, you have first-time guest gifts at the ready, and you’ve even spent a little bit of money on some Facebook ads promoting the event and had great engagement!
The event comes, it goes, you get some connection cards in, you put some people into your church management software, maybe make a phone call. Then what? How do you follow up with them?
We work hard to follow up after major events, but it's a struggle to follow up digitally. All is not lost! Here are five strategies you can use to follow up with people digitally.
1. Engagement audience
You can leverage people connecting with you on Facebook to follow up. In the Facebook Ads platform you can create an audience based on a variety of engagements. Create an ad either with a video or image, and just say “Hey, thanks for connecting with us this Christmas season! We’d love to see you again!” and then target people who have already connected with your page.
2. The Facebook Pixel
As part of your digital outreach strategy you’ve been driving people to your website and getting loads of hits on your event landing page. Now you can leverage that to follow up with people who didn’t fill out the event registration, or submit the plan your visit form.
You can install a little snippet of code from Facebook, called Facebook Pixel, on your website that will track people who land on your website. Much like the engagement audience, you use your pixel to build an audience, and then you can follow up with people who were interested enough in your Easter service to go to your website, but didn’t end up coming.
3. Build a follow-up landing page
Leading up to your event you’ve built a landing page to get information to people. Now that the event is done, flip the script and turn those landing pages into pages dedicated to follow-up from your event.
Use the page to thank people for attending, and show them that you care about them. You could ask for prayer requests, or ask them if they’d share the best moment from the event. However you do it, make sure you communicate care for your visitor before you make another ask.
4. Send newcomers an email sequence
This is really something you should be doing year-round, but especially after a big event! Grab those emails and put them into an automated follow up sequence. You could start with a thank you from your pastor, and then continue once a week for up to four weeks to communicate care and provide information about your church.
Here are some articles that may help you get started:
Benefits of Using a Professional Email System
Planning Your Fall Outreach: Think Follow-Up First
From Visitor to Thriving Member
5 Ways to Use MailChimp for Church Marketing
5. Don’t disappear on social media!
This is super easy, but incredibly important. As churches we’re usually pretty good at posting on our social platforms leading up to an event, but after the event? Radio silence. The days and week following Christmas or Easter are critical for helping people continue to connect with your church. BEFORE your event, plan a week’s worth of content for your social media following up on it. Thank people for coming, throwback Thursday to an image from your Christmas Eve service, tell people you’re praying for them as they connect with loved ones, post a funny picture your dog. Just post something! Keep the ball rolling, and follow up with people on your social media channels.
Follow up can be challenging, but the digital space opens up a new world of possibilities for follow up. These are just a few ideas for how you an follow up with people digitally. What have you done to follow up with people online?
