Rewind to 2019 and our church email newsletter looked like most. It was a highlight reel of upcoming events and advertisements, suffering from abysmal open rates and even more abysmal click-through rates. If it hit the inbox of 1000 people, fewer than 10 would click on anything. And those who read it were our most insidery insiders who love being in the know. Of course, these are also the sincerely wonderful people who sign up for everything no matter what — which means they need serialized email event advertisements less than anyone else.

Those we hoped the newsletter would inspire unto hitherto unimagined levels of church involvement habitually trashed the email. I don’t judge them. I deleted the email every week, because I had no interest in picking through a repetitive, self-promotional event billboard. It was boring and mostly irrelevant.  

So if the goal of the newsletter was to gin-up sign-ups, then it was failing miserably precisely because it added no value to the spiritual lives of the hundreds of church members who deleted it by default every week. I knew we needed to take it back and reimagine it. I suspected that if we did so, it might lead to more event engagement and spiritual formation. But before my team could go forward, we had to wrestle with internal politics.

The Politics of Blowing Up Event Newsletters

At the time, it was apparent to me that the newsletter served no purpose, but it wasn’t at all apparent to ministry leaders on and off staff. In their view, the newsletter was a priceless venue for event announcing, and without it, no one would attend their events. So we did the hard work of education: showing leaders the abominable open and click-through rates, and explaining that, at best, the newsletter accounted for roughly 1–3 sign-ups per event — and most of them by people who sign up for everything, anyway. 

This won most people to the newsletter destruction cause. But tradition is tradition. Some leaders couldn’t be persuaded from their perception of the newsletter as a supernal sign-up god whose supernatural mojo secured the success of any event it sermonized. No evidence could persuade them otherwise.

And this, I suspect, is precisely the juncture at which most church-newsletter-blowing-up projects come to a halt. Or at least a compromise: a sort of halfway house between an event board and valuable content. Which is to say, not a house most people wish to live in.

Thankfully, our leadership didn’t suffer from a failure of nerve. We proposed to the skeptical that they allow us to detonate the newsletter for a year. If their sign-ups experienced noticeable decreases (not normal fluctuations), then we would reverse course. But if their sign-ups stayed steady or increased, they would allow us to continue forward. We made no compromises, because we had a clear vision of what the church’s newsletter could be.

Over the next three years, our newsletter subscriptions grew by over 10 times. Open rates skyrocketed. Click-through rates ballooned. And best of all: we were able to show that the new newsletter generated more event sign-ups, not less.

What did we do? We gave our church members and attendees targeted, structured spiritual substance. 

Writing a Newsletter Worth Reading: Targeted, Structured, and Substantive 

In place of the weekly event board, we began a weekly blog written by an assortment of staff and church members. We divide every year into six to eight “campaigns,” each of which focuses on a different theme or goal. This allows us to structure the newsletter around a given topic over a period of time — rather than the latest thoughts of a pastor.

For example, last fall, we built content around the theme of prayer. This is a topic relevant both to longtime churchgoers and new converts — in other words, it’s the sort of spiritual substance everyone is interested in. During that period, we wrote 11 posts on prayer. We explained what prayer is, why we do it, and when we do it. We wrote about daily office and how to practice communal prayer. We explored how to pray like the disciples and Jesus. We trained people how to pray in marriages, how to pray through decisions, and how to hold a prayer meeting. One of our counselors wrote a fantastic piece about the role of emotions in prayer.

Outside of the newsletter, we launched a seasonal, twice-daily prayer podcast, and created a whole series of social media posts called “How Prayer Changed My Life” in which church members shared about their own prayer life. But all of that’s probably better suited for a later post. This is about newsletters.

As the above example shows, our newsletters were structured around learning objectives. We slowly built from the whats and whys to the hows. They were also targeted: these posts were primarily for people who are newish to formal, liturgical prayers. The goal was to give them a trellis on which they could grow a deeper prayer life. Lastly, they were substantive: none of the newsletter were repetitive or fluffy. Readers could expect to learn something new and applicable from each one.

Those three dimensions are the key to our newsletter’s high open rate: we’re writing to people for their spiritual good, in a thoughtful, premeditated way. We put as much work into our newsletter’s educational scaffolding and quality as we put into our weekly sermons, and that’s made it an invaluable source of spiritual formation for our congregation — which means it’s always worth clicking “open.”

But how does this translate to event sign-ups?

Our campaigns are always conscious of the church season. Whether that’s Easter or Advent, or fall sign-ups and January sign-ups. During our major “join in” periods, we intentionally create content around the themes of community and connection. Those posts often link to a specific event (at the end) where people can practically pursue what the newsletter commends. 

To be clear: these newsletters are not ads. They aren’t about what is happening at a given event or group, but instead highlighting why. In other words, why Christians need intimate community. Why Christians are called to serve inside and outside the church. Why Christians need group Bible study. Why you should invest in your child’s spiritual growth.

You get the idea. We aren’t selling anything. The event sign-ups really are peripheral. What we want to do is convince people of Biblical realities, and then give them an avenue to apply what they’ve learned at the end. It’s that simple. And our event sign-ups have grown tremendously. (And this isn’t just because of the newsletter; ironically, a positive side effect of blowing up the old one was that it caused leaders to be more proactive about inviting others to their events — they’ve become better at assimilation without a newsletter crutch).

So now’s the time. Blow up your church newsletter. No one wants to read it, anyway. Email can be an avenue for so much more than skippable advertisements. It can be a key part of how your church pursues spiritual formation.