Five Useful Email Tips for Ministry to Men

Electronic mail (e-mail) has become commonplace and is clearly the easiest and most successful way to disseminate information to your audience. Ensuring that guys receive your message AND read it is critical for your ministry. Here are a few tips to help you succeed with your ministry emails:

1. Use an email management system. Regardless of the size of your group, using a service will help you stay organized. One of the best email management systems out there is MailChimp. It’s free to use (if your subscriber list is under 2,000 and you plan to send out less than 12,000 emails per month). Free is a great price and there are many great little tools included with MailChimp. Create a custom template for your men’s ministry. When you upload your email subscriber list, be sure to take the time to personalize your list as well (so that your emails will have a personal greeting, “Hi Tim or Hey Gary”). If you don’t know how to do any of these things, that’s okay. Most likely there is a guy in your group that is very familiar with these functions and it will be a great opportunity for you to get them involved.
2. Create events that are easily copied or imported into electronic calendars. For example, you may choose to use Google Calendar for managing all of your men’s ministry events. When you list an upcoming event in your email, make sure guys have the ability to confirm their attendance or import it into the appointment calendar on their computer or smartphone. If you’re unsure how to do this, we suggest you get one of the younger guys in your ministry to show you how (this is one of those ideal roles for the “tech crew” – see this month’s article on Creating an Environment for Young Men to Flourish).
3. Don’t abuse the inbox. Regardless of the size of your men’s ministry, please don’t overuse email. Sending out an email once or twice each week is sufficient. Any more than that and you’ll most likely experience quite a few complaints and start seeing members unsubscribe.
4. Get creative. Embed a funny or poignant video, encourage guys to read up on the next topic for your Bible study, list service opportunities, create a “featured guy of the week column” where you include a short interview about one of the guys in your men’s ministry.
5. Keep it brief. Remember, there are guys out there who may end up reading several hundred emails every day (like me). Don’t “beat around the bush”. Get to the point quickly. Guys will appreciate it. Oh yeah, don’t type in ALL CAPS – it’s a no-no (it’s considered yelling).

Most importantly, have fun with email, think outside of the box a little and get creative in the way you use it. Again, we highly encourage you to enlist the help and creativity of the younger men in your group to employ your email strategy. Look for more tips in coming months both here in our newsletter and the MMC blog.