It can be quite complex to come up with a strategy or pathway for how best to follow up those who visit your church. As I’ve read through a bunch of the literature on this topic, as well as experimented with a number of approaches at a few different churches, I’ve come up with 3 simple rules to consider as you plan your follow up process.
For a successful follow up pathway what you do needs to be relevant, timely and achievable.
Relevant
Whatever you do, it needs to be relevant to your visitors.
This will require you to know a bit about the types of people that visit your church and tailor your pathway to suit them (this will be easier if you’ve already created a target audience profile). Salt Church gets a lot of visitors, but we’ve targeted our follow up to work best for the 20-30 year old unbelievers who come along (you can read more about or visitor follow up process here). This means we use SMS as our primary method of communication with visitors because that’s relevant those that group of people. But there are churches out there reaching a different demographic for which SMS is not relevant or appropriate!
What works at one church is going to be different to what works at another church. I used to work at an Anglican Church in Sydney and we had a number of older people visit – and what they loved was for the minister to turn up at their door on Monday night for a cup of tea – but if we tried that at Salt Church and knocked on the door of a 25 year old visitor I think they might call the police! Whatever you do, your follow up needs to be relevant to the people you’re wanting to reach.
We’ve also had quick a bit of success hand writing welcome notes and posting them to visitors. Most people that we get visiting Salt Church only ever get junk mail or bills in their letterbox. So when they receive a hand-addressed envelop with a little note inside, that really stands out and makes for a memorable and positive impression. Think about the people you’re wanting to reach and make your follow up process relevant to them.
Timely
Your follow up needs to be quick. Aim to follow up visitors as soon as you’re able to. The more time that passes after their visit on Sunday the less impact it will have. Hopefully they had a positive experience visiting your Church and you want to solidify that impression with your follow up – so make it as soon as possible after Sunday. We send our follow up SMS and emails out on Monday morning. I know some churches that send a SMS out mere hours after church has finished.
However, a follow up process that’s timely is not just about sending it ASAP. It’s worth thinking through the overall timing of your follow up. Do you just send something out on Monday – or do you also send something out that next Saturday, reminding people to come back again tomorrow? Think through what the timeframe for your follow up process will be.
But whatever you decide on, make sure it’s achievable…
Achievable
There’s no point having a great follow up process that is quick and relevant for your visitors and yet when it comes time to implement it’s not actually doable and following up guests gets dropped through the cracks. Your process needs to be achievable. Things to consider are:
- Who will be doing the following up?
- What resources do you need to implement it?
To help us make our follow up process achievable we have automated it as much as possible. A lot of our follow up process revolves around sending SMS to first and 2nd time visitors – and you can read more about our SMS integration in my post here.
