Boost Your Church Marketing with Custom Online Forms

Written by  //  October 14, 2011  //  Web Ministry  //  2 Comments

As churches and ministries grow, or as you feel the call to focus on growth, it’s necessary to have some tools in place to help your organization grow both in person and online. You might be wondering how a church can grow online. Well, for many people, before they even step foot in a new church, they first check out a church’s website. They might listen to a sermon, review photos of the facility, look at the classes and childcare offered.

That said, churches can benefit from using email marketing solutions, like BombBomb, to reach out to people on a consistent basis. With the company’s new custom online form features, a church could easily build a form and drop in the code on their website homepage so that people visiting the site could sign up to receive more information; separate forms can be created and links posted to invite folks to join a special video prayer list; the possibilities are endless.

Great Tool

BombBomb has always provided a form tool to build a custom form (you pick the fields, choose which ones are required, put name and logo on top, what list the sign-ups go to, etc).  After you choose all your info and the form is generated, churches would get a code for a button or a link (two options) to place on their site.  The button or link might say “Sign Up for Our Newsletter!” or similar.

Custom Code

Now, there’s a third option that the company built by request (lots of customer asked for it).  We now provide code to have the full form show up directly on the site (rather than just a button or a link that pops up the form).  The form can be placed on websites, blogs, or any other web page they want to drop the code into.

The main use of a form is to build your permission-based list – to get your website visitors to sign up to receive your weekly or monthly newsletter or any other kind of email.  Perhaps a church leader sends a weekly prayer video email with prayer and encouragement for specific church members – that could have its own separate form on a specific page on the website and fill a specific list inside BombBomb.

Again, when you set up the custom form, you choose which list any sign-ups go to.  It all happens inside the BombBomb app without having to manage that specifically.  In my examples above, one form would be set for the newsletter list and the other form would go to the prayer list.

Document Management

Additionally, BombBomb has also recently added document hosting, sharing and tracking. By popular request, BombBomb has enabled their email marketing tool to have the ability to upload MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, zip, and mp3 files into BombBomb.  They can then  be put into emails and video emails. They become trackable, so you can see how many times – for example – the audio podcast you put in as an mp3 file was opened.

This would definitely be valuable at a committee, team, or planning level, where documents might be more frequently used. Many churches are doing audio podcasts that could be attached with a video introduction, then tracked to see how often they’re accessed.

So you see, there’s much more to church marketing through online marketing – many possibilities that will help you draw more people to your church and keep them coming back for more.

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Lauren Hunter is a freelance writer, church technology consultant (http://lhpr.net) and founder of the blog ChurchTechToday (http://ChurchTechToday.com), Technology for Today’s Church.