This month, we’re bringing you a resource that you can watch any time: TouchPoint’s Guide to Effective Email Communication! In addition to the video below, we’ve included an in-depth written guide. We hope you take away some helpful tips and tricks to provide great emails to your church-goers.

Emails are one of the most used modes of communication, which will only continue to grow as technology advances. It is important to factor email communication into your marketing strategy in order to stay relevant with your audience.

Let’s examine a few email best practices to help elevate your email marketing strategy:

Mobile Responsiveness
We all know that the time we spend on our phones completely skyrocketed in 2020, trending years earlier than predicted. Where have you been checking your personal email? According to the Global Web Index, It is likely you fall within the 72% of users that prefer to use their mobile devices over a PC. It is easier than ever to make sure your email is mobile friendly. There are tools online like Be Free that have mobile responsive templates available at no cost to you.

Branding
Telling your organization’s story is so important. Branding helps your members immediately recognize you’re emailing them at first glance. There are many tools online that can help you start branding your organization at no cost, like Coolors to help identify brand colors and Unsplash to find free stock images. To learn more about branding, check out our “What’s the Point of Branding” webinar replay.

Personalize Emails
Personalizing email is the best way to really connect to your audience at a deeper level. Sure, you could add a couple of email replacement codes into the email, but are you thinking of who you are sending that email to? Your audience appreciates that you know who they are to you. Spending time segmenting your audience to provide the best emails to the right person helps them know you are thinking about the individual, not the list.

Calls-to-Action
We communicate for the purpose of receiving a response, but keeping readers engaged can sometimes be difficult. If a reader knows that they are expected to do something while reading an email, it is well worth adding calls-to-action. We want to make that call-to-action as easy to identify as possible. Be sure to add a call-to-action button to make sure the link pops. The button will also give you an opportunity to break up some of the page’s content, which will make it more digestible to the reader.

Email Footers
Readers want to know who has access to their email information. In fact, the FCC’s guidelines require a footer that contains a mailing address, organization name, and link to unsubscribe in every mass distributed email. Standardizing your email footers is also an excellent way to assure your email does not get sent to spam.

Communicating to your audience via email is not going anywhere, so keeping your email strategy dynamic and up to date is essential to your success.

Want to stay connected with TouchPoint? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter, TouchPoint Minute.

Download Guide 

We deployed an update to the TouchPoint Check-In Print Server (version 1.1.4) that reduces network traffic to improve performance. The current version 1.1.3 will continue to function at this time.

If you are running the print server as a Windows service, it should update automatically and require no user input. You can verify that it updated by launching the configuration window and looking at the version number in the title bar. We recommend checking your kiosks to make sure they are printing properly.

If you manually launch the print server (not running as a Windows service), you can update it to version 1.1.4 by using this link: https://www.touchpointsoftware.com/checkinprinter.

See the Print Server for Check-In help article for more information.

We have released a new finance role named FinanceViewOnlyDetails. This role functions similarly to the existing FinanceViewOnly role, but it also grants access to view individual contributions on an individual’s record. The goal is to allow a user to see an individual’s giving information without having the access to modify it. The FinanceViewOnlyDetails role can be used in conjunction with the FundManager role to limited access to specific funds. This can be helpful if your church also has a foundation and you want to give a user access to see contributions given to the foundation, while maintaining privacy and confidentiality of other giving history.

In addition, we have updated the layout of the User Account page where an Admin assigns user roles. This includes a new column-based layout and a recategorization of the roles. This should make it easier to understand what certain roles affect so that Admins can assign the appropriate access to users.

See the Contributions – The Basics and Fund-Based Finance Roles help articles for more information.

If you couldn’t catch us live, check out October’s What’s the Point Webinar below! We Hope you gained some helpful giving tips as well as had the opportunity to learn more about TouchPoint Giving. If you’re just now tuning in and didn’t have the chance to answer our Zoom poll, but would like to be contacted to learn more about TouchPoint Giving, click this link to set up some time to speak with our TouchPoint Giving expert!

Watch our recorded webinar below to learn more:

Download Presentation 

We have released a few Check-In enhancements, based on feedback from our partner churches. These updates make Check-In much easier and streamlined for your staff.

***IMPORTANT: In order for these updates to work properly, you must log out of your Check-In kiosks and log back in. ***

Check-In Reached Capacity/Closed Items – On the Check-In kiosk, badges are now displayed when a class is Full (has reached capacity) or has been manually Closed, and people will not be able to self-check in to those classes. In Admin mode, when Visit or Join has been selected, the list of available classes will also show these labels, when appropriate, but Full or Closed classes can still be selected.

Add Family – In the Check-In Profile under your Administration menu, you will see a new tab named Add Family. Here, you can enable the ability to Add a Family all at once in Check-In. In addition to Add Person, you will also see Add Family as an option when searching for someone in Admin Mode. You can then optionally add them as Visitors or Members of a Class.

See the Check-In Profiles and Using Check-In help articles for more information.