Secret 3 – You Need a Marketing Funnel
This is a 10 part teaching series that covers all of the chapters (all 10 secrets of extraordinary church growth) from the influential book, The Funnel, written by Ross Turner, CEO & Founder of Vibrant Agency. This book shows the proven methods for using digital marketing for churches. Using branding, team leadership, social media, website, and paid ads to help a church bring their message to their community.
If you would like to learn more about Ross, or to contact us, please do so using the following:
Ross Turner Instagram: @ross.turner.official
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Vibrant Agency Website: https://www.vibrantagency.com
Email: Questions@VibrantAgency.com
Secret #3 – You Need a Marketing Funnel
So what is this “funnel” all about?
More than anything else, I am known for my talks on sales funnels and church growth. I know that your church is not a business, so talking about sales and marketing funnels seems really weird. I get that. But you need to understand what the funnel is, and how it is a proven method for reaching new people. This chapter will teach you how to use a marketing and advertising funnel to actually reach new people. It simply works.
What is the funnel? In simple terms, it is the course of decision making when someone engages with a new brand. When someone makes a choice to buy something online, try a new restaurant, or go to a church, there is a specific process that they go through. Once you understand this process, you can tailor your marketing to guide people on each step of their journey. The progression is exactly like a funnel. Picture one of those real life funnels where you can pour liquid or sand into a big cone, and it spits it out through a small hole at the bottom. A funnel is wide at the top, and gets progressively smaller until it gets to the bottom. This real life funnel is the analogy for how professional marketing is done. At the top of your funnel, you get your message out to a lot of people who barely know your brand. Then you progressively move them down your marketing funnel until they end up at the bottom and take a precise action.
Each phase of this marketing funnel has a different goal and a different message that you promote. If you can visualize your marketing like a funnel, then you will ask your target audience to take the right steps. You can’t go for the big ask with every ad, or your marketing will be flat and ineffective. Your marketing should only be built to progress people to the next phase of the funnel. The goal isn’t always a new visitor on Sunday morning, the goal is progress.
To get a visual on the step-by-step process, check out the diagram of the funnel below.
In this diagram you can see that people are taken on a journey. The biggest number of people are introduced to your church at the top of the funnel. Next is the middle of the funnel where we ask them to take a next step, and then the conversion, at the bottom of the funnel, is when they come to one of your services or connect online. In the following pages, we are going to discuss the best ways to reach people at the top and the middle of the funnel, and guide them on the journey to a conversion.
To fully understand how the funnel works, you must first understand that people go through a certain process when they make decisions, whether they are aware of it or not. If you want to influence people, then you need to understand them first. You have to stop trying to go from A to Z in one big leap, but learn to embrace the process. People don’t go from A to Z, they go from A to B…and then B to C…and so on. Likewise, people don’t go from ignoring Jesus, to 100% sold-out, on-fire believers in one instant.
It is a process.
This is the essence of the funnel. You start on the top, and take people on a journey one step at a time. If you will understand and embrace the funnel, it will open your eyes to making decisions with your marketing that are intentional, instead of just blasting ads asking people to come to church. Don’t ask people who barely know you to come on a Sunday. You are skipping all the steps.
The goal of marketing is to take people to the next step in the funnel. That’s it. If done correctly, you will see genuine fruits of your marketing. If done wrongly, you will likely spend a lot of hours—and dollars—without seeing results.
In traditional e-commerce business, digital marketers are obsessed with perfecting the marketing funnel. Let’s first discuss how this funnel works in the corporate world, then zoom in and talk about how a marketing funnel works in the church world. The top of the funnel is where people are first introduced to your product or offer. This is generally where the masses first see a commercial or an advertisement promoting a product. Following that, there are a set of specific steps involved in the buying process. What steps do we want people to take? You might decide you want them to first see an offer for a free resource, then you want them to visit your website, then perhaps you want to follow up with a different ad for the next step, and finally you call them…you get it. It doesn’t have to be this specific formula, because each company has its own funnel that it uses to get new customers.
Often the audience is presented with a promotion at the top of the funnel, and those who are interested will move on to the next layer in the funnel. This is where they are sent to a specific page on a website, and are presented with the details of an offer. From there, it is up to the consumer whether they make a purchase or not.
Some companies have a simple three-step funnel, such as offer/website/purchase, but some companies have an extensive multi-step sales funnel that is much more elaborate. However, the step-by-step concept is still the same—regardless of how many steps are in the process—and it applies to your church in more ways than you can imagine.
To define what specific steps you want people to take when entering your church marketing funnel, you first must decide what the end goal is. You would probably agree with me that the most effective way of introducing Jesus to people is by having them come to a service and experience him for themselves or, when appropriate, watch a livestream right then while the service is happening. Most churches have an opportunity somewhere in the service for people to make the decision to give or rededicate their lives to Jesus. Generally there is also an opportunity for personal prayer, some additional resources, and connecting with other believers. So the goal of your funnel is to get people to visit your church during a service or watch a livestream.
Reaching the end goal of your marketing funnel has a specific terminology, and it is a word that is probably familiar to you. In marketing, once your funnel has successfully taken someone from the top, all the way through the funnel, it is called a “conversion.” As Christians, we use the term “conversion” when referencing someone making a decision for Jesus, but for the purposes of this book, we will use the term “conversion” in reference to someone completing your funnel. Therefore, the conversion in your church marketing funnel is when someone steps foot onto your church grounds for the first time or fills out a Plan Your Visit form.
Now that you have a basic understanding of the concept of the marketing funnel, we can take a deeper look at what that looks like for your church’s marketing.
Let’s dive into the funnel.
The Top of the Funnel: The Relationship.
What’s the difference between a normal ad, and a top of the funnel ad?
The top of the funnel is your chance to make a first impression—where people connect with you for the first time, and you have the chance to introduce what your church is all about. This is where most churches screw it up. All the time I see top of the funnel church ads asking people to come visit a service, invite a friend, or attend an upcoming event. Please stop doing that.
People first need to know you and like you, and even trust you before you ask them to take a next step.
You have to build rapport with people. Only then will they be interested in taking any next steps with you. If you ask your top of the funnel audience to come visit your church, it’s like asking someone to go from A all the way to Z, and skipping everything in between.
Simply put, your top of the funnel audience is defined as a list of people who don’t already attend your church. Outside of the people who already attend a different church, these are the people whom you are trying to reach. With these people, you have one very specific job, and one job only.
Are you ready for it? Start a positive relationship. If you try to get anything else out of the top of the funnel, you have missed the whole point.
When you fully understand the funnel, then you will have success with your marketing efforts to the people you want to reach. However, without understanding the funnel, you will see very limited results, and you may actually do damage to your church’s reputation.
Did you read that? You may actually hurt your cause if you don’t respect the process of the funnel.
If people’s first impression of you is that you want something from them, they are going to have sales resistance. This is the ultimate fail. Once people have sales resistance, they are almost impossible to win back. Now you may be wondering, what exactly is sales resistance? Consider the feeling you get when walking into a car dealership or a furniture store. As soon as you walk through the door, you are bombarded with sales people trying to convince you to buy something. They are not there to help you really, and everybody knows that. They are only there to sell. And so you become guarded and on the defense. This is sales resistance. When you have sales resistance, you want to leave as quickly as possible. At least that is my experience.
Recently my wife Sarah and I, with our two young kids, visited a furniture store in downtown San Luis Obispo, near where we live. We were looking around for a new sectional sofa for our living room. We had been looking at a few of the big box stores, but I had been wanting to try this new local store for a while, so we stopped in to look at their selections. I couldn’t even enjoy my experience and browse around, because as soon as we walked through the door, there was a salesperson waiting for us. He had a clipboard in hand, a huge smile, and the classic dress shirt tucked into blue jeans.
Note to self: never trust anyone who tucks their dress shirt into jeans! (I digress).
This guy simply would not let us just browse. He followed us everywhere and asked us all of his rehearsed questions. Sarah is so kind that she engaged with him the whole time, but I just really wanted to look around in peace. I know this guy was only doing his job. I also know that this tactic probably does close a lot of sales. My distaste is nothing personal towards him, but I am telling you, I will never go back to that store. I wanted to first feel comfortable and look around on my own before being forced into a sales pitch, so we left after only a short stay in the store and ended up buying a sofa online where we could browse at our leisure.
So my message to churches is this: don’t be a sofa salesman. Churches can have the same negative impact as this poor sales guy in the furniture store. You don’t want people to see a post from your church in their social media feed that constantly asks them to consider donating or attending or joining. Let people get to know you first. The invite can come later.
You cannot have a hidden motive.
People know when something is genuine, and when it is not. Don’t publish content or ads in the top of your funnel only because you want people to come to your church. You must not do this. You have to pour genuine love into the top of the funnel without expecting anything in return—solely because you want to impact the people you are reaching. Don’t even have a hint of a hidden agenda. If they want to take the next step with your church, then great! If not, love them from a distance through online media. Sometimes that’s as good as it’s gonna get. When your motive is pure, only then will it produce the results you’ve been longing for.
Win trust with your community first. Then ask for something later. Win trust by being trustworthy. Let everything you publish to the top of your funnel be truly helpful and genuine. The top of your funnel has one purpose: to build relationships by adding value to the people in your community, and asking for nothing in return. Add as much value as you possibly can with the time and resources at your disposal. You need to intentionally build your reputation and the feeling people have about your church. Why? So you can lead them deeper later.
In the corporate world, this is a part of the branding process. If done correctly, you can actually shape the feeling and perception people have of your brand. It establishes your reputation as a place that genuinely cares, and you are going to get way more people to trust you with the next step in their faith journey because you have shown them that you are trustworthy. Even further than getting people to trust you, they have to like you. Give them weeks, months, years, and decades of love and value. However long it takes. The funnel never stops, so when they are ready to go deeper, you are ready to receive them. You should give so much to the top of your funnel that it hurts. Give your best.
It is hard to find consistent ways to resource and encourage people through media channels. It takes creativity, time, energy, and money. You should be spending most of your advertising money on your top of the funnel campaigns. But don’t give up, because this is where the battle is won. You will make a deep impact when you constantly give your community something of true value, something that can positively impact their lives. And if they never come to your church because of it, that’s ok. Let that be your heart.
Here are some great examples of top of the funnel campaigns that churches have done:
1. Write a blog post that gives helpful insights on how to improve your marriage, and post it on Facebook to encourage and strengthen local families.
2. Do a surprise meal for your local first responders to say thank you for their service, record a video surprising them with it, and post a tribute online.
3. Publish a one-minute clip of the key points of a recent message on hope, and tell people on Instagram that whatever they are going through, there is still hope.
4. Go to local farmers’ markets or community events and pass out free bottled water and encourage people.
5. Promote a Facebook post inviting anyone to anonymously submit prayer requests for your staff to personally pray for.
6. Do a well-done post highlighting a local business, just to support them. Write a short article about the history of the business and introduce readers to the owner.
Those are some ideas, but there are certainly more things to do than this list. Put your creative abilities to work and continue to find unique ways to add value to your community. Do one new top of the funnel promotion every single week. This can be from an Instagram ad, a Facebook post, a Google ad, or even a mailer. This will simply be something that causes the community to know about you and receive some sort of message from you. The top of your funnel is where you cast a wide net to as many people as you can who are in your target area. Some of your promotions will have a huge impact, and some won’t really catch on. But never stop. Give as much as you can. Create as much deeply impactful content as you can. Genuinely help people.
If you put tremendous effort into the top of your funnel, you will have tremendous results.
Remember, your ministry isn’t only on Sundays anymore.
Some of the fruits of your funnel won’t be known until you walk into Heaven and meet the people whom you impacted but you never even met.
Read that last sentence again.
When you are first beginning this process, be careful to manage your expectations. In the top of the funnel phase, you won’t produce massive results during the first few impressions. Have patience.
You may be familiar with the idea of making an impression, but when speaking of marketing, the term impression takes on a whole new meaning. An “impression” is simply the term for when someone sees an ad or post. People usually need to see an ad quite a few times before they stop and really read or engage with it. Generally it takes about seven impressions before a person will take action on an ad. It’s going to take time before you start seeing real conversions of people who make it all the way through the funnel. If your church is faithful in creating one piece of top of the funnel content every week, it is a good rule of thumb to assume that it will take around seven weeks before you start to see conversions. Pace yourself, have endurance, and be committed to investing into your top of the funnel…forever. Every week, no matter what. Galatians 6:9 says, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” So pour into people, and then do it again. I promise, you will impact them for the Kingdom.
The top of your funnel should be your best content, not your leftovers.
Also keep in mind that when I talk about an “ad,” it simply means it is a piece of content that you are paying for people to see. Organic posts on social media are not ads, unless you pay to promote them. Although the word ad implies that you are trying to sell something, this is still about the top of the funnel—about reaching people and pouring into the community. It’s simply the term we use, so don’t get weirded out. We are paying for people to see the top of the funnel content, thus it is an ad. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we are selling something.
The top of the funnel is not just a social media thing. You can be creative and find ways to impact people anywhere. You don’t want to put all of your eggs into the basket of social media ads, or the basket of Google Ads. You want to get as many people from your target audience as physically possible to see your top of the funnel content on a weekly basis. You need constant ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube. You may even sometimes send out mailers, or have a billboard ad, or anything else that is relevant. The more people you can get in the top of your funnel, the more conversions you will see at the bottom of your funnel. As I write this book in 2020, the best way to reach the top of the funnel people is on Instagram and Facebook. But whatever outlets your target audience gives their time and attention to, that is what you should be investing your time and content in.
Once someone sees your content, and decides to take the next step in interacting with your church online in any way, this automatically moves them into phase two of your funnel. This is where we go for “the ask.”
Welcome to the middle of the funnel.
The Middle of the Funnel: The Ask
So how do I make this whole retargeting thing work?
Now that you have put in the effort, and you’ve gotten the top of your funnel set up and working, take a moment to celebrate! People are starting to know what your church is all about, and they are beginning to trust you. Now it’s time to invite them to take the next step. We don’t ask for anything in the top of the funnel, but in phase two, “the ask,” you request for them to come and check out your church online or in person. This is your chance to convert them from knowing who you are, to receiving from you on a spiritual level.
Here is how it works: you have a separate set of posts or videos that you only show to people who have first engaged with one of your top of the funnel ads.
How do you show ads to only those specific people?
This is a process called “retargeting” and is the top secret ingredient in the funnel. In the marketing industry, retargeting is a term for showing different ads to people who visit your website for the first time or engage with a post on social media. For example, if you go online to a major retailer’s website right now, I can almost guarantee that the next time you open Facebook or Instagram you will now see retargeting ads from that company. Why do they do this? Because it is a much smarter use of advertising money if you spend it on people who are interested, instead of showing ads to everybody. Imagine a world where you are able to only show ads to people who are currently interested in checking out your church, instead of wasting it on people who are not interested at all. You would be more than willing to spend that money, because you know it is going to produce results.
This is exactly why companies do anything they can to figure out who is interested in their products, then show their advertisements solely to that audience. With Google and Facebook, you can use tracking codes to build a custom “audience” of people who have interacted with your church online and have shown interest. You only show your middle of the funnel content to this custom audience. This is retargeting, and this is the middle of your funnel. In the Paid Ads chapter of this book, I will show you exactly how to set this up for your church.
Here is a cool thought. We are taking the exact same tactics and strategies used by multi-million dollar corporations, and using them to impact people’s lives for eternity. It has taken the marketing world years to figure out how sales funnels impact people’s decision making, and now you can use this same funnel to introduce people to Jesus.
The process works, but the motive is different.
Here is a real life example from a local church leader. Let’s call him Greg. Greg wrote an article that offers practical tips and biblical insights for overcoming fear and anxiety. He spent time studying and writing the article in a very encouraging and helpful way and posted it on their church’s website. They also shot a short, thirty-second promo video to let people know what the article is about. Greg’s prayer was that God would use this promotion to help someone who was struggling with anxiety and could use some encouragement. Greg had a budget of $15 per day and promoted the article as an ad on Facebook, Instagram, and Google to his top of the funnel audience. Over the next three weeks there were over 7,400 people who saw the ad, and 433 people clicked on the link to his article. He had twenty-three comments and five shares. Pretty good! But it didn’t stop there.
Because of the tracking codes and custom retargeting audience set up, all 433 people who engaged with that post were immediately added to Greg’s retargeting audience. So now they are starting to see a personal invitation from Greg on their Instagram feed inviting them to check out the current series on fear and anxiety at their church. In his retargeting ad, Greg talks about how this series goes deep into this topic, and he invites people to watch their livestream or visit them in person. Every one of those 433 people have gone from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel. This happens automatically with Facebook’s and Google Ads’ custom audiences. Your job is simply to produce the message, and people get taken on the journey without any further prompting. Over the three weeks of promoting this article, Greg saw twelve new people fill out a Plan Your Visit form from this funnel.
These twelve people went from the top of the funnel, into the middle of the funnel, and then converted through the bottom of the funnel.
This is how the funnel works, and it changes people’s lives.
You should be running a new top of the funnel ad every week. In addition, you should be updating your middle of the funnel (retargeting) ads once every two or three weeks. Someone in the middle of the funnel will see your retargeting content on high rotation in their social media feed, meaning that they will probably see the retargeting ads two to four times per week. That’s a lot. This is why it is so important to make sure you are updating your retargeting ads on a regular basis. You should have around three to five retargeting ads all running at the same time. This way people will see a healthy rotation of ads, instead of the same one over and over. The retargeting ads don’t have to be super specific like Greg’s was, it can just be a general invitation to come visit your church on a Sunday. However, it can be very specific if you want. It just depends on how much time you can dedicate to it.
One of my favorite churches in Los Angeles uses the funnel to help boost attendance to their annual conferences. For the top of the funnel they use clips from the keynote speakers, and then a follow-up retargeting ad is shown with the details of the conference and a link to buy tickets. The process is still the same—they start by offering a helpful post from the keynote speaker filled with good and encouraging content, and the conference invite does not come until the middle of the funnel. People’s first impression is a video that gets them excited about the keynote speakers, and then they are primed to be shown the retargeting ad to buy the tickets.
Similarly, a great church that we work with in Florida does a sixty-second clip each week recapping the message from Sunday. They promote the video as a top of the funnel ad on both Facebook and Instagram. Everyone who watches the clip will then start seeing personal invitations from the lead pastor to an upcoming Sunday. The message recap is the top of the funnel, and the personal invite by the pastor is the middle of the funnel.
Are you seeing a pattern?
In order to make the middle of the funnel effective, you have to make sure the call to action is clear and easy. Many churches use the Plan Your Visit model to give users a well-defined next step. This works great for some people, but by far, most first-time guests will just show up on Sunday and not even use the Plan Your Visit option. But even if they don’t go through with filling out the Plan Your Visit form, the content on that “Visit Us” page on your website will still be very helpful in converting them to a visitor. Some churches encourage people to join them online for their livestream as the call to action, which can be very effective as well. You can start impacting people online, before they even make it through your doors for the first time.
The key is to be consistent and relentless. It is totally common that people will go from the top of the funnel, to the middle of the funnel and never go any further. This is absolutely normal and to be expected. You want to show those retargeting ads for around sixty to ninety days. We have found that anything longer than ninety days loses its effectiveness. If people don’t respond within that sixty to ninety day window, that is ok. They go back to the top of the funnel. The next time they interact with one of the top of the funnel posts, it starts the whole process over again. Just keep it going!
The beautiful part about the middle of the funnel is that it costs less than the top of the funnel. Generally a church has a top of the funnel target audience around 300,000 people, depending on the location. But since the middle of the funnel ads are only shown to select people in the retargeting audience, you generally have only around 2,000 to 6,000 people in that audience, way less than the top of the funnel. This means that you don’t have to spend nearly as much ad budget to reach those people. Fewer impressions costs less money. We will discuss budgets in a later chapter and dive into the practical details of setting up your ads and campaigns.
Now that you understand the top and the middle of the funnel, let’s talk about the bottom of the funnel.
Bottoms up!
The Bottom of the Funnel: The Conversion
Your target audience made it through the funnel! Now what?
Congratulations, your funnel worked! People saw your top of the funnel ads, and they liked what they saw. Next they saw your middle of the funnel retargeting ads, and they have decided to take the next step. They are ready to respond!
The first thing we need to discuss is your conversion model. Will everyone who converts from your funnel actually show up? No. There will likely be a huge discrepancy between the people who respond, and those who actually show up. This is discouraging when you run an ad for a specific event that five hundred people sign up for, but then only one hundred people attend. One way to help prevent this discrepancy is to have a strong conversion set up. You must have some sort of a hook—something that makes people really excited to attend. If you don’t have a solid conversion model in place, all the work and resources that you put into the top and middle of your funnel will be for nothing.
One option is to have a time-sensitive offer. A carrot at the end of the stick that compels people to follow through with their decision. For a first-time Sunday visitor, a great way to do this is to offer a welcome gift as part of the conversion. People can claim their gift basket online by filling out a special contact form. For example, you could have a retargeting ad send them to a Plan Your Visit form that they are then asked to fill out. We will discuss the Plan Your Visit page and how to make it perfect later when we discuss websites. But to give a brief definition, the Plan Your Visit page is where someone can fill out a form online that allows them to essentially pre-schedule their upcoming visit. After they fill out the Plan Your Visit form, you then tell them to come on Sunday and they will have a personalized gift basket waiting for them. It will include a hoodie or a shirt, a mug, a book, and maybe even a $10 gift card to go grab lunch afterwards. It doesn’t have to be this gift basket specifically, but whatever you do, get creative with it and put forth the time and effort to make it a worthwhile gift. In this gift basket example, you would let them take the time to select their hoodie size, and give them a couple of options for their gift card. The point is to let them customize their first-time gift basket. This lets them know that someone is physically putting the basket together specifically for them.
There is a strategy here. Knowing that someone went through all that work to set up their gift basket, people might feel bad backing out on their plans to visit. To help reel in the possible no-shows, you can make it so that the gift basket is good for that one specific Sunday only, unless they let the church know in advance that they have to reschedule their visit.
Believe it or not, these things really help to firm up their decision to actually follow through and attend on Sunday.
Once you have officially decided on your conversion offer, you need to perfect the art of follow up. Many churches are taking advantage of automated text messaging to help remind people of their upcoming visit. Text messages are the king of follow up because they are very personal and there are so many ways to utilize them. You can have an automated text message confirming your visitor’s selections for their customized gift basket. Then you can have an automated text message sent to them on Saturday reminding them of service times the following day. And on Sunday morning, one hour before the service, you could give them even further instructions. If you want to go even deeper beyond text messages, you could set up an automated email drip campaign that sends them a welcome from the pastor a day after they register. After their first service, you could also follow up with them and ask them to let you know how their experience was. All of these follow up automated events can be set up manually by connecting your website with an API platform like Zapier, or you could use one of the many drip campaign programs available.
Keep in mind that sometimes automating is ideal, but sometimes a personal touch is better. A church that I work with in California is killing it with text message follow ups. Instead of automating everything, they decided that a personal interaction was key. As soon as someone signs up for a visitor form online, they have a team member personally shoot them a text message to introduce themselves. And on Saturday or Sunday, this individual sets a time to meet them and welcome them into the church. After the Sunday service, this team member also follows up with them to see how they liked their experience. Then the following week, they invite them to lunch after church. The goal is to get people to come back three to four weeks in a row so they can build some relationships.
If your goal is to get someone to come to your church on a Sunday, there are two unique challenges. As opposed to traditional sales, people can’t immediately respond to your ads. They have to wait until the next service to attend. With online sales, once they have made up their mind to purchase something, they can do so right there on the website. It is easy to measure your cost per sale, and scale your marketing with that data. But with church marketing, the only way to get real data is by using a Plan Your Visit form with some sort of offer. It is a win for churches because they can directly see the fruits of their marketing funnel. When you get a Plan Your Visit form, Facebook or Google will show you that you got a “conversion” from your funnel, and that feels pretty good! Measuring your cost per conversion is key.
But even if you have the best Plan Your Visit page, a killer follow up plan, and a great first-time guest gift, you still have one more problem. Most people are not going to use the Plan Your Visit form, but they are just going to show up on Sunday. Which is still great! You will be so happy when you consistently have new people coming in on Sundays. However, you will have to keep that in mind when you think about how many new visitors you can attribute directly to your marketing. The people who just show up without using the Plan Your Visit form won’t be counted into your cost per conversion. So you will just have to rely on other methods of measuring where those guests are generated from.
Make sure your visitor info card or connection card (or whatever you call it at your church) has a spot where people can let you know where they first heard about you. However, don’t get caught up if visitors are not checking the “Facebook” or “Instagram” options as much as you would like. Most people will hear about your church from Facebook, then Instagram, then their friend Mike, and the list goes on. It is rare that someone just hears about a church from one single location. It is all part of the funnel.
Remember, the goal of the funnel is to keep people, not just generate first-time guests. The nature of your church should be to make people feel so incredibly welcomed when they come for the first time. People should know without a doubt that guests are a big deal. Your greeters and guest experience volunteers are way more important than you may realize, but everyone should be on a mission to be as welcoming and relational as possible for new guests. Don’t let your church be consumers only. Keep in mind that a guest is a life that needs to be touched. Obviously you don’t want to overwhelm them, but it is a culture of kindness that people will remember more than any message or song.
Maximize your conversions with follow up and a personalized experience.
