You would like your first-time guests to text you their numbers. You are already thinking of all the ways you can use these numbers to encourage their next steps closer to Christ. Yet, these people know very little about you. Why should they give you their personal information?
Step 1: The ‘Carrot’
It’s pretty much accepted that when we ask people for their info, we should give them something for it—a ‘carrot’ so to speak. ‘Carrots’ can come in all shapes and sizes: A voucher for free coffee? A complimentary book / journal / mug / T-shirt? A gift card? A 30-day devotional? The ability to enter into a contest?
Step 2: The Method
A very successful way to get new people to text you their numbers is to ask them to do it...but not just anyone and not just anytime. For best results, have your senior pastor do it or the next best person.
At some point during the service, that person would say something like: “If this is your first or second time with us, go ahead and take out your phones…”
Visuals can help, too—print the number they should text in your church bulletin, put it on your touch cards, and/or display it a screen behind the speaker (large and clear).
In our webinar we talk about an ‘AND’ strategy. If you want to digitize, then Digital Connect Texts (Data Capture) are better than Digital Connect Cards for most churches, but for many churches, a physical connect card or using the data from check-in will work well enough.
Don't force it. The ‘best’ way is always what’s right for your church’s culture.
If you don’t get a lot of people texting in and you see that filling out physical connect cards is working best, here’s what we suggest: use our “and” strategy and keep the texting campaign running for the few that are using it (you might see this number grow each week, too!), but use our new guest follow-up workflow to automate the follow-up for you! You already have to manually add those people to your database, why not also add them to the same guest follow-up workflow the “texters” would be added to? Add them once, and let PastorsLine automate the rest!
Pro Tip: Use integrations to automatically add people to the AMC follow-up workflow.