Think about the last time you visited a fancy restaurant for a special occasion. Was it a flashy advertisement or a recommendation from a close friend that swayed your decision? In most areas of our lives, a personal recommendation goes much further than mass marketing because it comes from someone we know.
The same dynamic is at work with your church’s Christmas services. In many cases, personal invitations yield better results than top-notch marketing campaigns. You might reach a wide audience with billboards and social media ads, but they don’t often foster the meaningful connections you need to get people to walk through your church’s front doors.
That’s why, as your church heads into the Christmas season, it’s critical you leverage personal invitations to reach more people this Christmas.
The Limitations of Extensive Marketing Campaigns
We live in the most over-marketed era in world history. On average, the people you want to reach see between 6,000 and 10,000 ads a day. Your ads for your church services are just one of many, many, many, many ads your prospective guests see during the holiday season.
You may say, so what? What do all those advertisements have to do with the effectiveness of the marketing messages our church is distributing? Likely more than you realize.
People who study advertising effectiveness for a living call it “advertising clutter.” Most people see so many advertising/marketing messages each day that none of them actually register in their brains. That means your church’s Christmas promotions become nothing more than white noise unless you’re willing to pump lots of money into producing something that’ll draw the attention of your potential audience.
Does this mean you should skip advertising or marketing during the holiday season? Not at all. However, it’s important to have realistic expectations about how effective these strategies will be if they’re your only approach. In other words, while advertising and marketing are still valuable, don’t count on them alone to drive all your church’s outreach efforts.
Why Invitations Matter
When someone from our church invites a family member, friend, or neighbor to Christmas services, they tap into something powerful. From the first choices we make in life to our decisions about our profession and long-term committed relationships, the opinions of those close to us matter greatly.
Some of the biggest brands on the planet have noticed and capitalized on this in recent years. For example, Dropbox—one of the world’s foremost cloud storage brands—jumped from 100,000 to 4 million users in just 15 months after offering free storage space for referrals. Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb all saw significant growth after leveraging the exuberance of their biggest fans as well.
If some of the largest companies in the world—with marketing budgets that would dwarf many churches—see the power of personal invites, what does that say for churches looking to fill their pews for Christmas services?
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says it like this, “People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend.”
When it comes to where people worship on Christmas Eve, the same principle applies. One Lifeway Research study showed that two-thirds of Americans say that a personal invitation from a church-going family member would be the most effective method to reach them.
A personal invite from someone we know helps ease anxieties about visiting a new place. Perhaps more importantly, the invitation usually comes with the companionship of someone else who will attend the worship service with us.
7 Ways to Leverage Personal Invitations This Christmas
As effective as personal invitations are, statistics show that many people in our churches simply aren’t doing it regularly. While 6 of 10 U.S. Protestant churchgoers say they’ve invited at least one person to their church in the past six months, a third say they have invited no one.
What can we do to make it easier for our congregants to invite others to church this Christmas?
- Put something in their hand. Give your congregants a printed invitation to your Christmas/Christmas Eve services they can hand it to others as they invite them to church. Include the time, date, church address, and a map.
- Ask your teaching pastor to share invitational stories in sermons. Your pulpit is always your most valuable motivational tool. If congregants regularly see your pastor modeling inviting others to worship services, they are more likely to do it themselves.
- Provide a good experience for guests. If church members don’t believe their friends and family will enjoy their visit to your service, they won’t likely ask them to join you for services.
Make auditing your church’s guest experience a regular habit. What does that mean? It’s simply asking people who don’t normally attend your church to come as a guest and describe their experience to you. - Encourage your members to pray for one another and the people they invite to church. Never forget there is a spiritual dynamic to inviting friends and family to church. We need to regularly pray that God would open the hearts of those we’re inviting to church.
- Share stories of people who were invited to church. Help people see their invitations can impact the lives of those they care about. Ask people to share their stories—both the stories of inviters and invitees—during worship services, on your website, on social media, etc.
- Encourage all ages to invite friends and family. Your age-graded ministries (children, youth, etc.) can all take part in a church-wide invitation strategy. Children and youth spend much of their days rubbing shoulders with other kids at school. Ask them to invite those in their social circles to Christmas services.
- Give congregants digital tools for invitations. In today’s world, digital invitation tools can be especially effective. These tools aren’t used in the place of personal, human-to-human invites; they augment them.
For example, provide a digital invitation in your mobile app (with much of the same invitation as you’d put in a printed invite). Your members can text those invitations to their friends after they’ve personally asked them to attend your Christmas services.
More than anything, try this Christmas to build an invitational culture at your church where your congregants know the value you place on invitations. Make this a priority. Spend significant time with your team brainstorming some other ideas about how you can encourage your congregants to invite others to celebrate Christmas with your church.
But don’t limit your Christmas outreach to your services. We’ve put together a free guide to help you create an outreach campaign leading up to Christmas. Get your copy of The Power of 12 Days: An Outreach Campaign to Share Christmas Hope today!
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