Following up with your guests is essential in encouraging them to consider visiting your church’s worship service again or to get further involved. Touching base with your guests after their visit is one way you can extend a positive experience, answer any questions, and let them know you’d love for them to visit again.
To accomplish this goal, be sure to include connection cards in your gift bags.
With your connections cards, aim for simplicity. In other words, only require visitors to share with you the bare minimum of information—their name and email address. Making it easy to complete your connection cards will increase the number of visitors who will actually complete them.
By giving your first-time guests a gift, you’ll be better able to close your church’s backdoor and encourage visitors to come back.
How much your first-time gift will cost
Sharing gifts with your first-time guests is a nice gesture.
It can do all of the things we just talked about above and more.
However, if the gift you share is done half-heartedly, you’ll end up discouraging people from returning, which defeats the entire purpose.
When planning your gift, be prepared to budget accordingly.
After talking to 33 church leaders across the United States about the gifts they provide to first-time guests, Rich Birch discovered that the average cost per gift was $4.88. In his research, he discovered that the least expensive gift was $0.75 and that the highest amount spent was $15.00.
How much you spend will look different from church to church and city to city.
For your gift, we suggest investing in a few gift bags to get started. This will let you know how much you should expect to pay, how much time it takes to put them together, and what type of feedback you’re receiving from your visitors.
How to make people feel comfortable—not awkward
Giving someone a gift is more of an art than a science.
Here’s the deal:
Make guests feel comfortable—not awkward.
What time you give a visitor a gift during your worship service is key and there are several times you can choose to give them a gift. But one of the best ways to hand your guests a gift is after your worship service.
To pull this off, here’s what you need to do:
- Dedicate a space to first-time guests
- Let first-time guests know where to go after your worship service
For this last point, it’s best to let your guests know during your announcements where they should go and to include this information in other places, such as your bulletin or in your foyer.
