This message is part of our comprehensive Visitor Nurturing strategy which driven by our messaging and automation tools within DiscipleSoft. In the next section we will outline how Visitor Nurturing is a powerful method for visitor follow-up and conversion.

Visitor Nurturing Overview

When someone comes to your church as a visitor and they share enough information about themselves through the visitors’ card, it’s because they’re interested in your church. Visitor nurturing campaigns help the follow-up team build relationships with visitors, from their first interaction to the time they are ready to make a decision to join your church family. Because the nurturing campaigns are meant to communicate with each visitor or prospective member on an individual level, it’s essential for campaign content — emails, SMSs, direct mail, etc. — to be personalized.

Relationship Building

Nurturing is rarely about immediate visitor conversions. Instead, it’s about inspiring real heartfelt engagement and keeping your church at the forefront of your visitors’ minds.  Some of the nurturing content will directly answers your audiences’ questions and relates to their needs in their physical and spiritual lives. When you help in solving their problems you are laying the groundwork for building long-term relationships.

With the right content mix, tailored to the right audience, sent at the right time, your church can gradually inform visitors about your church, its vision and benefits of belonging, and eventually inspire them to become a member.  A church with a proper visitors’ nurturing mindset would never spam their audience with generic messages. That kind of communication doesn’t teach audiences anything, nor does it take them on any kind of journey. Visitor nurturing is about identifying specific needs, and then tailoring content to different audience segments (or even individual audience members, when needed).

Your visitor nurturing campaign content should be designed to inform and entertain your audience in personalized and relevant ways. They should be excited to open and engage with each new message, and you should be excited to see where your nurturing journey takes them. 

Playing the Long Game

Good visitor nurturing is about playing the long game. You’re not rushing anyone into making a decision — you’re building an informed and interested audience mix of visitors engaging them in a dialogue that continues over time… perhaps indefinitely! If you build a trusted relationship with your audiences, there’s a strong chance that they’ll turn to your church when they are ready. If you bother them with overly self-interest messaging from the very beginning, they won’t want to build that relationship in the first place. Visitor nurturing is essential for your overall church growth and our automation and messaging tools are designed to help you.

Examples of Nurturing Messages