In 2021, generating new possible members for Emmanuel Baptist Church is more crucial than ever. In a post-pandemic world, churches can no longer use foot traffic as a main statistical marker in the brick and mortar alone as many churchgoers have opted to interact virtually with their place of worship.
Because of this, some studies have been released to show just how many people are interacting online more than in-person services. According to CDF Capital, they surveyed 269 churches during March 2020 and 86% of them did not hold in-person services. Religious organizations have entered the online marketing sphere to help gain new contacts and membership, specifically paid advertising.
Many churches canceled in person due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and are switching to digital formats. As months progressed, it became very important for churches to track the numbers of individuals reached in person and online.
Purple Marketing Consulting has been working with Emmanuel Baptist church over the past eight months to increase its social media presence and generate new contacts through online ads. For this project, PMC had a $2,000 ad spend budget and focused on pay-per-click advertising, an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked. In the time working with Emmanuel Baptist, 52 new contacts were generated from these ads alone. Included in this ad spend, PMC did target specific events the churches held which were not contact goal focused; therefore, few new contact forms were generated from the event promotions.
These contacts are pivotal for a religious organization’s overall success. Members can produce donations of anywhere from $1,200 to $20,000 annually. If Emmanuel Baptist has 52 new contact forms, this could potentially mean at minimum, $62,400 of revenue ranging to a little over $1 million dollars depending on how much each of the 52 contacts donate yearly.
By Andrea Wolf, Staff Copywriter
The average cost per click (CPC) in Google Ads on mobile across all industries is $2.67 on the search network and $0.60 on the display network
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