Christmas and Easter are the two biggest church holidays. And rightfully so! Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection are critical to what we believe, but do we make the best use of our outreach efforts during these holidays?
There are many steps involved when planning a special Sunday service, which is why many pastors are already thinking about Easter. There’s flyers to mail, cards to hand out, prayer meetings to have, and so on, but what about your website? As I’ve mentioned before, your website is almost guaranteed to be visited by potential visitors before they will ever come to a service, and special services are no different! Here are 5 things you should have on your website in preparation for Easter.
1. An Easter specific landing page
Before anything else, you need to create a specific page promoting your Easter services and any special Easter event your church has (if any). For your visitor’s ease, you should make this page’s url: “youwebsite.com/Easter”. This page will include the items from tips three through five and will be the url used on any flyers, and handouts you have for your Easter services.
2. A link to the Easter page on your homepage/announcement bar
Just in case some of the people who get your flyers, or find your website another way, don’t end up on the Easter page, you want to make it clear and easy for them to find all the info they’re looking for.
3. All info regarding your Easter services
This includes times, but it also includes any information you give out about normal services. Things such as: ages for childcare/youth classes, what to wear, what to expect (and why), etc. We don’t want to overload people with information that becomes exhausting, but we want to remove any fears or hesitancies because of the unknown. Coming to church can be a scary thing and we want to expel people’s concerns by making sure they know they’re welcome.
4. An invitation to the service
As I wrote about previously, we tend to do a horrible job of adding a “call to action” on our church websites. This is an opportunity to not only tell them about the service, but to invite them. Whether it be signing up with their email to receive a reminder about the service, to pre-register their kids, or to respond in some other way – get them to commit before they forget about it.
5. An option to share
After calling them to come to service, make sure you give them an option to tell others about your Easter service. This could be by sharing a picture or text on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter/Google+ or other social media sites, or even to email the link to a friend so they can know about the Easter service as well. This provides a duel purpose of being used by potential visitors, but also by the people in your church. Many of them want to invite their friends to church, but don’t know how – this is a way they can.
I hope this has left you with some great ideas to make your website more valuable as Easter draws near. I’d love to hear any ideas you have! Let me know in the comments below.
You can also check out this other post I’ve written for more information on how to market your Easter landing page.