Estimates say that between 80-87% of Americans celebrate Easter. At today’s population, that’s somewhere between 2.7-3 million people. In addition, Easter time sees the highest numbers of searches for ‘church’ and ‘God’.
Beyond Easter, every weekend is a chance for a new person to connect with Christ. Are you making that easy?
There is much discussion about whether attendance drives engagement or vice versa. We don’t know the answer, but here’s what we do know: the best way for people to feel involved and keep coming back is to have positive experiences.
How missional is your church in serving people’s Easter and beyond needs for hope, fellowship and positive connections with God?
In our previous article we talked about how important it is for members of your congregation and first-time guests to easily and quickly find the Easter information they need while feeling connected to your brand and mission. We suggested embedding a visually-striking, very unique, filter-specific, Easter events calendar on your church website that stays up-to-date.
In this article, we want to talk about a dedicated, intentional, Easter-specific landing page.
Should your Easter landing page be your home page?
More effective when not. People are not usually searching for specific church names, but rather using key words and phrases such as ‘Easter service near me’. You want to direct them straight to what they are looking for. Remember: we want to make it easy for them to take that step to engage with your church.
What should be on your landing page?
It should have all the information people need to plan their visit without being overwhelming.
Here’s a basic checklist:
- Worship options, including dates, days, times and whatever kids options are available.
- What people can expect from your worship service—length, what happens, etc.
- Invite a friend campaign (if relevant)
- Plan your visit link
- Get directions / link to map
If you’re starting to worry about who’s going to design all this and upload the information, please stop. We’ve got a simple but effective solution.
2 Tips to an effective Easter landing page
Tip 1: Create your Easter-specific calendar
Use the calendar feature in your ChMS or your church website app to create an ‘Easter events only’ calendar. Include the information we spoke about above. Make sure your information is updated with any changes.
Tip 2: Create a sticky bar.
Also known as an alert bar, banner, announcement bar or ‘hello’ bar (after the brand name), this eye-catcher focuses your viewers’ attention. In the preview below, the sticky bar example is at the bottom of the phone screen. Alternatively, you could place it at the top. Either way, it scrolls as you do.
Are there any challenges to implementing these 2 tips?
If you have the right team and the right apps, not really. This would be something you can easily create, really customize, and keep up-to-date. Yet many churches lack the staff, the ability, and/or the time.
Display.Church can remove the challenges this Easter and in the future.
We do the work for you.
Our integrations with Breeze, Community Center/Pushpay (CCB), Google Calendar, and Planning Center (PCO) allow us to pull in your Easter event details. Did some event details change? No problem. The Display.Church automatic sync updates your landing page—no need for you to come back to your website.
Here’s an example:
One of our newest features is the sticky (alert) bar.
A sticky bar is a dynamic way to highlight featured events. Just create a special ‘featured event’ tag or category. Your bar will show your featured event(s) and disappear once the featured event(s) is over. This saves you setup time. A one time install lets you ‘set and forget’ your bar since it automatically updates based on filters such as tags, groups, location, etc. (depending on your integration). Your sticky bar should link to your Easter landing (aka squeeze) page.
We think this is an exciting option for churches. And it’s not just for special events such as Easter. Think about weekend services, especially ones with live streaming. Since the bars can be set up to run automatically, you don’t have to constantly be thinking about getting back to your website to organize the next message.
Why not a pop up?
Pop-ups are super eye-catching, but they can be closed quite easily and then ‘out of sight, out of mind’. As its name implies, sticky bars move as the web page is scrolled, and because the bar does not really interfere with seeing the page, people are less likely to close it.
It’s free to get started with Display.Church, easy to set up, and very cost-effective to keep if it works for you.
Display.Church is not only for churches and ministries. It is also great for pastors or leaders who blog or offer church-related speaking engagements. In fact, anyone who uses one of our integrations or Google Calendar – or plans to – will benefit from the ease and beauty of Display.Church for free.
If you want to learn more or try it out, you can use the invite code: CHURCHCOMMS for a free trial (no credit card required).
