Maximize Push Notifications

Increasing efficiency, promoting campaigns, and making great content incredibly accessible are only a few of the benefits of using push notifications. Your audience has dozens, even hundreds of distractions demanding their attention each day. There is a barrage of media and messaging to constantly compete with, which is why the immediacy, accessibility, and brevity of push notifications makes them one of the best tools for reaching your audience. 

Just like with any mobile tool, coming up with a strategy, no matter how simple, will help you maximize this important feature in your app. We've come up with a few ideas on how to do just that!

Don't forget about the inbox

Even though push notifications are short and simple, your users might want want to review it at a later time, which is why the push notification inbox is very important so that no one misses your message.

To get the most out of this storage feature, occasionally draw your community's attention to it so that they are reminded to check it and see what they might've missed!

Send your message at the perfect moment

To reach your audience at exactly the right moment all you have to do is schedule a push notification ahead of time. Are you planning a worship night and need to remind your community the night before? No problem, just select a date and time and schedule your notification in advance so that your congregation can get a friendly reminder.

Scheduled push notifications allow you to be as efficient as possible by scheduling content when it will be most useful to your audience. If you're wanting to send an encouraging quote or bible verse during lunch time when your community is most likely to see it, scheduling ahead of time is a breeze.

3. Make great content a click away

Push notifications with attachments makes promoting great content easier than ever. Whether you need to send a sign-up form straight to your community, or just want to share a great article out, try this helpful feature to increase engagement in your app!

4. Target a specific audience

You might have specific communication needs for specific groups, with Group Push Notifications you can eliminate any barriers to sending relevant content to the right group of people. 

Creating a group is simple and targeted. If you need to let your worship team know that practice has been rescheduled, group notifications are your simple solution: just create a group with your worship team members and send your message without inconveniencing the rest of your community with a notification that's not relevant to them.

If you have any questions about signing up for an app or how to use push notifications, get in touch with us! We're happy to help.

Increase Engagement For Easter with Your App!

Easter services are the most highly attended weekends for churches, so why not take advantage of the opportunity to share the Gospel and good news of the risen Christ by leveraging your app to engage with first time guests as well as committed members?

Here are some ideas to increase engagement with your community this Easter Sunday...

1.  Send a group push notification to Easter volunteers

Group push notifications are the perfect tool to get in touch with your Easter Sunday volunteers. If you need to send out instructions, new information, or specific prayer requests about Easter weekend, this is the best way to do it!

No more wrangling everyone up for last minute meetings or trying to reach everyone by email in the hope that it will somehow get to your volunteers in time. Just create your push notification group and send up-to-the second updates straight to their phone.

2. Share last year's Easter Sunday sermon

You might have last year's Easter Sunday sermon sitting in your archives somewhere. To get your community ready and excited for Easter weekend, you could share last year's sermon in a linked push notification, on your blog, or social media.

3. Share baptism sign up forms in a linked push notification

Make it as easy as possible for people in your community to get baptized by sending out a push notification with a link to a sign up form. Sending sign up forms ahead of time will help you get in front of all of the Easter Sunday busyness!

4. Share baptism testimonies on your blog

You've probably witnessed some amazing stories of life transformation at past Easter services in your church. Why not encourage your community and get them excited to celebrate Easter by sharing those stories on your blog? 

5. Tell your community to share the app with friends

With so many visitors making their way to church on Easter Sunday, it is a great evangelistic opportunity. To help get visitors warmed up to the idea of attending your church this weekend, send out a push notification to your community reminding them that they can share your entire app with their friends.

When members of your congregation share your church's app, it will give visitors an idea of what they can expect when they visit your church for Easter.

Happy Easter from all of us at Subsplash!

Tips for Promoting Your App (Part 2)

In our first installment of Tips for Promoting Your App, we discussed some app promotion strategies that would encourage your community to download your app. Here's a review of the four specific strategies we are discussing:

• Generate excitement before the launch
• Leverage the new and improved Subsplash app promotion page
• Communicate the benefits
• Create a promo video

Now, let's take a look at a couple more ideas on how to get your app in front of the people who matter most to your organization.

Communicate the benefits

Your audience might not know all of the ways your app might benefit them, so why not tell them?! Even though you’ve thought through all of the upsides of creating an app for your organization, your community is still warming up to the idea, so tell them how it’s going to make their lives easier. Tell them how they can listen to your podcast on the go, read your blog in an instant, and receive important updates on organization-wide events in push notifications.

You might want to send out an email to let your audience know what the specific benefits are; or, if you send out a monthly newsletter, include a small section dedicated to promoting your app. You might even want to send out a blast on social media that is concise, but hits on the important points.

Create a promo video!

If you have a creative vision for promoting your app that you just can’t wait to share, creating your own promo video is a great way to get your audience excited about downloading your app! While this strategy is more involved, it's a great, creative avenue to get your message across in a way that will stick with your audience in a big way.

Check out some of our other clients' videos for inspiration!

Walnut Creek

 Journey Community Church

If you're wondering how an app can benefit your organization, let's chat. 

Tips for Promoting Your App (Part 1)

You've already invested the time and energy trying to create an app that you hope and pray will bless your community, now it's time to make a plan for how you will roll out the big launch!

With all of the hundreds of thousands of apps out there it can be intimidating to figure out the best way to promote your app so that the right people find it and download it. We want to help! Here are four app promotion strategies that will make all of that effort totally worth it! We will review all of them here and then break down each one in a couple of different posts:

• Generate excitement before the launch
• Leverage the new and improved Subsplash app promotion page
• Communicate the benefits
• Create a promo video

Generate excitement before the launch

You can help people get excited about your app before you even launch! As you prepare to release your app and solidify which features you are going to make available to your audience, consider creating some hype on social media or your website. What if you revealed one new feature every week leading up to your launch?

By highlighting a new feature every week leading up to the release of your app, you can get your community excited about all of the benefits they will get to enjoy once they download your app. A short description and the value of that particular feature will go a long way in showing your community you are committed to providing them with a great experience in your app. You can build hype on your social media channels, your blog, or even your website!

Leverage the new and improved Subsplash app promotion page!

Our design team has been hard at work over the past few months re-designing a beautiful app promotion page just for our awesome clients! We know that our clients are spending the time building their app, and so we want to make the launch as seamless as possible with a promotion page that is the perfect compliment to their app.

A custom-built app promotion page will give users the option to download it on the spot, setting your app up for more downloads and impressions, and giving the Gospel message a wider reach with great content, straight from The Church App dashboard to people's screens.

Check out Part 2 of this series on promoting your app! And be sure to get in touch with us if you have any questions about creating an app with The Church App!

Best Practices Part 2: Connect Tab

Here's part 2 of our series we’ve put together to highlight best practices for maximizing outreach and engagement. We want to shed light on how some of our clients are using their apps to deepen engagement, foster community, and get people connected within the body of Christ. 

Connect Tab 

A unique way to get your audience plugged in is through having a connect tab. Similar to the Sunday tab, the connect tab easily provides your audience ways to get involved. In Elevate Life’s connect tab, users can fill out a connect card, learn more about their mission, join a ministry team, and get involved in outreach projects directly from the app. Let’s say a member is listening to a sermon and gets inspired to join a small group–they can then navigate easily from the media tab over to the connect tab and sign up in mere seconds. Whatever avenues your ministry provides for people to get involved, creating a connect tab is a great way to sync those efforts into one place, and engage people beyond the Sunday service. Get Elevate Life’s app here to see more!

Stay tuned for Part 3!