This post was last updated on July 19th, 2024 at 03:39 pm.
A common concern of churches is how to effectively track church visitors and take every appropriate step to make sure those visitors feel welcome and can find answers to their questions.
IconCMO’s record keeping features and filters and its powerful groups module can give churches many options to track church visitors and reach out to them.
Below is one workflow that could be modified and used to make the most of IconCMO’s features to track large numbers of visitors (say, a dozen or more first-time visitors per Sunday). But by all means, comment and let us know other approaches you’ve found helpful.
Groups vs Status Codes
There are mainly two ways to track segments of your church population, such as visitors:
- by status code
- in the groups module
| Status Code | Groups Module |
| • Use as a filter in most reports • Use as a filter for donation statements • Use as a filter for mass adding to groups in the groups module | • Use to run any of the group reports • Use to create events and record attendance for the group • Use to send mass emails and texts |
For this post, I’m focusing on the groups module as a means to track visitors because of its communication features, but depending on your needs, you may want to track the progress of visitors through both groups and statuses.
Groups
IconCMO’s groups module is a great system for tracking segments of your church community, like visitors.
In today’s world, individual mobile phone numbers and email addresses have become more important and useful than a landline, family phone number. Setting up a group allows you to use IconCMO’s mass communication features to reliably reach people at their own numbers or email addresses.
Create a Folder and Groups to Track Church Visitors
Create three groups called:
- ‘One Time’ to track first-time visitors that haven’t been contacted
- ‘One Time Contacted’ to track first-time visitors that have been contacted
- ‘Multi Time’ for visitors that have visited more than once
Then put them into the a folder called ‘Visitors’.
Record Your Church Visitors
Let’s say our new visitors are Jim and Marie Dimitrios. I’ll create a household for them, give their individual records email addresses, and I’ll add them to the ‘One Time’ group.
Send Out a Welcome Email to Church Visitors
Click on the email icon for the group as you see below.
Now we want to copy the ‘One Time’ group into the ‘One Time Contacted’ group. First click on the ‘Copy Group’ button from the main screen.
Next, you will get a screen like the one below. You would fill out the dropdown list with the values as seen below. The records in the ‘One Time’ group will be added to whatever records are already in ‘One Time Contacted’ group.
Lastly, you clear out the ‘One Time’ group to use again next time. Removing the individuals is easily completed by clicking the ‘Remove All’ button.
If the visitor returns, you can switch them from the ‘One Time Contacted’ group to the ‘Multi Time’ group.
Thus, with this workflow, we have a group for sending an initial welcome email, a group for following up with one-time visitors until they return, and a group for keeping in touch with the multi-time visitors.
Learn more about tracking church visitors and communicating clearly with them.
Also, learn more about our church management software and its church group and communication features.
Hi, How I can print the list from each event?
Thank you
Lili,
Good question.
If you’re using our attendance module and recording attendance on a person-by-person basis (not head count), you could also use a ‘one time visit’ status code for first time visitors. Then, for any event, just run the ‘Attendance for a Single Event’ report and filter by that status code.
Otherwise, you could set up separate groups for one-time visitors for the separate event types.
Does that help with your question? Feel free to give us a call or shoot us an email to discuss in more detail.
Thanks, Lili!
Good ideas, though when sending emails from ICONCMO natively, do you have any idea on who opens them or any interaction? Do you have control over the graphic layout of the email, i.e. importing videos, such as a welcome video and then segmentation opportunities/tagging? Any automation opportunities? This was not the case a year or so ago. Always looking for ways to streamline, but won’t be using ICONCMO for email marketing until it catches up with CC and/or MailChimp.
If no, then I’d recommend people export these lists and import into Constant Contact or Mail Chimp. I’ve not tried the Constant Contact integration lately but was not happy with how it altered the name fields in Constant Contact (it modified the First Name field to include both First and Last name, which messes up any personalization you do from the Constant Contact side.) Took me some time to fix this in my Constant Contact database. Not separating personalization factors (such as separating First Name and Last Name) seems to be common as I’ve had this issue with other data gathering options (i.e. contact forms in SquareSpace). I’ve had better luck with downloading a list, tweaking the spreadsheet and uploading to CC versus using ICON’s mail natively.
With regard to mobile phone number collection, in the past, the carrier was required to send SMS. Is this still the case with the Call Em All integration? We are using CEA on a limited basis, but not integrated with ICON.
Thanks for the feedback and sharing your experience, Kelli!
IconCMO’s group emailing system allows basic editing features, embedding and one attachment of up to 10 MB. I just tried and wasn’t able to embed a youtube video as that’s done with an iFrame, which the editor currently doesn’t support. That’s something we could change if there was interest in it. But you could certainly embed an image that links to a welcome video. The email editor is using HTML, so you could also manipulate the appearance of your email by editing the ‘Source’. To your point, though, our emailing system isn’t going to have the marketing features you’ll get from email marketing service like Constant Contact, so using them is a great suggestion.
I believe that in our integration with Constant Contact, we’re sending all the fields separately (e.g. ‘first name’, ‘last name’), so I’m not sure if the issue you were experiencing is something we have control over, but I’ll look into it.
IconCMO’s mass texting does still rely on the carrier. If you use our Call-Em-All integration, though, you will not need the carrier to send mass texts.
How does tracking visitors affect the billing numbers? We are only allowed so many units before the payment increases.
Thanks for the question, Mary.
The ‘Households’ you create for visitors will count as part of your total household count, which is the basis for your billing rate.
We’ve created pricing brackets with large increments of a hundred or more families to give churches plenty of breathing room.
We recommend that churches have a routine for archiving visitors ever so often if they don’t return. This will keep your household count accurate and also keep your database (and visitor groups) clean and focused.