Email Marketing Software for Churches, Built Consent-First

Ekkli's email campaigns let your church send newsletters, event announcements, and giving updates only to people who've actively said yes to hearing from you. Audiences can be built from a group, hand-picked one by one, or both, and every send automatically respects consent status, opt-outs, and bounce history — so you're never one careless export away from a compliance problem or a mailbox full of angry unsubscribes.

This is email marketing software for churches in the narrow, useful sense: a way to reach a defined list and know, without checking manually, that everyone on it actually asked to be there. The standard editor is deliberately plain — clean, readable formatting rather than a design canvas — and if your church wants a visual, drag-and-drop builder, that is the Reach add-on, included at no extra cost from the Sunday plan upward. What the campaign tool handles either way is the two things that quietly go wrong with church email in practice: who is allowed to receive it, and what happens to your sender reputation when some of those addresses bounce.

Consent-aware targeting: the part most church email tools skip

Most small-church email problems aren't about design — they're about who ends up on the list. A visitor fills in a card at a welcome table two years ago, gets added to "the newsletter" by whoever was managing the spreadsheet at the time, and never explicitly agreed to ongoing marketing email. Multiply that across a few hundred contacts collected through sign-up sheets, event forms, and CSV imports over several years, and most churches genuinely don't know who on their list actually consented to receive email — only that the list exists.

Ekkli's email campaigns are built around the opposite default. The same GDPR double opt-in consent engine that governs your member database also governs who's eligible for a campaign send: a contact has to have an active, confirmed opt-in for email communication before a campaign will reach them, full stop. There's no separate "just this once" override and no way to import a CSV and blast it — if consent isn't recorded and active, that address doesn't receive the campaign, regardless of how the audience was built. That's a deliberate trade-off: your first send may reach fewer people than your full contact list, because it only reaches people who've actually said yes.

Building an audience: by group or by hand

Two ways to define who a campaign goes to, and they combine:

• By group. Target one of your church's existing groups — a small group, a ministry team, everyone on a particular rota — and the campaign reaches that group's consented members automatically. Add someone to the group later and they're in scope for the next send; no separate list to keep in sync by hand.
• Manual pick. Hand-select specific people for a campaign that doesn't map to an existing group — say, everyone who signed up for a past event, or a handful of key volunteers you want to reach directly.

Either way, consent filtering applies underneath the selection automatically — the eligible-to-receive filter is baked into how the audience is assembled, not a manual step you could forget.

Automatic bounce and complaint suppression

Sender reputation is the unglamorous part of email that quietly determines whether your messages land in inboxes or get filtered into spam — and it's damaged by exactly the kind of thing that happens naturally on a church list: an old address that no longer exists, a full inbox nobody checks anymore, or, occasionally, someone marking a message as spam instead of unsubscribing. Left unmanaged, repeatedly emailing addresses like that drags down deliverability for every future send, including to people who genuinely want to hear from you.

Ekkli handles this automatically. When an email bounces or triggers a spam complaint, that address is added to a suppression list and future campaigns skip it without anyone needing to notice, look it up, and remove it by hand. There's no bounce report to monitor or "problem addresses" spreadsheet to maintain — the list stays clean on an ongoing basis, protecting deliverability for the campaigns that follow.

Monthly send quotas: what each plan includes

Bulk email starts on the Growing plan. The free trial and Small are push-only, and that is a deliberate product decision rather than a squeeze: a plant or a home group lives in the app, where group chat, direct messages and targeted push notifications reach everyone who is actually there. From Growing upward, monthly sending volume scales with the plan:

"Sends" counts individual messages delivered, not campaigns — one newsletter to 300 consented members counts as 300 sends against the monthly quota, not one. For most churches that is a comfortable margin: a weekly newsletter plus event announcements and giving reminders sits well inside the Growing or Sunday allowance. If you do go over, extra sends are charged at €4 per 1,000 rather than the campaign being blocked.

Before your first campaign: sending from your own domain

Every church that sends bulk email through Ekkli sends it from its own domain. Before the first campaign goes out, three records are added to your domain's DNS settings — SPF, DKIM and DMARC — and we verify them with a live check before switching sending on.

This is a real step, and it needs whoever controls your church's domain. Worth knowing before you upgrade rather than on the morning you had planned to send. We walk you through it, and if nobody at your church is comfortable editing DNS records, we can set it up for you for a one-off fee.

The reason for the requirement is straightforward: it means your sender reputation belongs to your church. No other church on the platform can damage it, and your messages are authenticated as genuinely coming from you — which is increasingly what decides whether a newsletter reaches an inbox or a spam folder.

See the full pricing breakdown for exact monthly and annual figures, including regional pricing for churches outside our standard pricing band.

What email campaigns are for — and what they're not

Worth being direct about scope. Ekkli's email campaigns are a sending and targeting tool: pick an audience, write a message, send it, and let consent and suppression handling run automatically in the background. The standard editor keeps formatting simple; the Reach add-on adds the visual drag-and-drop designer and tag-based audience building on top. Email is not the only channel — SMS is available too, with its own separate consent and paid for with credits bought in advance — but for most congregational communication, email and push do the work between them, and push notifications are on every plan including the trial.

For most church communication — a weekly update, "registration closes Friday" for an event, a thank-you note tied to a season of giving — the plain editor is genuinely enough, and the confidence that everyone on the list actually wants to hear from you matters more than the layout.

How email campaigns fit with the rest of Ekkli

Campaigns aren't a bolted-on tool with a separate contact list — audiences are drawn from the same member and group data your church already manages inside Ekkli. Someone who joins a group is targetable by that group next time you email it; someone who withdraws consent stops receiving campaigns immediately. A typical use spans the platform: email a group about an upcoming event, let people register through event registration, and follow up afterward with a thank-you tied to their giving record — one login, one contact record per person, one consent status governing every channel.

Frequently asked questions

Who actually receives an email campaign?

Only people with an active, confirmed opt-in for email communication under Ekkli's GDPR double opt-in consent engine. Building an audience by group or by hand selects candidates; consent status filters who among them the campaign actually reaches. There's no way to override that filter for a single send.

Does the free trial include email campaigns?

No. The trial and Small are both push-only: unlimited push notifications through Ekkli's installable app, and zero email sends. Bulk email starts on the Growing plan, with monthly quotas rising through Sunday and Ministry.

What happens to an email address that bounces?

It's added to an automatic suppression list, and future campaigns skip it without anyone needing to notice the bounce and remove it manually. The same applies to addresses that trigger a spam complaint.

Can I import a CSV of email addresses and send to all of them?

You can import contacts, but a campaign only reaches the ones with an active, confirmed consent record — importing a list doesn't grant consent on its own. That's what keeps campaigns GDPR-aligned rather than a bulk-blast tool.

Is there a drag-and-drop email template builder?

Yes, through the Reach add-on. The standard campaign editor keeps formatting simple and concentrates on targeting, consent, sending and suppression. Reach adds a visual drag-and-drop designer and lets you build a send list from tags rather than picking people by hand. It is €19 a month, and included at no extra cost from the Sunday plan upward.

Does Ekkli send SMS as well as email?

Yes. SMS has its own separate consent and is paid for with credits bought in advance, so there is never a surprise bill. It is not part of the free trial. For most congregational messages, push notifications through the app are the faster channel and are free on every plan.

What counts against my monthly send quota?

Individual messages delivered, not campaigns sent. A newsletter reaching 500 consented members counts as 500 sends against that month's quota, whether it went out as one campaign or several.

This guide is maintained by the Ekkli team, who build the email campaign tools described above. Not sure which plan's quota fits your church's list size? Reach out and we'll help you estimate it honestly, whether or not you end up using Ekkli.