Introduction

The Catholic market, with its global reach and deeply committed audience, offers immense opportunities for products, services, and mission-driven apostolic work, but also unique challenges:

• Fragmentation: Diverse Catholic subcultures require varied approaches.

• Nuanced Communication: Outreach must align with Catholic religious sensibilities.

• Specialized Knowledge: Restrictions on religious advertising demand expertise in alternative and specialized networks.

Drawing from The Saintmaker’s journey, this article distills actionable insights for effectively engaging this complex market. The Saintmaker’s success—evidenced by high retention rates, substantial email growth, and impressive sales figures—serves as a blueprint for navigating these challenges and making the most of the opportunities available.

Lead-Generation: The Cornerstone Strategy

Unfortunately, the Catholic market is very fragmented into communities and sub-communities, making it hard to simply and inexpensively reach Catholics. As such, lead generation is an essential strategy for attracting potential customers and fostering trust and community. The Saintmaker’s success was built on a foundation of lead generation through strategic product launches, targeted list-building, and email marketing.

Product and Offer Launches

Regular high-profile product and offer launches, such as seasonal sales and upgrades, were pivotal in driving engagement with The Saintmaker and contributed greatly to our fast growth. By strategically combining email marketing with targeted ads and influencer partnerships, we tapped into the online Catholic community’s pre-existing networks, carefully building trust, communicating the value of our offerings, and creatively motivating leads and prospects to act. This approach led to $1M in sales and 15,000 units sold within the first two years. These types of campaigns should be seen not only as opportunities to sell or to drive donations, but also as powerful opportunities to build a highly interested list of prospects.

List-Building and Email Marketing

Effective list-building is crucial in a fragmented market. Catholic Digest, once a major publication with over 1 million subscribers in the mid-20th century, now represents a bygone era. Today, no single Catholic magazine has widespread appeal, with most drawing only 10,000 to 30,000 subscribers. To our broader point about fragmentation, each magazine represents one of these fractured communities and sub-communities, and engaging Catholics across these far-flung groups can be a challenge.

List-building overcomes this fragmentation by consolidating diverse audiences into a focused, motivated group of email and/or SMS subscribers. For example, The Saintmaker’s Lent Digital Detox, a free training program to help Catholics “detox” from digital media, computer and smartphone use in preparation for Lent, generated 4,000 leads in three weeks at $2.00 per lead. Over two years, targeted efforts like this expanded our email list to 26,000 subscribers with a 62% open rate, highlighting the power of contributing real—often free!—value for the spiritual lives of customers to build engagement, motivation to act on future offers, and long-lasting brand loyalty.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is not the one-stop marketing solution that many have made it out to be. But social media can be used very effectively at particular stages of the “Customer Journey”—the pathway that a typical customer takes from awareness of your brand, to motivation to purchase or contribute, to becoming a lifelong “superfan”.

For most organizations, Social Media can be used most effectively in the early stages of a customer’s experience to establish trust and get them involved, in the middle stages to reinforce important offers and calls to action, and in the later stages to keep them interested and engaged.

Social media leads should be converted to email or SMS subscribers are quickly as possible.

Customer Engagement and Retention

Sustained engagement is also vital for building a sustainable organization with an engaged supporter base. Regular, personalized communication through emails and loyalty programs keeps customers connected and encourages repeat business. “Drip” campaigns—ongoing email and SMS campaigns—ensure leads remain engaged and likely to convert. The Saintmaker’s retention rate of 60%, significantly above the industry norm, underscores the effectiveness of focused retention and upgrade strategies.

The quality of your customer service also communicates very clearly what your level of commitment is for your customer base, and how interested you are in having them “on board” for your organizational mission, which is why customer service is another important consideration in your strategic marketing strategy for Catholics. In this market, word gets around fast!

Custom Audiences on Facebook

Unfortunately, recent changes in data tracking and ad targeting have made it even harder for Catholic organizations to reach their audiences online. But there are workarounds.

Building custom and lookalike (i.e., advertising audiences that “look like” your existing email list subscribers) audiences using pre-existing data, usually derived from email lists, has always been the most effective way to reach out to customers, but mastery of this skillset has become essential for Catholic organizations looking to advertise effectively on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This can be done in two different ways:

• Leveraging pre-existing data: Using existing email lists to create custom audiences allows for more personalized and effective outreach, consistently delivering better engagement and conversion rates.

• Building new audiences: Retargeting tools like Retention.com can track website visitors and build new custom audiences. While this requires investment, it is particularly effective for high-value campaigns where customer lifetime value justifies the cost.

Strategic Marketing Approach

Because of the fragmented nature of the Catholic audience, it cannot be emphasized enough that a strategic approach to marketing is crucial to success. Most Catholic organizations are running on a tight budget, with limited staff, and every move should count. An organization should not even consider wading into the waters of paid advertising without a strategic approach. Success in the Catholic market requires a coordinated, multi-channel strategy that maximizes exposure and engagement at every phase of the Customer Journey.

Understanding the Customer Journey

To effectively move customers through the stages from initial awareness of your brand and mission to becoming passionate advocates of the organizational missions, it is crucial to understand their unique needs, behaviors, and the unique steps that you would like them to take with your business or non-profit. By refining customer personas through surveys and data analysis, it is possible to map out this journey. This approach ensures a cohesive and personalized experience across all touchpoints, leading to higher engagement, conversion rates, and ultimately, the creation of "superfans." Each stage of the Customer Journey should include:

• Engagement Strategies: Develop tailored content and strategic touchpoints that guide customers through each stage of the journey efficiently.

• Success Metrics: Measure success and optimize marketing efforts at each phased of the journey with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates, engagement levels, and retention rates.

Creating a Network Effect

Strategically aligning marketing efforts across multiple marketing channels can generate a powerful viral effect. The goal is to reach out to customers at any given stage of their journey from multiple angles with tailored content that is perfectly suited to both their mindset and the delivery channel. To illustrate the effectiveness of this approach, The Saintmaker achieved an average ROAS of 4.0 across all channels combined, with a first-time average order value (AOV) of $72 and a Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) of $150 against an acquisition cost of just $16.

Platform-Specific Strategies

As a part of the “network effect” described above, it is important to recognize the unique strengths of each marketing channel and to ensure that your strategy makes good use of them. As mentioned, this is best done by matching marketing channels to customer needs at each stage of the Customer Journey. For instance, Facebook is ideal for broad awareness of your brand and also for direct response advertising; Instagram is excellent for motivating customers to act, removing barriers to entry, and long-term engagement; email marketing is great for repurchasing and retention.

Major Promotional Events

Leveraging major events—whether in-person or virtual—can drive rapid and unprecedented growth. Integrating live appearances and interaction, influencer partnerships, value-added free content, and strategic lead generation during these events can create viral opportunities that expand your audience significantly. The Saintmaker used virtual webinars and video trainings, combined with product and offer launches, to achieve that end, which was another major driver of our rapid list growth.

Influencers and Brand Ambassadors

Influencer marketing can greatly extend a campaign's reach. While Catholic influencer relationships can be a bit of a minefield to navigate both politically and logistically, a systematized approach with carefully tailored offers can yield excellent results. When a social media influencer makes a recommendation, their audience tends to listen, with offers from Instagram influencers often garnering an impressive 7% conversion rate.

Influencer partnerships should be segmented into tiers as follows, with strategic implications for both tiers:

• Micro-Influencers (10k - 100k followers): Often have more engaged audiences, leading to higher conversion rates (up to 8% or more) even though their reach is smaller.

• Macro-Influencers (100k - 1M+ followers): Typically have broader reach but may experience lower conversion rates (around 1% to 3%) due to a less targeted audience.

The Saintmaker’s network of over 50 micro- and macro-influencers generated more than $100,000 in attributable revenue in the first two years, showcasing the power of influencer partnerships.

Commitment to Integrated Media

In a market where innovation is often slow to come, creatively integrating various media formats—video, podcasts, blogs, and landing pages—can accomplish two important and related goals:

• Boost visibility and domain authority on search engines, meaning your site and offers get more organic traffic

• Impress customers and industry peers, positioning you as a leader in the market

Video, Podcasting, and Blogging

Video is a powerful tool for emotional connection and strategic storytelling. Video also makes it possible to communicate beautiful and persuasive messages that touch the hearts of audience members at various points of their journey. Podcasts and blogs, though underutilized in the Catholic market, have immense potential for lead generation, brand awareness, and customer retention. Each of these mediums should be used strategically—and that strategy (we’re beginning to sound like a broken record) flows primarily from a deep understanding of the Customer Journey that you are bringing prospects along.

Optimized Landing Pages

High-converting landing pages are essential for converting leads and boosting domain authority. When integrated with other marketing efforts, they create a cohesive user experience that builds trust and leads to focused action and engagement with your brand and it assorted offers.

Unique Product Offerings

Smart innovation will help you stand out in the Catholic market. By continuously engaging with the audience through feedback and surveys, The Saintmaker ensured our products, services, and offers aligned closely with Catholic needs, leading to strong sales and lasting loyalty.

Just as marketing messages can be matched to customer needs at each stage of the customer journey, so too can product and service offerings, and this is perhaps the most powerful way to show customers that you are listening to their needs and continuing to develop offerings that meet them.

Conclusion

The Catholic market presents unique opportunities for those willing to adopt innovative, strategic marketing approaches. The lessons from The Saintmaker’s journey provide a roadmap for success. By understanding the nuances of the Catholic audience and employing proven strategies, organizations can effectively engage this community and achieve their goals.