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If you are only going to implement one strategy, do this one – it is the most powerful.
Copy, Paste & Use the following…
Subject: Obituary for [First Name] [Last Name]
Dear [Family Member],
I have uploaded your [Dad’s] obituary notice to our website at
http://www.YourFuneralChapel.com/john-doeFeel free to forward this email to friends and family as we have found that it is an easy way to let a lot of people know about services times – especially on such short notice. Let me know if you need help with anything else.
Sincerely,
[Funeral Director]
Next module: Email Church & Groups immediately
If you prefer text – here it is…
Hi. Welcome to the first strategy of how to double your website traffic. What you probably have is you’ve, probably, received the download of the script that I have. The first strategy that we’re going to do is sending an email to the family, immediately after you’ve posted the obituary to your website. Now, I’d really emphasize that you should just copy this word for word, maybe tweak it just a little bit, but don’t add anything to this email at all.
The email says,
Subject: Obituary for [First Name] [Last Name]
Dear [Family Member]
I have uploaded your Dad’s obituary notice to our website at www.yourfuneralchapel.com/john-doe. Feel free to forward to this email to friends and family as we have found that it’s a very easy way to let a lot of people know about the service times, especially, on such short notice. Let me know if you need any help with anything else.
Sincerely,
Funeral Director.
Now, there’s a lot of things that are going on in this email, I really don’t want you to change too much of it, if any at all. One thing is we’re not posting the obituary itself or the date and time of the service in the email. Because if we did, that is then…then the visitor won’t need to click the link to go to your website.
Second, we’re sending them a link directly to the obituary. We’re not sending them to the home page and then getting them to go to the obituaries and then scroll through the obituaries to find the obituary they’re looking for.
We want them to go right to that obituary, that’s why we have the direct link in there. Also, you probably noticed that there’s no PS like “PS — we’re embalming your father this afternoon, please bring in his dentures.” You know what, that’s probably left for a second email, or probably even a phone call.
But we want to make sure that this is a very clean email so that the family will read it. It’ll be so easy for them just to hit forward in their email program, select all their contacts and hit send. Then, notify the closest people who would be involved in service.
As a side note, those are the exact people who would probably ordering flowers or maybe you have sympathy food or things like that on your website, but at least for flowers. Those are the exact people and you’ve had the family almost promote that for you to the closest people. Now, the main goal is just to get people to the website and to leave a condolence.
Then at their convenience, if they order flowers from you, that’s just the bonus. This is the first strategy. The only thing that you need to do is get an email address from one or as many family members as you can during the arrangements.
Some funeral homes here, they say “You know what, we don’t get the email address because there’s no box for it on our arrangement form.” Create a box and write it in the column because this is a really important strategy. You’re going to help out your families and you’re going to then benefit their friends by finding out when the service is. You’re probably even getting to start to get more people to your services.
Another important reason for this strategy is why we want to get this out as fast as possible. When people hear of a death, they immediately start googling it. You want to get the obituary up on your website before it goes up on the newspaper’s obituary website.
Actually, the longer the distance between it goes up on your site and their site the better. We want Google to see that your obituary is the original content and that the obituary on the newspaper site is the duplicate content so that, when people are searching for the deceased name, your website listing will come up first before the newspaper’s.
That’s a tough thing because the newspaper will have millions and millions of pages and you won’t. You might have, maybe, a few thousand pages. Just follow this strategy. All that it does is for you to get their email address. Then, once you complete the obituary and it is approved by the family, you upload it to the website. Then, you send the email to them, just like it is here, immediately after it is posted.
If you’re wondering, “How do I ask for their email address,” just say, “After we’ve completed the obituary, if you give me your email address, I’ll send you a link immediately to that so that you’ll let other people know about the services.”
They’ll say, “That’s great. Here’s my email address.” You’ll probably get all the people that have email addresses giving them to you in the arrangement office, just not the primary next of kin. This is the first strategy and very simple to start. I would recommend starting that today. For the next strategy, just click the link below or the link in the email that I’ve sent you. I’ll see you in the next video.
Double Your Funeral Home Website Traffic is just one of the many courses inside Funeral Futurist Formula. Join me inside this Funeral Service training community so that I can help you and your funeral home get more calls: Click Here
Next module: Email Church & Groups immediately
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