Double Your Website Traffic

Podcast (fsm-show): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Welcome to the Double your Funeral Home Website Traffic Video Series.

Next module: Email Obit To Family Immediately
Tweetables:
Click to Tweet: Dr. Earl Grollman said, “Grief shared is grief diminished.” http://ctt.ec/t5oHC+
Click to Tweet: Harnessing the power of the online obituary. http://ctt.ec/abc35+

If you prefer text – here it is…

Hi. This is Robin Heppell. I’ve been helping funeral homes like yours, since 1996, with their websites and how to get them at the top of the search engines, and how to find more client families through their websites.

In the last five or six years, I’ve really dialed this down to some simple strategies that any funeral home can apply just by putting these in, on a regular basis. That’s why I created the “How to double your funeral home website traffic in just three easy steps.”

The reason why this is important is that Google and the other search engines love websites that get a lot of traffic and a lot of interaction, or what they would call engagement. If there are two funeral home websites that are both the same size, but one gets a whole bunch of traffic whereas the other one doesn’t get any traffic, Google is going to favorite the one with the majority of the traffic. You’re going to think that that has more authority than the other one that doesn’t get any traffic.

How we do this is, actually, harnessing the power of the online obituary, which leads me to the second benefit of this. As Dr. Earl Grollman said, “Grief shared is grief diminished.” If your goal is to help your client families go through the grief that they are with the loss of their loved one, this can really help them out.

If you get more of the community reading the obituary and leaving condolences on your website, not only is it going to benefit you, in the search engines, it’s going to benefit that client family because more people are sharing in their grief. Your client family will have you to thank for that. What we’re going to do now is go to the first strategy to double your website traffic. All that you need to do is click on the link below or on the link in the email that I sent you. I’ll see you at 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 Obit To Family Immediately
Click Here To Go To The Start Of This Training

Podcast (fsm-show): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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-doe

Feel 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
Click Here To Go To The Start Of This Training

Podcast (fsm-show): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

This strategy is the easiest get started and it will improve your relations with your local churches.

Copy, Paste & Use the following…

Subject: Obituary for [First Name] [Last Name]

Dear [Church / Group Name],

We are sorry to advise you that your member, [Deceased’s Name] has passed away (or died) and his / her family has asked us to let you and your membership know of [Mr / Mrs Last Name]’s upcoming funeral service.

The complete obituary and service details can be found on our website at:
http://www.YourFuneralChapel.com/john-doe

Feel free to forward this email to your membership as we have found that it is an easy way to let a lot of people know about service times – especially on such short notice. Let me know if you have questions or need help with anything else.

Sincerely,
[Funeral Director]

Next module: Facebook Family Strategy

If you prefer text – here it is…

Hi. We’re back to the How to Double your Website Traffic. In this video, what we’re going to do is very similar to the first strategy that I shared with you about emailing the family.
This one is to email the deceased’s church or any groups that they belong to. I want to give you a little bit of a backstory about this strategy. I only had two strategies until my Dad died. When my Dad died, I was at McCall’s Funeral Home, here in Victoria. That’s where I apprenticed and worked for Dave McCall and the staff there.

I had come in for some reason to check things over, and Dave and I were sitting in the foyer of the funeral home. Dave said to me, “Hey, Rob! How about, if you want, I’ll send an email to all the associations that you belong to within the industry, just letting them know that your Dad’s service is coming up and a link to the obituary.”

I was very grateful for Dave to suggest doing that for me. How my brain works is, partly, I’m going through the process of grieving the loss of my Dad. This is OK because my Dad was a teacher and, if you ever met my Dad, you’d know he loved to teach people things.

The other part of my brain said, “We could actually apply this strategy to anyone.” This email gets sent out to any churches or groups, and it’s very similar. The subject line is the same, “Obituary for [First Name] [Last Name] , Dear [Church or Group Name]…

This could go to, maybe, the Rotary Club, if they were members of the lawn bowling club, the yacht club, the golf course, or the church that they belonged to. It says, “We’re sorry to advise to that your member [Deceased Name] has passed away or died,” depending on the terminology that UAT is.

“His/her family has asked us to let you know, like you and your membership know, of his/her upcoming funeral service. The complete obituary and service details can be found on our website at www.yourfuneralchapel.com/john-doe. Feel free to forward this email to your membership as we have found it is an easy way to let a lot of people know about the service times, especially on such short notice. Let me know if you have any questions, or need help with anything else.

Sincerely,

Funeral Director

That’s it. This one is even easier because you don’t need to get permission from the family or to ask them for email, because you probably have the email address of the church or the church secretary. It’s probably pretty easy to find the email address for the different associations, as well.

What will happen is, then, that you might be able to get the church secretary to forward your email to 500, 1,000, depending on how big the church is, to all of their members. On receiving that, hopefully, most of them will click on the link, and come into your website to read the obituary and, hopefully, leave a condolence.

Again, just like the other one, we don’t put the day and time of the service in the email, and we don’t paste the obituary in the email either.

Apply this strategy. This is really simple to do. Even if you’re not getting the email addresses from the family yet, but I hope you are after the first video, this one can be done right away. As soon as it’s up on your website, send this email and put it in the hands of the church or the groups, to let their entire membership know.

What will happen is you’ll get more traffic to your website, more engagement, receive more condolences, help share and diminish that grief, and probably get more attendees to your services. In the next video, we’re going to go through the third strategy. Just click the link below or the link, in the email that I sent you, on our third strategy in the series. Thanks a lot.

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: Facebook Family Strategy
Click Here To Go To The Start Of This Training

Podcast (fsm-show): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

The # 1 Traffic Strategy for Facebook – even if you’re not on Facebook yourself.

Copy, Paste & Use the following…

There are 5 simple steps to add an Obituary Link to Facebook:

• Go to the page where the obituary is for your loved one or friend
• Copy the web page URL (address) from the Address Bar in the top of the Browser
  • Select the address and then Copy it “Ctrl + C”
  • This is an example of what the Address looks like:
  • http://www.YourFuneralChapel.com/john-doe
• Log into Facebook
• Paste the link into the Update Status area where is says, “What’s on your mind?”
• Select the appropriate picture, add a comment (optional), tag people (optional) and click ”Post”

Next module: Bonus: Checklist of more Traffic Strategies

If you prefer text – here it is…

Now, we’re back for our third strategy in this video series, on How to Double Your Funeral Home Website Traffic.

This one doesn’t have to do with any email at all. I like to joke about this one because it wants using social media. Don’t worry. If you’re one of those people that hate social media, hate Facebook, have sworn that you’ll never be on Facebook, ever, that’s fine.

You can still put the power of Facebook behind this strategy, and you never even have to go there. I know that this will drive more traffic from Facebook than any other strategy that you can pay for or implement. It is showing the family how to add the obituary to their Facebook profile. Some people might say, “Well, I put the obituary on our Facebook page and that’s fine.” You might have 50, 100, maybe even 500, or 1,000 likes. The thing is there might be a few of those people that are connected with this person.

If we get the family to do it and tell them how to do it, then, the on average 130 people that are connected with will have a very close tie to, and be very interested in finding out that this person’s loved one has passed away. It’s very simple to do. It actually takes longer to explain it that how to do it. What I recommend is either having a little video tutorial on your website on how to do it or just print these off on your letterhead and hand it to them.

Actually, don’t just put it in with all the other papers and hope that they find it. Just let them know that. If you can just say, “How many of you have a Facebook account? You know what? We have a really easy strategy that you can use to let all the people on Facebook know about your loved one’s service. It just takes a few seconds to do.”

There are five simple steps. You go where the obituary is on your website, you highlight the URL, and you copy that. Then, you log into Facebook, you paste the link in the status update where it says, “What’s on your mind”?

What will happen is a photo will come up. Make sure you select the right photo. Then, let the family know they can add a little bit of comment. They could tag, maybe, their brothers and sisters, or other members of the family in that little post, then just click post, and they’re done.

That obituary on your website will be spread to the core circle of influence of the survivors, and you will drive a ton of traffic from Facebook with this strategy alone. You’d rather them be on, click on that link, come to your site where they can engage on your website, read the full obituary, leave a condolence, and quite possibly send flowers or anything else.

That’s the third strategy. This is great because it just cost you probably the price of printing off one piece of letterhead and taking one minute to explain it to the family. Stay tuned for the next video. To access that one, just click the link below, or click the link in the email that I sent you.

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: Bonus: Checklist of more Traffic Strategies
Click Here To Go To The Start Of This Training

Podcast (fsm-show): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Here is a list of 8 simple one-and-done strategies that you can implement to drive more traffic to your website automatically.

• Email Signature
• Social Icons on Obit
• TAF (Tell A Friend) – Share Obituary
• Automated Posting to Facebook
• Automated Posting to Twitter
• In the newspaper, “Condolences may be offered for the family at www.YourFuneralChapel.com.”
• Video tribute on website page with note in memorial folder
• QR Codes

Next module: Double Your Website Traffic Recap & Challenge

If you prefer text – here it is…

Welcome to the next video in our How to Double Your Funeral Home Website Traffic video series.
In the beginning, I said that there are three strategies that I was going to share with you and I’ve already shared three strategies with you. This video is a bit of a bonus. I’ve put a little checklist together so that you can make sure that you’re maximizing the opportunity to promote your online obituaries, with the least amount of effort.

A lot of these are very simple. Do them once, and you don’t have to do them again. I thought that this video series would be incomplete if I didn’t go over these with you. We’ll just quickly go over these. The first one is your email signature. A lot of your funeral directors in their email signature it has their name, maybe their position, their email address, phone number, and the URL www.myfuneralchapel.com

What I would recommend is, actually, put in an action word in front of that, as David Allen in “Getting Things Done” recommends. Put an action word on your to-do list, it actually invokes someone to do something instead of just letting them figure out what they should do.

I’d recommend is to subscribe to our obituaries, and then your URL www.yourfuneralchapel.com/obituaries That will drive them right to the obituaries and, hopefully, you have one or the other mechanisms that we’re going to talk about, that they can actually subscribe to your obituary.

The next on the list is having the social icons on your obituary. That’s where you see sometimes at the bottom, “Add this,” or “Share this,” or it might have a couple of the icons like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ along the bottom. You want to make sure that you have those social sharing icons on your obituaries. Another great thing to have that we found works quite well is the ‘Tell a friend’ form on the side bar.

This really is to share the obituary. It’ll have the From like From Robin Heppell and funeralfuturist.com. Then the two names and the two email address, and then all of the comment, and then they hit send. It actually sends an email to the person from the other person with that link in it.

What we found between that we didn’t expect is that a lot of people email that to themselves. Maybe they’re at work and they’ve come across the obituary and they are actually putting…like to me, from me, and send it so that they get the email in their personal email if they’ve maybe come across it at work or something like that.

It’s just a really interesting find that we found. Also too, one thing to ask your web developer is that you can automate the posting of the obituary to your Facebook page and to your Twitter account. Now, I recommend doing this because although you’re going to get a huge amount of exposure, you are building up a little bit of a platform and a foundation for your social media accounts.

That should be interspersed with other activities on social media. For that automation, it really doesn’t cost anything and that’s a great way to get a little bit more…it’s not looking like an empty room there in the social media accounts. At least, you have list in the obituaries.

Next, and this is where it started, I’m not sure if you still d this but it’s still valuable, is in the newspaper. Make sure that you have a line something like this, “Condolences maybe offered for the family at www.yourfuneralchapel.com”, something along those lines. We’ve tweaked this over the years again.

We’ve been doing this for a long time. What we’ve come up with, that’s the softest condolences may be offered for the family at www.yourfuneralchapel.com. Another way to drive funeral homes traffic to your website is through…if you’re having the video tribute and if you put the video tribute on the obituary page then on the memorial folder, you can then have a note that says, “To view Rob Heppell’s tribute video, go to www.yourfuneralchapel.com/robin-heppell” and the video would appear there.

Because think about it, if people have been active at the service, maybe they’ve already been to the obituary and left a condolence and they watched the video. We know that those video tributes are very powerful. Usually, they show up even the best of eulogies and people may want to watch it again.

Give them a link to where they can see the video and that will drive people back to your website and further engage on the website. The last one on the list is QR codes. QR code is this funny little speckled square of white and black. I know that QR codes aren’t going to be around forever but right now, they’re here. For the people that know how to use them, they should be scanning them all the time. It doesn’t hurt to just having the side bar, QR code that is made just for that page.

If someone’s looking on their computer and they’ve got their cell phone with them and they want to save it to their phone, they can just scan it and save it to their phone. Then, from there, they can share it with other people. That’s what I would recommend.

This is just a bonus list of other ways that you can help direct traffic to your funeral home website. Also, in the bigger picture, get more engagement on those obituaries, get more condolences that your client families will receive and help them in the grieving process. We’ve got one more video. Just click the link below or click the link in the email and 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: Double Your Website Traffic Recap & Challenge
Click Here To Go To The Start Of This Training