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Podcast: Funeral Strategy & Marketing Show

How to be an All Star Funeral Director

http://funeralstrategymarketingshow.s3.amazonaws.com/005-FSM-All-Star-Funeral-Director.mp3

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Listen on iTunesHi. Robin Heppell here. On today’s show, I’m going to be talking about how you can be an all-star funeral director.

Topics discussed / In this video:

  • 3:20 – Advice from a hand-written note from Grandpa
  •  4:25 – Stand out with a little spit
  •  5:15 – The sweetest sound is a lost art
  •  7:10 – Turning around my greatest fear from the 3rd grade
  •  13:15 – The most profitable skill a funeral director can have
  •  12:05 – Understand profitability of the funeral home
  •  14:30 – The #1 way to improve your cash flow
  •  16:55 – What do nose hairs and cuff links have in common
  •  20:10 – Hello, my name is…
  •  25:05 – One communication a day keeps the problems away
  •  26:55 – How to separate you from the rest of the pack
  •  28:30 – How to get the most number of positive survey responses
  •  30:10 – My first mistake in funeral service
  •  34:35 – 2015 Funeral Rock Stars includes tour of my training grounds
  •  35:40 – Here is what the Historian and the Futurist are up to

 

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Funeral Director All Star

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Welcome to another edition of the Funeral Strategy and Marketing Show. Now, before I dive into today’s topic, I want to let you know to stick around till the end of the episode because that’s where I’m going to tell you where you can get your own copy of my personal funeral director’s all-star checklist. This is something that you can use just to record different things for every service that you do so that you can be a funeral director all-star.

Now, let’s get in today’s topic. How to be a an all-star funeral director. Now, first off, I’m not going to say that I am the best funeral director ever. I will say though that I feel that I was a really good funeral director and I still get called upon by close families to act in that capacity or even act as a celebrant so I still see things on the front lines.

What I want to share with you today is some of the things that I learned from my mentors and that can help you to rise above maybe the rest of the staff so that you can look like you would be the all-star funeral director on your staff. This is isn’t just for employees. It’s for owners as well, anyone who is working day to day on the front lines with the families, making the arrangements, embalming, directing the services.

Now, the reason why I want to share this with you is that I wanted to look back what would happen just recently. One of my mentors, Stu Carrol, who is the manager of McCall Bros. for a long time recently retired. I spoke just to have a little segment at his retirement dinner that I shared a few things. I thought, “You know what, this would be a great things for me to share with everyone, all the things that I learned from Stu plus my other mentors.”

First of all, when I started I started working in Ontario at my uncle’s and grandfather’s funeral home at Egan’s Funeral Home in Bolton, Ontario just northwest of Toronto. I came back to play hockey here in Victoria, British Columbia. It was funny because I was so shy I didn’t even … My dad phoned down to McCall’s and got me an interview. Actually, I had an interview with Stu way back so that’s almost 30 years ago.

Now, at McCall’s, I had great mentors there as well. Dave McCall gave me lots of great opportunities. He was very patient with me and his uncle, Torrey McCall taught me a few things that I’m going to share with you. Ken Kyle, who helped me during my apprenticeship. He’s an excellent embalmer, lots of attention to detail. For funeral directing and arrangement, Stu Carrol was the guy. He checked all of our work and made sure that we were doing the best that we could.

What I’ve done is I’ve broken this down into three areas. First of all, the first area is just the general attitude. The first one is, show up early. Show up early for work. Maybe ten minutes early. It’s funny. When I first started working at McCall’s, I got a handwritten letter from my grandfather, just checking in. This was way before e-mails and things like that. He wrote me a note saying and one of the suggestions that he made in that was to show up early.

I got to tell you, when you show up early for work, maybe it’s just ten minutes early, the day just rolls a lot better. McCall’s is a very busy funeral home and lots of things are going on. If you just up right up when you’re supposed to start working, there’s things that you could miss and it might threw you off the entire day. Get there early. If you drink coffee or tea or whatever you do, you grab that, find out what happened over the evening before, check out what’s happening today, make sure anything that you’re assigned to do, you’ve got that completely detailed and just be prepared.

Next, super simple one but be well-groomed whether it’s with your hair and your clothing, making sure that your shirts are pressed and not wrinkled. Make sure that your shoes are shined. Just little things but these things really stand out now more than back a generation ago, you won’t have to remind people because that’s why the people were. Nowadays, noticed many people uphold those types of things. There’s never going to be a negative just make sure that your shoes are shined, shirts are polished, you have a nice tie on if you’re wearing a tie. However you dressed, just make it the best that you can be.

Another skill that, I think, goes by the wayside is remembering names. If you have the chance to read and you should read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, just being personable and if you can remember someone’s name. They always say that the sweetest sound is someone’s own name. If you can call people by their name, remember their name especially certain pronunciations of names, how you say names, just make sure that you have that dialed in. Whether its certain things like Dana or Dana, Tara or Tara, things like that, just how do people pronounce their names, Ian or Ian, little things like that. Remember their names too.

I used to have this little book like a Day-Timer, not even a Day-Timer just a little pocket calendar and it had squares in it. I would write down the names of people once I met them. On the day that I met them, I put that it there. People on the staff and my friends would say, “Oh, what was that person’s name?” I wouldn’t even have to look back. I would just know because I just took that time at that point and wrote it down and that was enough for me to remember.

Now, with all our digital gadgets, we don’t always have that opportunity to do that. Somehow, maybe just key it in on your phone or enter them as a contact and put a note of how you met them and that’s going to go a lot further because, as I said, people love the sound of their name. People, even years later, will say, “I didn’t think you’d remember me. Thanks for remembering my name.”

Another thing too is public speaking and I lead it to the story of when I started at McCall’s, I was so shy, get this, that my dad actually phoned down to McCall’s for me to get an interview. I can even remember in Grade 3 and I still remember this. This is how paranoid or not paranoid but fearful I was of speaking aloud. We had to do this exercise and we’re reading a short story and the whole class had to read it and we went paragraph by paragraph. I can remember counting how many people are next because we’re going through the rows and then which paragraph I would have to read. I was just so hoping that it was a small paragraph and I can remember who has the big one.

I was so afraid but over time, if you practice and speaking aloud is a great or public speaking is a great skill because a lot of people stay away from it. Right? You’ve heard the thing that people even fear that more than death itself. Obviously, you’ve heard that, so many people used that in the eulogy but it’s somewhat true and it’s a great skill.

The first presentation that I ever did for McCall was a preneed presentation. It wasn’t the greatest. I basically read off a sheet of paper. Now, I can just have a few bullet points. I can tell stories and try to be a lot more engaging. I’m not the greatest order in the world but if it wasn’t for public speaking, I won’t be able to do what I’m currently doing. I think, it’s a skill that people put off to the side. They make up a lot of excuses why not to do it. If you can be that person of learning how to do it then do it.

Then also learn how to present and just get up just doing that. The more that you do it, there’s lots of books on it, lots of videos online to learn how to present, but don’t overthink it. The number one thing is to practice. Get a short presentation and offer that at smaller groups and they’ll become bigger and bigger. Now, I’ve presented hundreds of times to funeral directors all around the world and also hundreds of webinars and videos like this.

Those are some of the key things that are general skills. One more, anticipation. One thing that, I think, is really important especially in today’s busy lives is we have to anticipate what might happen or what might not happen. We can’t just assume that everything is going to go according to the way it’s been planned. I like to joke. The best way to be spontaneous is to have a plan. Just have an idea of, “If this happens, then this is what I should do.”

I can remember being in front of a church with over a thousand people. I had this idea that the flowers weren’t going to be sitting on the casket and it looked too big and it might start sliding off. What I did, I anticipated that. I brought in a small table at the very front of the church. As I looked in, “Yeah, this isn’t going to work.” I just carefully took the table, got it into place, put the flowers on it so that flowers didn’t slide off or we won’t have that. Just little things like that, anticipate.

When I was a hockey goalie, we used to do lots of sports. Athletes do this as mental imagery, thinking about things. I would be making a save in my mind, all the different scenarios so when it actually happens, it’s just second nature.

Now, again, I know that we’re super busy at work but just anticipate those little things. Anticipate what happens if there’s something in the family or if there’s a small child in the family. Anticipate where would a good exit strategy would be if the mom of that child wanted to leave early and not have to walk them down the middle of the aisle in front of everyone. That could be embarrassing. Just have those plans and maybe even let them know, “Hey, if this happens, this is where you can go.” Just be ready to improvise. You don’t have to but if you, again, the best way to be spontaneous is to have a plan.

Now, what I’d like to do is to drill in more to funeral skills overall for the business operations. The first one is and this might sound a bit weird but understand the profitability of a funeral home. This doesn’t matter who you work for. Maybe you work for a family, maybe you work for a corporation but you need to understand the profitability of the funeral home because if the funeral home is not profitable, one major thing is that you may be out of a job. We don’t want that to happen.

If you understand how the company makes money and making sure that … Not how much they’re making or anything at that but what’s important to them then you’re just going to approach things differently and you’ll be more valuable to that funeral. You might wonder, “Why do the owners and managers go around and turn off the lights when no one’s in the room? It’s not a big deal. They’re energy-efficient lighting.” Every penny that gets wasted is one less penny for the overall profitability of the firm.

If we dive into this a little bit deeper, I think, the most valuable skill, the most profitable skill, sure, as funeral directors we need to have a ton of skills but the most profitable one is if you can win price shoppers or phone shoppers. Not everyone’s a price shopper but they usually start out with that question, “How much is this going to cost?” If you can be excellent at that and maybe even a go-to person, that’s going to be very valuable because you got to think.

Here’s what happened, two major things had happened when there’s a phone shopper. Number one, someone has died or is about to die. That only comes around once in that person’s life so you only have one chance. Secondly, the phone has rung so that means that your marketing has worked up to that point. At that very moment, that call is yours to either win or to lose and if you lose it, it’s lost forever and you have to wait until the next person dies and, hopefully, your marketing works so that they call the funeral and that’s the cycle.

If you can really understand that and I know that role plan. I can remember I don’t want … That’s role playing and stuff like that and doing scripts but the more you practice it, the more comfortable that you get at that, you’re going to be that much more valuable to the firm.

The next one too is getting the money. You’ve got the arrangement. You’ve made the arrangements. Now, it’s time to how are you going to look after this. I think, funeral homes nowadays are on the ball about this and a lot more on top of it. When I started, it was, “Okay. Yeah, we’ll send you the bill in a couple of weeks,” or whatever or after the service. Nowadays, the cash flow is so important to a funeral home is that it’s better to get the money sooner than later.

A lot of funeral directors haven’t been on the other side of the desk. They’re not the business owners but, personally, as a business owner with a staff of 8 people, I know what it’s like when payday is coming around. Sure, you may have had a lot of sales or a lot of business coming in but if that money hasn’t been realized, if it’s still accounts receivable, you can’t pay your staff in money that you haven’t collected yet.

People will say, “The funeral homes got a lot of money. They can still pay for things.” In funeral homes, that money has been allocated to something else, just a pool there waiting if we haven’t received money yet for the next month. As a funeral director and as an arranger, it’s up to you to make sure that you take responsibility of getting that cash secured.

One of the lines and I’m sure your management has talked about this. How would you like to look after that today? They might ask what the options are and you can say, “We prefer to have everything paid up front. We can take a check or a credit card,” or however it’s set up at your firm. Assume that they’re going to pay today because almost everywhere else they go, they’re paying upfront for any other transactions. Funeral homes shouldn’t be any different. Just really understand that.

Now, I mentioned this, the next one is attention to detail. We hear attention to detail all the time but sometimes it gets lost or overdone or it’s talked too generally that we don’t really know what we’re paying attention to. This goes back to Stu Carrol. With the presentation of the deceased, we were always so competitive when I was embalmer/funeral director/arranger. If we were doing the preparation and the cosmetics, at the end of the day, we would have the deceased in the different viewing rooms and so we put them out and then Stu Carrol would walk around and check out how everyone looked.

The things that he always taught us to do was make sure that the colors are perfect on a male, that’s a nice knot on the tie if they’re wearing a tie, that the shirt is nicely snugged down, that’s not wrinkly. You can do that. There’s little tricks of doing that with the shirttails down in the pockets. In the pants pocket, you can tug those down to make those snug.

He was really meticulous on cuffs, that the cuffs were always straight and showing just a little bit past the jacket. If they’re wearing cuff links, that the cuff links were clean. There weren’t smudges or fingerprints on them or anything, that they’re always cleaned up and visible, and that everything just looked like they just came out of the tailors, out of the barber shop. Making sure that there’s nose hairs or ear hairs, that there’s not an eyelash out of place, that the mustache or facial hair that it was nicely trimmed if that’s the way they were just like they came out.

Same with females too, that everything was just right. Any dresses or blouses were always on properly. Sometimes I’ve seen other times at other places where things just looked a little disheveled and that’s not the way to do it. If you want to impress people, you have to pay attention to the detail.
The other thing too just in general arrangements. The obituaries, make sure that you double-checked all the names of the survivors. Obviously, the date and time of services. I’ve made that mistake before. That’s a story for another day. Those are really important. Same with flowers. Double-check if those flowers have been ordered and that they’re going to be on time at the proper location because that’s what those people are thinking of.

We just have service the other day and my mom, the first thing when we got there, she wanted to let me know that the flowers that we sent as a family, so Mom did it and put all our names on it but that’s the first thing that she did. Check to see if those flowers are there. Double-check that those are ordered just like what you hear about carpenters. They measure twice, cut once. Just double-check that information before it get sent off, before the order gets placed. This is the same with engraving urns as well. Make sure that that’s double-checked because you don’t want any mistakes. Same with monuments if you’re dealing monument cells. Those are some of the funeral skills.

Now, I wanted to talk you about the arrangements themselves. First off, I think, one thing that we don’t do enough of is introduce ourselves before the arrangements and you can do this via e-mail. Now, sometimes different funeral homes are going to be really busy. You may not know who’s going to be meeting that family but, I think, once the first has been taken, one of the critical pieces of information that is, after taking that first call, to ask for the e-mail address.

We always think, “They might think we’re prying or anything like that,” but they’re just giving you the business to look after their loved one, the deceased. I think, that they will be willing to give the e-mail address and just let them know, “We got some important information to send you before the arrangements and we find it best just to send it by e-mail. Can you give me your e-mail address, please?” Or, “What’s your e-mail address?” It’ll just be automatic that they give that to you.
Then you send an e-mail and you can briefly introduce yourself or maybe this is the admin staff sending it on your behalf. Maybe put a link to the staff page and say, “If you want, Rob Heppell will be meeting with you today,” or “I’ll be meeting with you today. For a little bit more information on myself, check out our staff page or my bio here.”

The reason why I say this is probably dozens of times, McCall’s, I’ve been working with McCall’s on their website. It was 1996 that we first had a website for McCall’s. Even then, the super tech-savvy people, I can remember this one lady, she was over 60 at the time. She started asking me about Ontario and Toronto and things like that. I said, “That’s strange.” I answered the questions. She says, “I was on the McCall’s website and I looked up your information.” It makes people more at ease and we’ve been working with this with our funeral boardroom members of actually creating a special page on the website that’s not part of the general navigation that we send families between the time of the need or by the time of the first call and before they come in for the arrangements.

Obviously, this isn’t going to work for walk-ins but for people that get that e-mail ahead of time, they’ve land on the page that has like these are the things that we’re going to cover. It’ll also introduces them to new services such us … Maybe it’s a tribute blanket or something like that. Instead of after 80 minutes of your 90-minute arrangement and I know that there are so much detail that we have to go through nowadays.

The boss will probably say, “No, no. Make sure you introduce cremation jewelry and tribute blankets and anything else that’s part of what you’re offering.” If they’ve never heard it, it’s sometimes even uncomfortable to bring that up. If they’ve had a chance to read that ahead of time on their own time, spend time on the website and see the sample of that tribute blanket, they might actually initiate the conversation. “Oh, tell me a little bit more about the cremation jewelry. Tell me a little bit more about this tribute blankets. I saw a sample on the website.”

If they start it then it’s not like you’re being sales-y at all but if you’re going through your list, over time, you might be getting uncomfortable. You might think they’re getting uncomfortable. I believe that the more comfortable that they are coming into the arrangement, it’s going to just set them at ease. It’s going to be a better experience for them. It’ll be an easier arrangement for you. I believe that your averages will go up because they’ll be more preconditioned to some of the new offerings that you might have.

Also, in that e-mail too, if you receive a personal e-mail from me, you see my picture at the bottom of the e-mail. Dr. Robert Cialdini who spoke at ICCFA a few years ago, one of his studies that he’s done show that people that insert a picture in their e-mail when they’re just introducing themselves to someone else, that those relationships are much stronger than people that don’t. We’re trying to build trust and credibility. Include a picture and also if you’re comfortable with it, include your mobile phone, your cell number.

Again, those are only given out to people in trustful situations so here you’re extending it to them and they feel then, “Hey, this is good. We know we’re going to be busy and this person has gone over the way to make sure that we can communicate with them however we need to.” Those are just some suggestions for that.

Now, another thing that I would do. Here in Victoria, it’s not uncommon for the service to go from … It might be four days later or even seven days later or it can be a couple of weeks or longer than that. Now, if it’s four days later or even it’s two days later, I would always check between the time of the arrangement and the day of the service with the family. I’ll give them a phone call and touch base. Let them know, “Okay. These are the things that happened so far. We’ve made the transfer so your mom has been transferred from the hospital and she’s now in our care.”

Again, we do this every day. We know it like the back of our hand. It’s totally new to them. They may not even have a clue like, “I wonder if they picked up Mom or not. I don’t know. Should we phone the hospital? Do we phone the coroner?” The funeral director who’s on the ball is going to be letting you know.

It’s not every little bit of minutia that you’re sending then ten e-mails a day but just touch base with them whether it be by phone call or maybe send them an e-mail or maybe if they’ve given you their cellphone number and the person thinks that communicating by text message is okay then you can send him a quick text just to keep him up to date.

I found that it’s just a lot easier to pull off a really good service by having that communication ahead of time because there’s not going to be as many surprises for you and you know what it’s like to get surprised by the family an hour before the service. A lot of those things can be looked after if you’ve been in touched with them.

Another thing that I would recommend is to put some note, just put any notes on the back of your file however you arranged, however you do your process of things that you can have went above and beyond. Just the little things. Instead of saying, “Hear people, he liked to fish and then he liked to golf.” Instead of saying, “Oh, make sure you bring in the good golf clubs or the fishing rods the evening before, you dropped them off.” If you’ve got free time, go out to the house and say, “Hey, I’m going to be in the neighborhood, would you mind if I go and picked those up?” Then you can get them, then you can have them set up early.

You’re not waiting on them to bring them in because they’re bringing them late, maybe they forgot them. You know what that’s like and then someone’s got to rush back. Just do these little things. Again, it’s usually not going to cost a lot of money or any money just maybe a little bit of time and maybe a little bit of gas but you’re providing a service.

More so now than ever, we have to justify why they’re paying a lot of money for funeral services. If we’re doing these things, they’re going to feel that they’re getting more value so do that. Write some notes on the back of your file and add just the little things in. I always put one or two things. It’s almost like a little challenge to me of what I could do extra for that family. Again, these are little things but they’re things that people remember.

Now, another thing that you can do is if you’re giving out surveys, the practice that we had at McCall’s was we have a survey and the survey would then be given to them with the information usually at the grave site or at the end of the service. We have the pouch with the guest book and thank you cards and give them the survey. Every family had to get one.

Back to Dr. Robert Cialdini, he recommends that if you’re using surveys, write a personalized sticky note, like a yellow sticky note, Post-it note in handwriting and just write, “When you have time please fill this out” or “I’d really appreciate it if would complete this. Rob.” Just put it on top. You got to remember, you’ve just done all this work for the families and now they’re indebted to you and here’s the personalized note so they’re probably going to fill that out for you and you probably get more positive feedback.

Especially nowadays you can take that and turn that into a positive review online then follow-up with an e-mail and say, “Thank you so much for the feedback on the survey. Would you mind sharing that on Google Plus or Yelp” or wherever. Use the yellow sticky to get more of those back because that’s one of the competitive things that we have at McCall’s. How many positive surveys that each one of us would get back. If I would have known the yellow sticky deal then, I would have definitely done it. I think, you should do it too.

One last thing and this goes actually back to Torrey McCall. One of the first times that I started there, I was a young kid, 18 years old, and I can’t remember what happened but I remember what happened afterwards or how it happened. I must have been closing the coach door and there’s probably a foot away or two feet away and I just let the handle go and the way to the door slammed shut. Torrey McCall who would have probably been 70 at the time quickly came around and instructed me on the proper way to close the door. You just take the door and push it closed, holding it all the way.

A couple of things, one, it looks a lot more professional. Two, it doesn’t make a big bang. Three, it’s going to be less wear and tear on the vehicle. Those funeral coaches nowadays are $100,000 so you don’t want something to bang or things to shake and get loose over time. It just looks good.

Another quick note that I was taught was always walk around the back of the car so don’t cut in front of the car all the time because as a driver you can usually see what’s in front and you should take a quick look but always work the back of the car. In closing the doors, that’s not just the coach, that’s also the limousine as well. Closing those doors just firmly shut.

Another thing and this is for Stu Carrol and he was a huge stickler on this. The door stoppers that flipped down, they got the little rubber grommet on them, he would make sure that we’d always bend over carefully, push that up, click it into place and then open the door. Once the door is open where we wanted it to, we pushed it down and put it in place. We would not use our toe to flick it up or flick it down. The reason why is, first of all, if you flick it up, it might make a big bang. If you kick it down, you may not get it so you may have to try it a couple of times and maybe it’ll slammed down.

It’s just not professional so you just quietly bend over, push it down, put it into place. It just looks a lot more professional and it saves your shoes. One of the other tips about having your polished shoes. If you’re not flicking the door stoppers up and down with your shoes, they’re going to stay polished longer.

Again, this is not a complete list but it’s just a bunch of things, general attitude things. There are other things that’s really specific but I wanted to let you know and also to really give thanks to mentors that I’ve had about being as good a funeral director as you can. I think, try some of these tips, put them into place, and whether you’re an employee or an owner or a manager, we have to really justify the things that we do as funeral directors and charging what we do for funeral services or celebrations or life services. These little things, I think, will just make us look that much better in the eyes of the public, guests, especially the client families that we’re serving. That’s my little seminar on how to be an all-star funeral director.

Now, just to keep you up to date on a few things that are going on, Funeral Rock Stars, it’s my big event that I’m having. I usually have this in Vegas but this year I’m having it right here at Victoria, B.C. and part of that is that you’ll be invited to a tour at McCall. You’ve heard me talked about McCall so much and you can actually visit. I’ll let you know the changes that have happened over the 30 years of how a funeral home can actually be successful and profitable in a market of 92% cremation.

For more details, go to FuneralRockStars.com. It’s in the third week of September, September 21. It starts right here in Victoria. Go to FuneralRockStars.com for more information on that.

Some other news that I want to share with you. Some exciting news is that I’ve been talking to my good friend and other mentor, Mr. Todd Van Beck. He’s a total guru when it comes to all things of funeral directing, administration. What we’re doing is we’re actually creating a private membership area where we’re going to be putting a lot of our resources, a lot of Todd’s teachings, a lot of my recorded seminars, are all going to go into the membership area of Funeral Gurus.

For less than a cup of coffee a day, you can access to a lot of that information and so that you can become as good a funeral director and/or as good as funeral home owner as you can be. That’s going to be our focus of putting that stuff there and then also for us to answer any questions that you have.

I just want to wrap up this episode here and I really think that being an all-star funeral director will not only help your career but help the funeral home that you’re working with. Most importantly, you’ll be providing even better services for the families that you serve. My challenge for you today is to start writing notes. Just do one of the things, start writing notes on the back of your file, and just over time or even complete the funeral checklist. If you want a copy of the funeral checklist, it’ll be below the video here and a post at FuneralFuturist.com.

Make sure that you check back soon for another episode of the Funeral Strategy and Marketing Show. I really want to thank you today for spending time with me on this. I think, it’s really important and my goal for you is to serve as many families as possible by providing them with the most meaningful services.

Thanks a lot. This is Robin Heppell.

Do you have anything to add to this list? Please leave your comments below.

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Are You Mobile Ready? Google is Watching…

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Listen on iTunes Hi, it’s Rob Heppell here and on today’s show we’re going to be talking about mobile search and April 21st which is Mobile day, where Google is going to update their algorithm to really take into account websites that are mobile-friendly or not.

mobile friendly funeral home websitesTopics discussed / In this video:

  • 0:44 – Google Algorithm update on April 21st for mobile-friendly websites – including funeral homes
  • 2:06 – 90% of adults in North America have a smartphone
  • 3:09 – Our clients in metro areas get more mobile users than desktop users to their websites
  • 3:21 – Google likes mobile responsive websites the best
  • 5:42 – Here’s where you can get a funeral home website that is mobile responsive
  • 6:36 – Location of the 2015 Funeral Rock Stars event announced
  • 8:21 – Does Google think your funeral home website is mobile friendly?

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Welcome to another edition of this Funeral Strategy and Marketing Show. Now, before I dive into today’s topic about mobile search, I want you stick around to the end, where I’m going to give you free resource to check to see if your mobile website is mobile friendly and ready for Mobile Day. Now, let’s get right into the topic. Mobile responsive and mobile ready websites are going to be a necessity for all businesses starting April 21st because Google has announced that on April 21st, they’re going to be updating their algorithm to identify websites that are mobile-friendly or not.

Here’s the article right from the Webmaster Central Blog from Google and I’ll just read this one little part, “More mobile-friendly website in search results” is the title of the section., “Starting April 21st, we will be expanding the use of mobile friendliness as a ranking signal, this change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact on our search results, consequently users will find it easier to get relevant high-quality search results that are optimized for the devices.”

That’s right from the horse’s mouth, right from Google. You may be wondering, “Well why is this so important?” Some other stats about mobile usage and I’m sure you might even be watching this podcast on your mobile device itself. First of all, mobile usage has skyrocketed and in some aspects it’s even more popular than desktop searches. Some of the recent stats are 90% of adults in North America have a smartphone that have internet capability, 42% of them have a tablet. From Google, their own stats says 48% of mobile users start to their searches with a search engine on their mobile phone. Mobile is here to stay and it’s just getting more and more popular. You should be able to check your own website stats if your Google Analytics setup. They always check if it’s mobile device or not and they’ll even break down whether it’s an iPhone or Android or Blackberry and then the different tablets as well.

We’re doing some checking on our own client sites and most of our clients at least have 25% of their visitors are using a mobile device or a tablet and even up to third of them. In major markets, in metropolitan areas, a couple of our clients actually have more mobile users on their website than desktop users. Those sites have to be mobile friendly and Google has also stated that they feel that mobile responsive is the way to go. The difference is some people have mobile version of their website, so there’s two separate versions. What happens is when you get into different devices like in the middle part, like an iPad, they’re kind of in between. Here and this is what mobile responsive is, so here’s a website here, McCall’s website. You can see how it’s laid out and this is how it looks on a computer as well, on a desktop.

Mobile responsive funeral home websiteIf you were to spin it, what mobile responsive is is that the website actually responds to the width of the device and you can see here that instead of these images being for across, they’re now two up. You don’t have to scroll side to side, you don’t have to zoom in or pinch it with your fingers. Now, if you are then on your iPhone or other mobile device and here’s iPhone 4, so it’s even a small display. You can see the same site is now … When you scroll, these images are now one on top of each other. If it’s sideways, then it just makes it a little bit wider. This just shows when a website is mobile responsive that it then conforms to the width of device that’s being watched on.

Now, the benefit of that is that you only have one website. Google has actually said that having a mobile responsive site is the best thing to do because then you’re not having two different sites and that you’re not sending different signals and having devices that are maybe in between a small phone like this versus a tablet or something a little bit bigger where it doesn’t matter what device a mobile responsive site is viewed on, it just conforms to whatever width the device is. If you need help with that if your website isn’t mobile-friendly or mobile responsive, those are things that we can do. We’ve been upgrading our clients’ website if they’ve asked us to mobile responsive and any new sites I think in the last two years that we’ve created are mobile responsive. That’s built right into every site and should be going forward.

Now, if you have a WordPress website, we can actually retrofit your current theme if you want and so that’s not a lot of money or if you’re just unhappy with your current website and you’d like to have us create a mobile responsive website for you, you can just go to FuneralFuturistWebsites.com and check out some of the sites that we’ve done there.

Some happenings that are going on in the world Funeral Futurist is that I’ve just announced the Funeral Rock Stars event for 2015. It’s going to be right here in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia. I’m hosting it at my private business club, the Union Club of British Columbia. It’s in the heart of downtown Victoria. The Union Club is right across the street from the Empress Hotel, kitty corner to the Inner Harbor and it’s just going to be a great venue.

I won’t go into all the details, just go to FuneralRockStars.com for the introductory video there and the complete program and details. It’s going to include a tour through McCall’s Funeral Home and so you can see how a 92% cremation funeral home is still healthy and profitable and successful in a market that’s predominately or almost all cremation. I’d love for you to come to my hometown and for me to show you around and also for you to attend the Funeral Rock Stars.

Now, if you have any other questions at all, please submit them to me. Let me know and I’d love to cover them in another episode of the Funeral Strategy and Marketing Show. You can leave a question or comment below this video and if you like what you hear, please leave me a review on iTunes. Hopefully, you’re subscribed to the podcast on iTunes that would be great.

Mobile Friendly Funeral Home websiteJust a quick recap of today’s presentation is that April 21st is Mobile Day. Google is updating their algorithm, so you want to make sure that your website is up to date. You can just do a quick check if you want if you do a search for your funeral home. Now, it’s going to be hard to see on here, but just do a search on your phone for your funeral home or funeral homes in your town and hopefully you can see that there where it says, “In the text,” and I’ll leave, there’ll be a screenshot in the episode. Right below the URL, it says, “Mobile-friendly,” so if your site isn’t mobile friendly that won’t be there. If your site is mobile-friendly, you’re good to go. Do that. Do that immediately, also make sure that you check your rankings after April 21st to see if there’s been any adjustment. If you’re mobile ready and your competitors aren’t, you might get a jump in rankings from a mobile device. Otherwise, if you’re not ready, you might see a drop.

Now, the reason why this is so important is that since so many people have mobile phones, 90% as the statistics say, when people maybe at the nursing home or at hospice and it’s kind of those final hours and they know they have to start to do something. You know it’s like, there’s maybe not a lot of communication going on. People might just pull up their phone, start to do some searches for funeral homes in your area, you want to make sure you’re at the top of that list. It’s really important to get on this.

Now, the free resource is right from Google and it is to check to see if your website is mobile friendly. The URL is http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly. I’ll put that in the show notes as well as it will be on the bottom of the screen for the video.

Thanks a lot for spending time with me today. I know that you’re busy and it’s my goal to help you serve as many families as possible. Make sure you check back soon for another episode of the Funeral Strategy and Marketing Show.

Please leave your comments below.

How To Deal With Negative Online Reviews

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Listen on iTunesIn this episode, I’m going to share with you my strategy on how to deal with online reviews: how to get nasty ones removed (or at least not look as bad) and how to get a steady stream of positive reviews…



In this video:

00:53 – How did you feel when you get a negative review?
02:44 – Is the complaint legitimate
05:35 – The Olive Branch Approach
06:49 – Cultivating positive reviews
08:41 – Why client families with Gmail accounts are great for leaving online reviews
10:25 – Your After Care Specialist can generate the best online reviews
11:39 – Don’t have people leave you online reviews from your office computers
12:56 – Check out the Funeral Bootcamp brochures – they are awesome!
15:17 – How to get your free Local SEO Audit report
17:15 – Your challenge – get one positive online review from someone that you have served in the last 6 months

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Now on iTunes – Subscribe for free to this podcast now

Free Funeral Home Resources

Free Revenue Per Call Calculator for Funeral Homes
Free Local SEO Audit of your Funeral Home’s Web Presence

Quotes:

“…Always respond to negative reviews using the Olive Branch approach.” – Hepp – Click To Tweet

“…Does your After Care program cultivate positive online reviews? – If not, it should!” – Hepp – Click To Tweet

003-FSM-Negative-Online-Reviews-Funeral-Homes-BPI-600

Welcome to another episode of the Funeral Strategy and Marketing show. Before I dive into today’s topic, I want to let you know to stick around to the end of the episode, because I have a special gift for you. What it is, is a free resource that I created called the revenue per call calculator. It’s an Excel spreadsheet that you can use to track the additional revenue you would get by getting additional calls or maybe how much you might be losing in revenue if you lose calls.

It’s a handy little spreadsheet that you can use and play around with and maybe think of for, if you’re able to gain 10 percent market share, how is that going to relate to your business from a financial perspective.

Let’s get into today’s topic. How did it feel the first time that you saw that you had a negative review? Were you mad? Did you get sad? Probably not, you were probably really mad.
Most of the time, these are not legitimate. There’s just some jerk out there that feels that they’ve got to try to take a shot at you, maybe it’s even a competitor. But, you know what? We’ve got some strategies that I’m going to share with you today that will put you in the driver’s seat for dealing with negative reviews that happen and also to prevent negative reviews from coming onto your profiles.

Recently, on Facebook, I was asked by a friend of mine, Kim Stacy, on how to deal with negative reviews. I’m sharing some of my experiences, as I’ve mentioned before. I’ve had a couple opportunities to help people, get funeral homes get negative reviews taken off of places like Yelp and Google Reviews.

The first thing that, let’s just take one step back. I’ve heard some bad advice out there. Now, my last episode was hearing opinions and talking about opinions and advice. There is some bad advice. People are saying, “Don’t respond to a negative review because if you do, that will actually make that review more popular and come up towards the top.”

If that’s the case or not, I don’t know. But even if it is, I’d rather have a negative review that is responded to than having a negative review with no response. That is way worse. If we go through the process that we’re going to talk about today, you’re going to look so much better than the person leaving the negative review.

OK, the first step. Ask yourself, is it a legitimate complaint? If it is, then you’ve got to clean up some stuff at the office. What happened? Dig into it, find out. Were you having a bad day? Was a staff member having a bad day?

If it was a process that was an oversight, then maybe put a system into place that prevents that from happening again. You have some more checks and balances.
If it was legitimate, then I would reach out to the person, try to phone them offline and let them know, say, “Thank you for letting me know about this. We’ve taken these steps to rectify it. Is there anything else that we could do to make this better?”

Once you’ve done that, you can then go onto the review site and actually, kind of as a follow up, say, “Thank you so much for talking to me on the phone. Thank you for explaining the situation further. We have done these steps so that this won’t happen again.” For all the people that are watching, they’re going to see that you’re taking a very proactive approach to anytime that something happens like this.

What if it’s not a legitimate complaint? What if it’s your competitor down the street that’s paying someone to leave that or something? I’m not saying that that happens, but we think that that’s what happens. But what if it’s just some jerk trying to bring you down?

Here’s what you do. You still want to reach out to them and take it as a specific legitimate complaint, but ask a couple of probing questions, such as, find out when the service was or even for who the service was for. When you do this, people are going to see that you’re actually trying to solve the problem.

It goes back to people saying, “Don’t respond to it,” because people are, yes, they are going to read the negative review, but they’re also going to read your response. If your response is very professional and you’re not flying off the handle, that’s going to even be more credit to you if you’ve gone and tried to solve the problem.

A couple things that are going to happen here is, more than likely, they’re not going to respond. If you’re being nice, it’s really hard for them to be angry again, if they are real jerks. They might, and if they do, you just respond in a very polite manner again, say that you’re doing everything you can to try to resolve that. You would hope that they would meet you kind of halfway, or meet you in trying to resolve the issue.

This is why I like to call this the olive branch approach, because you’re kind of extending the olive branch here.

More than likely, though, they’re not going to respond. After a week or so if they don’t respond, you can then contact, whether it’s Yelp or Google or whoever and say, “There’s been this review on your website about our company and we take this really seriously. We’ve tried to reach out to the person and try to rectify the issue, and they are not responding. Also, it seems that there could be a little bit of hearsay in there or second hand information. I believe that’s against your terms of service. Could you please check into that for me?”
Both times that I’ve been involved in this process, one line that the person who’s flying off the handle puts in there that actually makes their complaint outside of their terms of service, the website’s terms of service, and they’ll delete. Both times we’ve had them deleted, but you can’t just ask them to delete it. You have to go through this process. It might take a week or two, but it’s well worth it.

Then what you should do so that this doesn’t happen again is have a proactive approach. What I like to do is let clients know that first of all, just go back in the last year or so to all the raving fans that you’ve had, the people that have sent you those awesome thank you cards. I know that you probably have a shoebox full of them. Hopefully you’re displaying them or even scanning them and putting them on your website if you get the family’s permission.

But what you should also do is then get those cards, and if it’s someone who’s web savvy, type out their response and email it to them and just say, “I really appreciate this great thank you card that you sent to us. We’re honored to help your family at a very tough time. If you could just do me a small favor and share the same words or similar words to one of the online review sites. A lot of people look for those when they’re looking for a funeral home. We would like to serve more families like yours.”

Especially if you know someone quite well, they’re probably going to do it. They just need to be asked. You have to remember. You’ve helped them out at the toughest time of their lives. They probably will take the five minutes to do this.

The next thing that you want to do is have a page on your website dedicated to this. You could put a link to all the different websites that link right to your profile, so you make it really easy for people to do that.

If for some reason one of those websites has a couple of negative reviews, you may not want that on there at the beginning. But if you have maybe a close friend, you could just say, “Hey, could you go put one on here? We’ve got some negative ones and they’re stuck there. We’ve tried to get them removed, but they can’t. But send them to other ones, especially Google Plus, your Google Plus page or Yelp. People will do this. They’ll take the five minutes to do it. Hopefully you’re taking down clients email addresses. Find any that are Gmail addresses and send it to them, because then that means that they don’t need to create an account to leave one on Google. It’s a little secret tip there, actually, not too secret but a little shortcut.

Then what you should do is on a proactive basis, every time you have a card of thanks come in like that, you do the same. Send out a little email and have it have their part, what they wrote typed up. Obviously, leave out the part that also submitted in the card is the final balance of the payment. You don’t need to put that in there. Then send that email to the link to the page or if they have a Gmail account, you can just send them specifically right to the Gmail account.

For those of you who have an aftercare program in place and everyone should, because you can just put out so many little fires that I’ve found. I’ve worked with a lot of people in aftercare. I’ve organized and created the aftercare program at McCall Brothers. It is now one of their best programs that they have there. They’ve got a great staff, but the icing on the cake is Audrey, who is their aftercare specialist.

What you should do then is have your Audrey or your aftercare person, when they’re sitting down with the families after the service, ask them or they’re going to know if someone’s ecstatic about everything. If the person seems to be kind of web savvy, like maybe their checking iPhone and that type of thing right there, or they brought in their iPad. Just say, “Hey, would you mind taking a few minutes and doing this?” Kind of going through the same process as I’ve explained for the people who send in the cards.

Because right then when they’re so happy and they’ve just said, “Oh, everything that you did was so great.” Don’t do it in the first two minutes, but maybe halfway through the appointment just bring it up. Just say, “Oh, you know one thing that we ask, especially people who are so pleased with what we’ve done, if you could just take five minutes to leave a nice online review for us. Here’s their web page.”

If they have their iPhone, they could do it right there. You could even just have a QR code that they can scan or just type in the web address. Then they can click on the links from your website and they can fill out right there.

A word of warning is don’t have them log in on your computer. If they’re there and they have to log in, if Google sees that all these reviews are coming from the same IP address, they’re going to think it’s a little fishy, so don’t do that. But nowadays, the people who I would approach are the people walking around with their iPhones or Androids or iPads. Just ask them if they would do that.

That’s a real proactive way of making sure that negative reviews don’t harm you. Because what’ll happen is, if someone’s being a real jerk and they want to give you a negative review, and if they go to a place where there’s 20 positive reviews, and they’re all four out of five stars or five out of five stars, they’re going to look like a real idiot trying to give you a one or a zero or whatever. That’s just something to keep in mind. It’s just the way it is. Whether you want to participate in this or not, it’s going to happen. There’s going to be online reviews, and as Google is continually changing their algorithm of how websites rank, online reviews are playing more and more of a factor.

I just want to share with you a couple things that have been happening here at Funeral Futurist. It’s been a busy summer. Getting ready just next month, we’ve got our funeral boot camp. We’ve got the brochures. They’ve been mailed out. We mailed them to funeral homes in Ohio and the border states around Ohio, since it is going to be in Cleveland.
We’re also getting, ramping up for funeral rock stars two in November at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas, and also getting ready for NFDA in Austin in October. It’s going to be busy fall and we’re really looking forward to it.

Another thing that we’ve been doing, we’ve launched three now, three cremation arrangement websites. The great thing about these is that they’re very easy to use. What we do is we try to get the payment first and then get them to fill in the form second, because it’s better to get the cash in and have them make that commitment and then have them go into filling out the forms and authorizing the documentation and that type of thing.

The other thing is that all of our sites are mobile responsive, meaning that they work, they fully function from your computer to your laptop to your iPad to your phone. If you’re interested in those, just shoot me an email and I can give you some more information on that.

If you have any questions that are just burning about strategy, competitions, marketing, leave them here. Leave a comment and ask a question or send me an email at [email protected] and I’d be glad to answer them. I can answer them privately or even answer them right here on the show.

If you have a comment, too, I’ll read the comment out and give you a little plug, and a little link back to your funeral home’s website. Links, although they’re not as important as they used to be, they still are very important. Getting a link from my site is going to be of benefit to you and just a little other tick in your favor for getting you up in rankings.

Another resource that I want to share with you is you may have seen some of our banner ads, but we are now offering what we call our “local SEO audit.” I’ll leave a link in the show notes of how you can get that for free. We normally charge $50 for this, but what we do is we create a 14 page, 15 page report. It shows a lot of the elements of the different ranking factors that are affecting your website.

Some on site factors, meaning how your website is built, but mostly off site factors, it’s going to talk about links. It’s going to talk about local listings and things like this that you need for the online reviews and what they call “citations” online. You want to build that up and this report shows you what to do. A lot of things you can just do on your own. It’s not just a sales pitch or anything like that. It’s a good, solid resource for you that you can work away on and improve your overall online presence.

Just as we wrap up here, when you’re talking about online reviews, when you get a negative one, three things. first of all, investigate it to see if it is legitimate. If it is, solve it.
Next, you want to go with the olive branch approach and respond to them online, always taking the high road, doing it in a very professional manner, because millions of people are watching. They’re watching if you don’t do anything, and they’re also watching what you do. You have more control if you do something. If you’re going to do it, make sure that it’s positive. Third, start a proactive program to cultivate more reviews, especially with your aftercare program.

Just a quick little challenge for you if you do this, leave a little comment. Just go back the last six months. You’ve probably served someone that you’ve known quite well and because you’ve probably above and beyond for them, like what you do for all your client families. Just ask them if they would leave an online review for you. I’d love to know your success and how that went. If you get one, send me a link to where the review was and I’d love to see it.

With that, once again, thanks for spending your time with me today. I really appreciate it. My goal for you is for you to serve more families and provide them more meaning services. That’s what I do with this show and also with my business. I just want to make sure that you can do a better job serving more families.

Make sure you check back soon for another episode of the Funeral Strategy and Marketing show. This is Robin Heppell.

Leave your comments below.

Beware of the Difference Between Opinions and Advice

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Listen on iTunesAs you will learn in this episode, this topic is always apparent to me ever since it hit me over the head in 1997 and I think that it is something that you should think about every so often (or even daily)…



Topics discussed / In this video:

02:34 – Who scored on Hepp who also hoisted the Stanley Cup?
03:24 – Started my apprenticeship with McCalls
04:04 – An epiphany in Las Vegas
06:07 – Opinions are like a nose, everyone has one
07:30 – Have you embalmed as many bodies as me?
09:32 – I’m not picking on hospice 
10:23 – September 9th, 10th, and 11th, in Cleveland
14:44 – This podcast is now on iTunes
15:11 – Dropbox for Funeral Homes

Like or share this video with your friends and colleagues.

Resources:
Funeral Related Domains for Sale
Dropbox for Funeral Homes

Quotes:
“Never take advice from someone who doesn’t have what you want or doesn’t have the experience or the education to get you the results that you need.” – Hepp – Click To Tweet
Don’t you hate “the nosy rosy neighbor, who always sticks their nose in it” – Hepp – Click To Tweet

002-FSM-OpinionVsAdviceBPI

Welcome to the “Funeral Strategy and Marketing Show.” I’m your host, Robin Heppell. In today’s show, we’re going to be talking about the differences between opinion and advice. Before I get into that topic, I just want to let you know to stick around to the end of the episode because I’m going to be sharing with you one of my favorite free resources that every funeral home could use. It saved my butt more than once, probably a dozen times. We’ll get into a little bit later. [Read more…] about Beware of the Difference Between Opinions and Advice

Google AdWords Campaign & Ad Group Setup for Funeral Homes

http://funeralstrategymarketingshow.s3.amazonaws.com/001-FSM-Google-AdWords-Campaign-Ad-Group-Setup.mp3

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Listen on iTunesI get a lot of questions about what is the best way to set up a Google AdWords account for funeral homes – and I have seen a lot of AdWords accounts that haven’t been set up properly, so here is what I recommend…



00:39 – Very effective marketing tool.
01:20 – Is click fraud a tongue twister
03:08 – Setting up your initial Google AdWords campaign
03:55 – Setting up your ad groups
06:05 – Not all keywords are good for you
07:58 – If you have multiple locations, do this
11:15 – Get the Funeral Home edition of Scientific Advertising audiobook for free
13:29 – Let’s meet this Fall in person

Like or share this video with your friends and colleagues.

Need help with your Google AdWords account for your funeral home.
Join Hepp in Cleveland for the Funeral Bootcamp.

Quotes:
“…it’s important to add in negative keywords” – Hepp – Click To Tweet
“…Google can track click fraud. [laughs] It’s not much of a tongue twister.” – Hepp – Click To Tweet

Google AdWords Setup For Funeral Homes

Hi, this is Robin Heppell from FuneralFuturist.com, and welcome to “The Funeral Strategy and Marketing Show.” This is a little video that I’m going to do on a regular basis so that I can share with you and other funeral professionals just some of my experiences, tips, and strategies for you to have your funeral home more strategic, more competitive, and win more calls, serve more families. That’s what it’s all about to me is, if I can help you serve more families, and if you provide better funeral services than your competition, then I believe my job is being done. I think that’s awesome.

What we’re going to talk about today is setting up Google AdWords. Google AdWords is a very effective marketing tool. It allows you to get in front of people who are searching for funeral homes and cremation services. The great thing is, you only pay for when someone clicks on your ad. Unlike the yellow pages or any other type of marketing you pay upfront, this is what they call pay per click, so you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Now, the first thing you’re going to think of is, “Hey, I don’t want my competitor clicking on my ad.” Sure, none of us do. The reality is that’s going to happen a couple times, but if it happens a lot, a couple things happen. One is that Google can track click fraud. [laughs] It’s not much of a tongue twister. They can track click fraud. They can then either reverse those charges don’t even worry about that. [Read more…] about Google AdWords Campaign & Ad Group Setup for Funeral Homes

Double Your Website Traffic – 1 – Introduction

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

Part 1 of 6

3-Funeral-Home-Website-Obituary-Traffic-Strategies
Click to Download Cheat Sheet

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

Double Your Funeral Home Website Traffic Part 1

Double Your Website Traffic – 2 – Email Family

http://funeralstrategymarketingshow.s3.amazonaws.com/FF-Double-Website-Traffic-02.mp3

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If you are only going to implement one strategy, do this one – it is the most powerful.

Part 2 of 6

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]

3-Funeral-Home-Website-Obituary-Traffic-Strategies
Click to Download Cheat Sheet

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

Double Your Website Traffic Part 2

Double Your Website Traffic – 3 – Email Church & Groups

http://funeralstrategymarketingshow.s3.amazonaws.com/FF-Double-Website-Traffic-03.mp3

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

Part 3 of 6

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]

3-Funeral-Home-Website-Obituary-Traffic-Strategies
Click to Download Cheat Sheet

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

Double Your Website Traffic Part 3

Double Your Website Traffic – 4 – Facebook Family Strategy

http://funeralstrategymarketingshow.s3.amazonaws.com/FF-Double-Website-Traffic-04.mp3

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

Part 4 of 6

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”
3-Funeral-Home-Website-Obituary-Traffic-Strategies
Click to Download Cheat Sheet

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

Double Your Website Traffic Part 4

Double Your Website Traffic – 5 – Bonus: Checklist of more Traffic Strategies

http://funeralstrategymarketingshow.s3.amazonaws.com/FF-Double-Website-Traffic-05.mp3

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

Part 5 of 6

  • 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
3-Funeral-Home-Website-Obituary-Traffic-Strategies
Click to Download Cheat Sheet

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

Double Your Website Traffic Part 5

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