What Families Want In A Funeral Home Website – Part 3
September 6th, 2011
Make Your Funeral Website a Gathering Place For Families
Ok, so now that I’ve introduced you to some ways to make Your Funeral Home Website Rise Above the Online Clutter and shared ideas about How to Use Your Funeral Website to Serve the Living, I’m going to wrap up this series by giving you a little insight about why it’s important to make your website a gathering place for your client families.
A funeral home website should exist to serve families before, during and after the actual funeral service. By featuring interactive memorial web pages dedicated to their loved one, your website will serve as a gathering place for friends and relatives.
Today’s interactive web technology opens the door to innovative services that are both convenient and profoundly helpful to families. The funeral firms that recognize these possibilities are quickly becoming the new leaders in the funeral service profession.
How can your website become an online place that enhances the celebration of the life of the loved one? One answer. Social memorial websites.
Here are 6 reasons why a social memorial website serves as a gathering place for families:
- By providing your client families with a permanent memorial website for their loved one, you’re allowing their memories to be preserved forever.
- By preserving an online record, the life story of the deceased is visible to children as they grow up, creating a sense of family history.
- Funeral websites usually include online obituary notices, but most of them are boring and merely state the names of surviving family members. A memorial website gives family members and friends a place to share their stories and experiences about their loved one through uploading photos or videos, and leaving messages and virtual gifts.
- Memorial websites can also help to create family trees.
- People who live far away and are unable to attend the services can participate online by sharing their memories on the social memorial website.
- Families can invite friends to the site to leave condolences, gifts, photos, and donations in memory of their loved one.
Your site can – and should – become a virtual gathering place of all who knew the deceased. A memorial website is the best way to do that. With the rise in social media, interacting through online dialogue is becoming a common – and expected – activity.
Your families expect to come away feeling satisfied with the funeral and with the celebration of the life of their loved one. Social memorial websites serve to increase their satisfaction by affording them more opportunities to participate in the experience of remembering the life lived.
When your site has responded to their needs by facilitating interactive web services before, during and after the funeral, you’ve built a relationship with them they won’t forget. You’ve helped them manage during a difficult time and relieved much of the stress and responsibility for them. They will return to your firm when they have future needs.
Is your firm incorporating interactive options with your website? We’d love to hear about your experiences. Share your comments below!
[…] that people in your community are already having online and reach your target market. With a social memorial website, you can actually integrate social media into your funeral home website and engage your client […]
If funeral homes don’t make
their websites a virtual gathering place for family and friends to come
together than chances are someone else, like facebook, will step in and
take that from you. There are a lot of savvy people working for facebook
and I’m sure true memorial pages are in their future growth plans.