7 Features Your Families Crave From A Funeral Home Website
May 7th, 2015
As a business-minded funeral professional, you know what types of features your funeral home website needs to help you grow your business. But do you know what information and tools your families crave the most?
Finding out the specifics of what your families are looking for from your funeral home website requires a lot of research, experimentation and analyzing. But thankfully, we’ve done all that hard work for you. After compiling nearly a decade of research, we have come up with these 7 website features that will help to transform your funeral home website into your #1 marketing tool:
1. “A website that educates me on all my options for celebrating my loved one’s life.”
When you take a step back and think about the true value of a funeral service, you realize that it’s not about the casket, the flowers, or even the discussion of cremation vs. burial. It’s about creating a service that celebrates the life the loved one lived. All of the other elements that go into a service should simply reflect that goal, and should be personalized to create the most meaningful service possible.
Unfortunately, a personalized funeral, to many, seems expensive, intimidating, or simply out of reach. Many people think customizing their funeral means spending thousands of dollars to shoot their loved one’s ashes into space, which isn’t exactly in everyone’s price range. Little do they know that a personalized funeral can be affordable, without having to sacrifice the full meaning and impact that this end of life celebration brings. Your job as a funeral director is to show potential families all the options there are for celebrating life, no matter what their price range is.
And if your families see how creative and helpful you are by providing them this information on your website – especially in an interactive way – why shouldn’t they choose your firm? Below, B.C. Bailey Funeral & Cremation Services uses their “What We Do” page to educate their families on all of their “signature services,” as well as walking them through the range of different options available to them with an interactive life exploration tool. Families can literally scroll through a portal of different choices, from traditional to out of this world, all without leaving the page. By offering their families this information on their website, families often come to their funeral home with tons of creative ideas for creating a memorable service for their loved one.
2. “A website that helps me before, during and after the service.”
One huge way to make an impact in your families’ experience at your funeral home is to treat them like family. Because they’re sharing this difficult time of their lives with you, families will crave the type of love and support their own family would give them.
So why not use your website as the perfect resource to help them feel comforted 24/7? You could offer them 365 days of affirmations, or you could offer them online grief aftercare that lets them seek guidance from a professionally trained grief counselor from the comfort of their own home (Pssst, both of these features are out there if you choose the right website provider). Another feature you can add to your website is a grief and healing blog that inspires your readers with stories, advice and helpful resources (O’Connor Mortuary does an awesome job).
3. “A website that makes it easy for me to find what I’m looking for.”
Every visitor on your website is there for a specific purpose or goal, and they’re going to want to achieve that goal as quickly and easily as possible, or else they’ll visit another website. To give your website visitor’s what they need ASAP, you’ll have to figure out what activities your visitors are doing on your website the most.
According to funeralOne’s research, which looked at more than 7,000 websites, apart from pre-planners and those at need, the majority of funeral home website visitors want to achieve one of three goals: 1) lookup service information 2) share a condolence on a loved one’s social memorial website and 3) send flowers or gifts to show the family they care. Keeping this information in mind, it’s important that you design your website in a way that makes these three goals incredibly easy to achieve. That’s why it’s important to choose a website platform designed around these three goals, in addition to creating useful resources that attract at-need and pre-need families.
If you look at French Funeral’s website (below), the three goals we mentioned above are what the website’s design and structure are centered around. That way, when families land on their website, they’ll find what they’re looking for without having to search high and low.
4. “A website that makes sharing memories with my family and community social.”
With the hectic lifestyles we live today, it’s not always easy to fly across the country to attend a funeral service for someone you know. Heck, these days, even making a phone call is a huge feat all on its own. That’s why the families of today are using social media (particularly Facebook) to send their condolences to the family and share the memories they have with the loved one.
But there is a downside to using Facebook – all of the messages and memories the family receives will be scattered all over the place, living on multiple Facebook accounts – not one concise place where photos, memories and condolences can be stored. Families of today crave this singular, simple place where they can create a legacy for their loved ones that will live on for generations to come. And if you choose the right website platform, that’s exactly what they’ll get: an interactive social memorial page where supporters can leave messages, pictures, videos, purchase gift, and even light a candle in honor of the loved one (see the example below).
5. “A website that works on all my devices.”
Don’t you just hate when you’re trying search the web on your phone – only to find that the website’s design is all messed up? This happens when websites aren’t optimized for mobile phones or tablets. Since almost half of online shoppers are exclusively using their mobile phones to research products and services, you’d be crazy to think that your funeral home’s website is an exception to this rule. Just think – if an at-need family needs to speak with a qualified funeral director now, you shouldn’t make them go through loops to access your website. Give them all the information they need, on the go, by optimizing your website for all mobile devices.
6. “A website that loads fast… really fast.”
In a recent survey conducted by Business News Daily, 83 percent of respondents said slow websites cause them to have a negative reaction to a brand or company. Does your website have a slow or lagging load time? Type in your website address right now and put it to the test. Did it take more than three seconds for everything to load properly? If so, you could be losing out on more than half of your business. Find out why your website is loading slow and how to fix it by entering your web address in this Google tool.
7. “An easy way to show my loved one that I care… without having to make a million calls.”
It’s 3am and you just realized that you forgot to send flowers to your Aunt Betty’s family for the funeral tomorrow. How great would it be if you could go online right now, pick out a beautiful flower arrangement, and be confident that it will be hand delivered by a local florist just in time for the service? Oh, and on top of that, you wouldn’t even need to make any phone calls to find out the funeral home address, the preferred florist, or the exact service time! Some people would say that’s magic, but actually, with the right funeral eCommerce platform, your funeral home website can make this kind of magic happen everyday. To learn everything you need to know about funeral eCommerce, check out the article What Everyone Ought to Know About Funeral eCommerce.
Does your website offer the features your families crave?
We understand that it can feel overwhelming trying to create the perfect website for your families, while also managing the ins and outs of your funeral home. Luckily, you don’t have to, because we’ve already made the website your families want. While f1Connect was created for funeral professionals, it was built and engineered for today’s families, with all of their needs in mind. With an f1Connect website, you can be sure that your families are finding the helpful tools, resources and information they need ﹘ and they’ll value your funeral home more for giving it to them.
Get a free demo of the website platform that’s packed with all of the features your families crave, f1Connect, by clicking here or calling us at 800-798-2575, ext. 5.
What other website features do you think your families crave the most? Tell us in the comments below!
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