Alrighty, hello everybody this is Albert with Parting Pro. Apologies for the quarantine haircut but in this presentation I'm gonna cover what the problem is with funeral home websites, and how you can easily multiply your business by fixing your website without even having to change website providers.
All right, and here are a couple of examples of funeral homes that we've been working with. A lot of them were able to keep their existing website provider. Here's Balboa Cremation Services in San Diego. He was averaging about 30 cases per month.Essentially within five or six months, we were able to help them double that to 60 cases per month.
So think about that. They were doing 30 cases per month for a number of years all of a sudden working with Parting Pro, they're now at 60, after six months. And at their price point in terms of revenue, that's roughly about, I don't know, a third of a million dollars? You can see their transactions here on the right side.
There's also a Colonial Funeral Home of Leesburg; they added about 32 to 33 cases their first year. So in the first 12 months they generated an additional $55,000 in revenue.
Here's another example. Cremation Society of Milwaukee improved their business in a ton of different aspects. I'm not able to share any actual numbers, but I can say that they added their case volume as well as revenue per case, among many other things.
So obviously all this growth is not 100% due to a couple changes you're going to make on your website, but really understanding the importance of how a website should work really is the foundation of how to achieve this astronomical growth.
All right, so a problem that I have with let's say websites and technology, especially in the funeral space, is that there's very little focus on the user experience. And in my mind, user experience is literally really everything, right?
So my co-founders and I all come from the consumer tech world.We all built their careers working at consumer-facing technology companies up in San Francisco. Within two or three years we were able to build up Parting Pro which now processes millions and millions of dollars every month in online arrangements. And I don't know this for a fact, but I'm willing to bet that we're probably the number one processor in online at-need cremation arrangements in the country right now because we have the best product. And we got here by solely focusing on mainly one thing, which is the user experience.
So this is a picture of an elevator with a very poor user experience and you can imagine, I'm sure there are a lot of websites out there that have people as confused as they would be using this elevator. So it's very important to understand that the user experience you're giving to your families through your website, through interacting with the software you’re using, will 100% affect the growth of your business.
Okay and i'll talk more about this in detail in another video, but in terms of the original question I asked, in terms of websites, let's talk about user experience in terms of websites. So what is the main goal of a website?
You might say “I want my website to give my family information. I want to show obituaries. I want to sell flowers. I want to talk about how great I am. I want to do this or that.” So yeah, these are all things that your website can and probably should do, but I would argue that the main goal of your website should be to get the user most, likely this family, to take an action, Right? Take an action.
And it goes without saying that this action usually should be in the direction of you winning their business. Okay, so as a funeral home what do you want that action to be? And I'm sure everyone's gonna be slightly different but I think the majority of folks on average would really want this action to be either call me, or start some sort of process to pay me, right? To become a customer.
So this really is your number one call to action you should have your website and everything else is just secondary. Everything else is just noise really. And you don't want to offer like “oh I want them to do this. I want to do that and do that.” Because you really are going to confuse a user with too many options. And keep in mind, somebody who's on your website will only give you like 10 or 20 seconds of attention before they're off doing something else.
So you need to be able to communicate your value, the value you provide, very very quickly so in order to do that you need to have a very clear call to action as well as a very clear value proposition, right?
And don't worry about any of the details. So really just two things to focus on in talking about your website. What is the value proposition? What are you going to offer to your family” And what do you want them to do next?
Okay, so let's take a look at some websites and see how this works out. So I mentioned Cremation Society Milwaukee earlier so here's their website right? So what are the two things I talked about? The call-to-action and value prop.
So they offer more than one package but the the main reason people go to their website is they want direct cremation. So you can see it's a very clear value proposition and then you can guess what these green boxes are for... This is your call to action.
It's a really clear call to action right? I want you to click this button because this will lead me down to becoming my customer. You could also argue you also want them to call you, so you I wouldn't mind if they put their phone number down here in the middle as well. That could be a little bit better. Because they may want to call for some questions.
But as I scroll down, there's also the information. There's like this video how to how to work with us, the paragraphs of some benefits, these pictures. But really, most people aren't going to be reading this. Most people want to know what the price is and what the next step is and that anywhere I'm on the website there's this button here for me to press. There's also going to be people that can later on look at other information.
So this information is all available but you really want a call to action to be really right here above the fold, right in the center.
All right so here's another example that I could use. Here's my website. Parting Pro’s website and we're not selling funeral services but you can use the same format, right? So I have a very clear call to action which is to click this button right here to get a price, right? Click this button and this will bring you down our our sales funnel.
I have a very clear value prop. We do a lot of different things but I don't have time to explain everything to you in this little real estate I have, so i'm gonna narrow it down to the one thing I want you to understand about my business. And you can read more about it if you explain on but it's a very clear value proposition i'm offering you to get you to take the call to action right.
And then my sales process and your sales process is going to be different because my sales cycle is much longer. No one's going to buy, no one's going to call me and just buy software right away, whereas they would for a cremation or a funeral service right? But I have more content here. So I have a full video and I explain everything. I have social proof. So you want reviews, right? Social proof, people that have done it before.
That's very important as well for you to capture reviews. I have another video on that. A lot of people put reviews on their website which is great. I can just go out and get more information.
But the idea here, once again, above the fold, before you scroll… What do I have to offer and what do I want you to do? So those two things should be abundantly clear for any website and that's really the job of your website.
Okay that's the job of your website, plain and simple. Everything else, you can do a lot of stuff but that's just extra. So think about your website in that framework: what kind of experience are you providing to your families that go to your website. Is it very clear to them what you have to offer and what you want them to do?
Okay so that's how I would go about thinking about this. So think about how people go to your website that may not call you right? Why don't they call you? Maybe they're not ready or didn't see your phone number. What's the next call to action? What's your call to action?
I just went in google I just typed in to google I typed in “funeral home websites” and I just clicked on a couple of actual funeral homes. So I'm gonna go through a couple examples I just want to kind of make it clear I don't want to be picking on anybody I just want to go through an example of how you would go about evaluating your own website right. So here's a website that showed up.
So these are websites with good SEO because I was able to find them so by typing in funeral home websites and that's pretty competitive. And when I get here I can see I have a sentence that has “friends who care.” What kind of value prop is this to someone that doesn't know anything about your funeral home? And this phone number is at the top here but it's not very clear to me.... it's not very big right? So it's not really clear to me what you want me to do.
It seems like you want me to look at your obituaries, which a lot of funeral homes do want that, however, I will make the argument as a business owner, in your best interest, you want to make sure anyone that's interested in your services, that comes to your website become a customer right?
So you should really focus on that. So obituaries although they're nice and they generate SEO and all that might not, might not be what you want to show first.
Okay here's another one so you can see when I get above the phone without scrolling, I don't really see any phone number anywhere. I have a very big picture that's taking up a lot of real estate. And once again I see .. think about think of, just rethink your process. You have photos on your of your funeral home, you have all these pictures. What are you trying to do? What is your goal?
And I said earlier your goal is to get someone to take an action right? Does this photo do that? Maybe, Maybe not. Should just be here? Maybe, maybe not. But maybe you could have explained why they should call you and make that phone number more appear-able. What if someone wants to call you, but they don't see the phone number? They don't call you right?
So there could be a there's a funnel of information. People are getting to certain places and you want to design that funnel to make it very simple for the family to become your customer.
This is another one here. Yeah so this is good. As you can see here. Here's the website take the first step this is your call to action I guess and click on here. And... okay so it leads me to this paragraph of stuff so this is not a very this is not really providing me with the information I was expecting, but there was a call to action….and then it goes to a pre-planning form.
Okay, so now I asked you for a lot of information so I could make the argument that nobody's gonna want to fill this out. So they probably don't want to have that on your home page,but they do have that phone number here.
Okay so just I just want to go through this exercise I didn't I don't want to this is your website, I don't mean to offend you. i'm just just calling out a couple of things that you can do to improve your website and design your website.
So in summary, you really want to understand how important the user experience you're offering to your families is, right? And this starts with your website, but can go into any other another process you bring the family through and you have a very limited time to communicate your value. And you need to spend the real estate you have there above the fold to focus on getting them to do what you want them to do which again I would argue probably for you should be to get some sort of process in place where they pay you or call you right some sort of process that brings you down the funnel of making that sale.
So yeah use this frame work to examine your website. You really want to keep an eye on user experience like I said, if you want to learn more about other aspects of improving user experience feel free to reach out.
I would suggest you go to my website and follow my call to action which will bring you down my process right? So think about how that works. Just go there and then we'll end up booking a time and we can talk. So hope this helps i'll see you guys next video
