Starting with our very first client back in 2008, we have always structured our business model as a partnership with each funeral home client. We only generate revenue when people find and use your CFS website This motivates us to do all that we can to help you stand out in a competitive online world.
A CFS funeral home website generates lots of traffic. We see an average of 271 visitors per website per day across our network. More than four out of five of these visitors are viewing obituary pages. If you’re an average-sized funeral home that posts obituaries, you can expect them to draw in over 200 people to your CFS website each and every day.
Seizing the opportunity
Every visitor to your website can be a direct or indirect link to future business. It’s very much in our interest, as your website provider and partner, to do all that we can to help you capture these opportunities. This is why we’ve spent the last few months performing research and engineering an improved obituary system. Our new design focuses on better serving families, capturing new leads, and creating an even more favorable impression of your funeral home.
What’s new
Key features of the new system include:
- A larger obituary theme header across the top, with the decedent’s photo(s) inset. This approach is similar to the familiar Facebook cover photo format.
- Hundreds of new obituary theme graphics, with more on the way. This allows you to tailor the obituary page to more closely represent the individual, undoubtedly creating additional goodwill with your families.
- A ‘tribute wall’ that includes condolences, gestures, images, and our new video posts, all in one place. The guest book is now structured much like social media sites, and has proven to generate more posted content in support of the family. It also aims to encourage families to use the wall as a permanent and ongoing online memorial.
- Multiple features that make it much easier for people to view and interact with the obituary on a mobile device, now that roughly half of visitors are viewing your website on a smartphone or tablet.
- Continuous background music across all content tabs (as opposed to the old system that started the music over as people clicked on each tab).
- A better store layout that allows people to filter products by type and price range.
- On-demand display of condolences (loading as needed) as people scroll down the tribute wall. This significantly reduces the load time of obituary pages when there are many guestbook entries. Reduced load time also helps your website’s search ranking.
- Ability to have the services tab appear first when the services have not yet concluded (that setting is in the obituary preferences section of your website). The obituary tab is returned to the first slot after the services are over.
- Grief support signup option in the sidebar. This has already generated an increase in subscribers across the first phase of websites using the new obituary system. Each grief subscription puts your funeral home name and brand in front of a consumer every day for 365 days! As well as helping the subscriber through grief, these emails also allow you to gently offer pre-need/pre-planning, if you wish to take advantage of this.
Summary
Your website traffic is vitally important to securing long-term business and it’s mostly driven by obituaries. Our new system provides better features for families and better opportunities for you to promote your funeral home.
We are very proud of the new obituary system and hope that you will like it too. We’ve started rolling it out across our responsive website platform and everyone should have it in place over the next few days.
If you are still on our non-responsive platform (those who logon with a username), we would love to transfer you onto our newer platform so that you can take advantage of our latest features.
Please let us know if you have comments or questions. We stand ready to assist you.
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