You’ve got to check out the way pre-planning is being approached by folks who, hopefully, won’t need funeral services for sixty or eighty years. Click the link above to visit the site.
The Argus, a British newspaper, conducted an interview with Victoria Vanstone, the site’s creator. You can read it here.
ASK YOURSELF: What are we doing to reach out to the folks who will plan their own funerals in sixty years?
Have we considered that they’ll probably be handling their own parent’s funerals much sooner?
How do we interact with 20-somethings at our firm?
About a year ago, I started looking at the funeral business in a radically different way. I joined an organization that helps women starting businesses, called Ladies Who Launch (http://ladieswholaunch.com/).
The core of the program is a four week long “incubator”. The general theory is that when we try to innovate for ourselves, we tend to be unsuccessful because every new idea is met with four or five reasons why we think it would never work. Other people will tend not to see those limitations, and will dream bigger for us than we do for ourselves. My homework during those four weeks was to think about everyone else’s business but my own.
When it came time to hear what ideas the other women in my group came up with for my funeral home, I was expecting to hear a lot about cremation, green funerals, East-Asian and new-age rituals, and other scenarios that are hard for funeral directors to make a living on.
I was very, very wrong. Their perceptions of what can and can’t be done to memorialize someone were worlds apart from mine. Overall, their ideas harkened back to making things very simple, but meaningful. Most were also fairly expensive: several people suggested ‘destination funerals’ in The Adirondacks or the Jersey Shore. As a whole, they saw nothing wrong with spending money if they could see the value in the cost.
I think many of us in the funeral industry get stuck in a mindset about how we think the industry should progress, and what we think the consumer should want.My experience in the Ladies Who Launch Incubator showed me that what this group of consumers wants from me as their funeral director is vastly different from what I thought it was.
From this stems my frustration with the majority of those who market their wares to me as the funeral director.
First, of course, are those who try to get me to buy an item for anywhere from $50 to $150, and just “throw it in” with a funeral. This demonstrates a (perceived) lack of understanding by the vendors about how much my actual costs are, and what I can realistically afford to absorb before passing the cost on to my clients. They also seriously underestimate the intelligence of my clients if they think I can tack and extra $100 on to their bill without them noticing or questioning it.
Second, many of the things I see that are intended to be resold to families are just too complicated, especially in an at-need situation. Most often, the families have a million things going on in their heads, and have varying levels of focus on the task at hand. I’ve got a limited window of time and attention during which to sell them items. That, and I personally just don’t like doing a hard sell at any point during the arrangement process.
There’s a woman I met in Ladies Who Launch, Jen Groover, who sells the Butler Bag, a compartmentalized handbag for women. (http://butlerbag.com/). It’s great because you never have to dig to find anything in your purse- it’s always right there. I own FIVE of them. Jen and I have both lost count of how many more I’ve sold for her. The reason is because they sell themselves. In less than 15 seconds I can explain what it is, and once I open up my own bag and show them what it looks like inside, they’re sold.
My general rule of thumb now is if I can’t sell a product to my families the way I can sell Butler Bags to my friends, I won’t waste time on it during arrangements.
More importantly, most items I come across are marketed to me because, as a funeral director I’ll appreciate them. Very few items are marketed to me because of what they’ll actually do for my clients. I find that very frustrating.
At the last convention I attended, it was the casket-makers that had the largest displays, as usual. If you took away their logos, it would have been hard to tell one from the other. Both were pushing their arrangement-making software in a big, big way.
So I asked myself, is this something my client would really be interested in? Generally the answer was no. Even if the software is free to me up front, we all know it’s going to be factored into the costs of the caskets I buy. How will that benefit the families I work with?
As a funeral director, I was really impressed by caskets with new types of interiors, or a new type of scrollwork carved into the exterior. However, before I became a funeral director, I honestly couldn’t tell you the difference between wood that was actually cherry, or pine that was given a cherry finish. Most of my clients can’t either. A few will come in and ask me for the very best I have on hand, an equal number want the absolute minimum. Most, however, just want something that will do the job within their price range. The less time they can spend in the selection room, the better. The same is true for most urns.
Unfortunately, I’ve found very few vendors who create products specifically for the families, and market them to me for what they’ll do for my families. Most create products to appeal to funeral directors and then sell them as such.
A man I greatly admire, is the funeral director and poet Thomas Lynch. In a conversation I had with him not long ago, he lamented that most funeral directors sell personalization as though it were a commodity, instead of simply making funerals personal.
He’ll be featured in a documentary on PBS October 30. Here’s a clip of him describing what he wants for his own funeral:
You’ll notice he never mentions what kind of casket he wants, or that he better be brought to the cemetery in the newest Cadillac hearse. It’s because those are not the things that matter. Not even for him, a funeral director.
Unless you sell fluid or cot covers, chances are you shouldn’t be marketing to me as a funeral director.
A licensed funeral director, Michelle Carter is also a funeral consultant and grief counselor from Westchester County, New York.
Through her company, New York Center for Transition, she provides counseling for those who have recently been diagnosed with diseases, grief counseling for those who have experienced a death and funeral consulting to families in need.
Michelle is working toward opening her own funeral home.
Since my friend, Michael Manley of the Funeral Business Advisor, has been so kind as to share his plans for world domination (insert maniacal laughter here) I thought I’d rain on his parade a little.
Actually, Michael has basically (in not so many words) asked me to give him my impressions, so I’m going to do it. Hopefully he can use these questions and the suggestions I’ve offered (without being asked) to make his plan more robust. No sense conquering only half the world if a little tweaking could help you take it all.
Here’s a recap of Michael’s plan, as I understand it:
1. Solicit vendor members and funeral home members using the current advertising and subscription list from Funeral Business Advisor. The vendors will get orders and advertising while the members will benefit from group-only discounts.
2. For a fee ($99 a month for vendor, $19 a month for funeral home) the collective will create a website to show off all the discounted products. The collective will also have a ”Buying Guide” section in the Funeral Business Advisor magazine.
3. Twice a year they’ll publish a “Buying Group” catalog for members.
4. The collective will handle the ordering and invoicing for members.
And now, my questions:
1. Encouraging a funeral home to spend $19 a month for this service means you’ve got guarantee you’ll save them at least that much on merchandise. Without signing up every casket manufacturer (a difficult task), how can you guarantee that big a savings, especially if the funeral home doesn’t use one of the casket makers you’ve signed up? While I know Final Embrace will be offering our quilted mortuary cot covers through your collective, I can’t imagine that even a 10% savings on a product someone buys once every few years will make up for the expense.
2. Will you allow more than one vendor for each market segment? In other words, will you restrict membership to just one casket maker, one cot cover maker, one fluid seller?
3. How do you keep advertisers from abandoning the more expensive advertising space in your magazine by joining the buyer’s group? Do you think you’ll be able to encourage companies to continue advertising in the other sections? Or is the buying collective one way to encourage smaller companies, who might not be able to spend a lot of cash on big ads, to utilize your ad services?
4. Will you charge a transaction fee to the vendor? If your collective makes great strides, handling orders, invoicing and collections might cause a strain on your administrative staff. And since they’re aren’t infinite numbers of potential vendors and clients, wild success might mean a huge strain on your ability to service the group without equal gains in cashflow. It’s possible that charging a transaction fee after the first “X” number of orders might be more appropriate.
5. Would you streamline the process by requiring all vendors to offer the same discount (say, 10%) or would you allow each vendor to create their own offer?
6. Could you expand the group by buying a few pages in other industry publications and advertising the group? This would help mitigate any credibility issues your magazine might have with people who haven’t yet received your publication. Of course, just because I hadn’t seen it doesn’t mean most of the independents haven’t.
7. What keeps the vendors from simply raising their price by 10% and marketing exclusively to your 17,500 prospective buyers?
8. How will you handle firms with multiple locations? Will they be receiving an unfair advantage because they only pay $19 for all their locations?
9. Now that I’ve finished giving you heck, when can I sign up?
As publisher of Funeral Business Advisor, I would like to comment that we are a REAL magazine, circulating FREE to over 30% more death care professionals than any other industry magazine. And Funeral Business Advisor’s success has evolved with a very simple premise; our publication provides insightful content, advice, and information that is intended to help the funeral director manage and run their business more effectively.
Yes, our content is typically provided by our advertisers, but not intended to be viewed as an “advertorial.” Quite to the contrary, we go to great lengths to ensure that our contributing writers DO NOT write in a self-promotional (self-serving) manner. We edit the content to maintain as unbias approach as possible. In reality, we are as a marketing vehicle for manufacturers, distributors, and industry providers to highlight their products and services to the funeral industry.
But what most who are in the publishing business don’t realize, is every magazine is designed in this manner. Not a single magazine would be in business if it wasn’t for their advertisers, so every publisher is concerned with their advertisers first and foremost. At FBA, this is especially important since we are solely funded by our advertisers. The reason we can bring such great content to the industry is because our advertiser help pay for it. Unlike most of the other industry publications, we can’t subsidize our costs with subscription fees. I like to say we are like a co-operative. We provide a marketing tool that everyone shares in the cost and everyone receives the benefit.
Here is how it usually works. Most magazine have an editorial staff, or they pay freelance writers to provide content for the publication. Then those same magazines contact advertisers to solicit advertisements to place around the editorials that they intend to publish. They do this to encourage the advertiser that their ads will have more visability and effect because it will be included with an editorial that has content relating to their business.
At Funeral Business Adisor, we don’t ignore the reason other magazines do this, but we take it a step further and make it much more effective for our advertisers. Who is best suited to educate and provide information and advice to the death care industry? Is it a member of an editorial staff or freelance writer? Or is it someone who works in the death care industry daily? In fact, we believe it is the industry experts themselves. The people making the products or selling the products/services are the experts. They are the ones who should be educating the industry. Funeral Business Advisor does exactly what ever magazine does. We bring “buyers and sellers” together for the benefit of both parties.
We give the industry participant the opportunity to have a voice, and in return for this opportunity we provide two very important benefits:
(1) Funeral Directors get great information. Information that is fresh, current, and designed to help improve their businesses.
(2) We provide the industry suppliers a direct marketing venue (same as every other publication, but provided in a different manner) that is far more effective than traditional magazines.
Instead of just purchasing an ad as every other magazine offers, we offer the opportunity to purchase a marketing package.
THE END RESULT: Our readers (funeral directors) have responded with overwhelminly favorably feedback.
How do we know we are being read? Our advertisers have consistenly told us that they get many more calls from their advertisement in our publication than from competing industry magazines. In fact, these testimonials are posted on our website as proof of these claims.
In the end, all magazines success relies upon the success of generating sales leads for their advertisers. Without good ad results, advertisers would pull their ads and the magazine would go out of business.
Yes, we are less than 1 yr old, but looking at the major industry suppliers who have entrusted us with a portion of their marketing dollars with us, it is obvious we have made a BIG SPLASH and will be in business for many years to come.
Sincerely,
Michael Manley
Publisher
If you’ve had a chance to check out their website, you’ll see that they offer quite a lot for a free publication. Even with content provided by the advertisers, the magazine feels substantial and offers a wide range of subject matter.
I would, however, make the point that, despite Mike’s claims, the way they get content is not new. Every funeral publication solicits editorial content from the industry. I’ve written articles for several trade magazines, with no return ($$$) except for the byline that follows the article. Final Embrace contributors like Kim Stacey write for the trades as well.
The difference? Getting published in one of the other trade magazines is not about buying ad space. It’s about having something to say that isn’t necessarily ad-supported.
And to be fair, The Director, Mortuary Management, American Funeral Director and others publish their editorial calendar far in advance of their publication date. This is to, obstensibly, give advertisers a chance to decide which editorial content would best fit their ad.
In fact, they’ve got the same model I’ll be using when we launch Final Embrace: The Magazine.
Do I think they’ll accept my article submissions, even if I don’t advertise with them? That’s an answer I don’t have yet. But once I figure out whether Final Embrace can afford to advertise with them, I’ll let you know.
We’ve just signed the contract and, more importantly, paid a BIG CHUNK OF CASH to the NFDA to exhibit at the national convention in Las Vegas, October 7-10.
I’m excited and nervous.
Excited because this is our chance to sell our great product on a national stage! Our main competitor, Ron of Quilted First-Call Covers, has gone the last three years. Common sense says he wouldn’t keep going if the $2000 booth didn’t pay for itself.
But I’m also nervous, because we’re already running near our current capacity. Even with four part-time employees, I’m going to have to start adding some folks if we hope to meet all the demand.
I’m confident there will be demand, because our product is so much better than the competition, which includes:
Standard, fake fur covers. These are those ugly puppet-fur covers that are available in red, green and blue and are sometimes embroidered with a funeral home name on the side. If they’re lined, it’s with brittle or hard vinyl. If they’re not lined, you’ve got a germ warehouse in your funeral home.
Cordura or plain covers. These are sold by the cot makers. Besides being unattractive, lined with vinyl and too heavy, they’re also INSANELY expensive. Ferno charges almost $400 for a slip-over style plain cover for the 24-Maxx cot.
Cot Quilts. These are made by Marty at The Last Quilt Company. They are beautiful, but they’re not fitted or lined. Funeral directors I’ve talked with say they fall off the cot very easily. Oh, and they’re a lot more expensive than our superior covers.
Quilted First-Call Covers. Ron has a great design, but his product suffers from two BIG problems: they’re sold unlined (a lining costs $50 extra) and most of the patterns are light colors.
Homemade covers. Some folks make their own. Unfortunately, they don’t have ready access to the great FluidBlocker lining fabric we use. They also suffer because we’ve made thousands of these covers and we’ve perfected the design and manufacture. And by the time you pay a seamstress to make it for you, you’ve got almost as much invested as any of my clients.
So why am I nervous? Because this is our first time on the national stage. Because the suits from many of industry chains will be there. Because we’re being seen by other vendors for the first time.
Because sometimes success is as frightening as failure. Imagine it all unfolds exactly the way I’ve dreamed it. While that would be nice, I dream big! What if it’s all too big for our little company?
Ours has become a visual culture. Most people have hundreds of television channels streaming into their homes, but very few books, and often just a few magazines. The written word has been left behind, in favor of exciting images and special effects. The Internet has changed the way we use language too; muddying the written communication channel.
If you write your own advertising or informational copy, always (and I mean always) have others read through it. A second or third set of eyes can make all the difference.
And, always remember that most people aren’t equipped to read complex information.
While more Americans are graduating from college, and more than ever are applying for admission, far fewer are leaving higher education with the skills needed to comprehend routine data, according to the federal study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.
This means the old acronym, K.I.S.S. still applies: Keep It Simple…Sweetie!
And, that means, reviewing, editing, and rewriting – until a 10 year-old can understand everything on the page.
Kim Stacey, of marketingfuneralservices.com, has dedicated her career to supporting and empowering funeral service professionals by writing responsive advertising and informational copy. She can be reached most easily at kimstacey@sbcglobal.net, or 831-338-0220. Living in the small coastal town of Boulder Creek, California, she’s in the Pacific Time zone.
There are two distinct types of crippling challenges in business. The first is devastating: something is wrong and you can’t find the right answer. And while business still goes on, the problem threatens to unravel some well-made plans.
The second is more immediate and even more dangerous: the business killer!
Our fledgeling quilted cot cover business was humming right along when the business killer swooped down on us.
Seems the vinyl lining we were using in our beautiful covers was causing some of our clients problems. Further investigation showed that each new shipment of vinyl was more brittle than the last. Worse still, several old clients who had bought from us years before were reporting that their vinyl linings were splitting from wear, cracking in the cold or falling out in the wash.
And while we only warrantied our covers for 180 days after order, I still knew that we’d be getting more calls regarding the lining.
Could we have ignored the problems and continued making the inferior covers? Of course. But that would mean creating hundreds of dissatisfied customers every year. We couldn’t afford to alienate our past customers and we couldn’t afford to replace all the old covers we’d sold, especially if we just replaced them with covers that would fail again.
I spent a few terror-filled nights (the kind where you get into bed, stare at the ceiling for eight hours, then get out of bed) and finally hit upon the solution: we’d find a stronger lining for our covers, we’d replace any warrantied covers with new ones and we’d offer a discount to anyone who owned one of our original covers.
Finding a new lining turned out to be more simple than expected. The new material, a treated nylon that is washer and drier safe and won’t melt like vinyl, is more expensive. And while we’ve tripled our materials cost for lining, we’ve also added years of durability to our lining and made our covers many times more attractive than the alternatives.
We replaced quite a few covers during those first months. But we also doubled sales, as folks who had hesitated to buy a vinyl-lined cover because they were worried about durability decided to take a chance on our great product.
Still others were so pleased that we fixed their problem and offered a better solution, they ordered more covers to augment what they already had.
And because our covers are so strong now, we’ve upped our warranty to a full year and we offer a 90-day money-back return on all orders.
What started as a threat to our small company turned into the second best change (right after selling to retail customers) we ever made.
I know, some of the replacements we sent will last quite a few years longer than the originals, meaning we’ll sell less covers to those firms. But we’ve only sold to a fraction of the 22,000 funeral homes in the United States. It didn’t make sense to ruin our fledgeling good name by not standing behind our product.
And since our goal is to make quilted cot covers the industry standard (we’re trying to replace those ugly fake fur covers and the corduroy ones that have no character or class) we’ve got to be a reputable and remarkable company.
So far, we’ve been both. But we could have very well ended up like this:
Commonly Overused Words in Advertising Copy and How to Avoid Them
I recently read a list of five words you should never use in your advertising – and I think you’ll be surprised by them. These words are bantered about all the time; chances are you’re using one or more of them in your current campaigns. Can you guess what they are?
value
quality
service
caring
integrity
The first four are ineffective simply because they all fail for essentially the same reasons. Not only are they overused, they’re based on variables that will be different for everyone. There’s a quality/value/service/caring continuum in each person’s mind for every purchase occasion, and it is a continually moving target.
But the fifth word is different. The fifth word doesn’t work precisely because it’s not variable. The fifth word is binary. Either your company has integrity, or it doesn’t! And…what is integrity, in 21st century America?
The next time you’re tempted to use one of these five words in an ad, stop and ask if there’s a better way to get the message across.
Kim Stacey, of marketingfuneralservices.com, has dedicated her career to supporting and empowering funeral service professionals by writing responsive advertising and informational copy. She can be reached most easily at kimstacey@sbcglobal.net, or 831-338-0220. Living in the small coastal town of Boulder Creek, California, she’s in the Pacific Time zone.
Six Questions to Ask When Writing Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
In order to successfully market your business you need to focus on what’s special and different about what you do. Try to express this uniqueness in a single statement, known as your USP. This is not about advertising slogans; we’re creating a tool to help you focus on what your business is all about.
Sit down with your staff members, and ask one another these six questions:
1. What is unique about your business or brand vs. direct competitors? You’ll probably find a whole list of things that set you apart; the next questions will help you decide which of these to focus on.
2. Which of these factors are most important to the buyers and end users of your business or brand? (Casual surveys of client families can help determine what has been the most important factors in their experience with you.)
3. Which of these factors are not easily imitated by competitors?
4. Which of these factors can be easily communicated and understood by buyers or end users?
5. Can you construct a memorable message (USP) of these unique, meaningful qualities about your business or brand? 6. Finally, how will you communicate this message (USP) to buyers and end users?
Marketing tools to communicate your new USP include Yellow Page ads, radio or television advertising, direct mail promotions, and script development for your pre-need sales personnel.
Kim Stacey, of marketingfuneralservices.com, has dedicated her career to supporting and empowering funeral service professionals by writing responsive advertising and informational copy. She can be reached most easily at kimstacey@sbcglobal.net, or 831-338-0220. Living in the small coastal town of Boulder Creek, California, she’s in the Pacific Time zone.
It’s been awhile since I recorded this interview with Herb Ayres, but my regular readers will remember that in the last few weeks we’ve been busy making and selling quilted mortuary cot covers.
So here’s Part 1 of my interview with Herb Ayres for our MEET YOUR MAKER series. I’d call this one “The Life Story Network Introduction” since Herb describes the network and tells us why it’s gaining such popularity.
I promised that I would share my experiences from the convention, so here goes.
I arrived at the exhibit hall on Thursday, June 7. After scouting out the space and the loading dock, I met my dad at a local restaurant for lunch and to discuss our sales pitch.
While I haven’t shared my business plan with all my readers, some of you will know that my dad is the second part-time employee I hired (we’re up to four now!).
We arrived at the hall after 2:00 pm. The exhibit space was set to open at 5:30 pm.
We carried over 30 quilted cot covers with us, enough to display, along with additional units in case anyone chose to purchase at the convention.
I really like the design of the IFDF Convention, since the exhibit hall does not compete with other sessions and dinner on day 1 and lunch on day 2 is served in the expo area.
Standing cocktail tables were set up in the aisles between the booths for attendees to eat their buffet-style meals.
Attendance was estimated at 300 – 400 guests. And while some of those were wives, husbands and children, I’d say we got to speak to seventy or eighty funeral directors during our two days.
Day 2 saw the doors open at 12:00 pm for lunch. I brought along Matt Coughlin from Central Florida First Call (407-425-3323), a removal service that is an old customer. I figured a little “testimonial” action wouldn’t hurt anyone, and he definitely helped give new perspective to those to whom we presented.
Above: Matt Roloff and family
Matt Roloff, star of the reality TV show “Little People, Big World,” was the keynote speaker for the event. Rushing to catch an early plane, he wheeled through the expo hall on his scooter. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to speak with him or get a photo with him (sorry, Mom!).
Day 2 was sales day! I had set an ambitious goal for the convention (10 sales) and decided that we would not attend the national convention (in Las Vegas in October) unless we were able to meet the goal. And while I knew the goal was excessive, I also know that the national convention will cost in excess of $4000.
We met the goal with thirty minutes to spare.
When all the other exhibitors started packing up, I walked the hall and handed out fliers announcing our blog and the “Meet Your Maker” series. I figured that a few of the other exhibitors might want to have their products and services featured here.
Having worked for a member of the IFDF, I know that their organization works hard to provide an interesting convention experience and value.
And we got value, as our spot at the expo cost less than $400 and created over $2000 in sales.
Browsing their website and watching their commercial, I had an immediate notion of who they are and the type of services they sell.
They don’t sell their long history in the community (even though they have one). They don’t sell the amazing variety of services they offer (although they probably could do a specialized service, if asked). They don’t even push their convenience to local churches, cemeteries or highways.
They sell their prices and their vehicle fleet. (Their fleet is awesome – Hummer, Mercedes, Chrysler 300, etc.)
And they put their prices right on their website. Separated into 13 different funeral packages, their offerings range in price from $795 for a graveside service in a cloth-covered casket to $30,000 for the Diamond package.
Do they provide immediate burial or direct cremation? Possibly, but those are not options listed on their website. They use the web as a marketing tool. It helps them weed out the visitors that just “aren’t their clients.”
These people have figured it out. Which may be why they just opened their fourth facility.
We’ve suggested before (in a beautifully worded podcast titled “Trunk Full of Flowers“) that you carry extra flowers with you when you conduct funerals in a cemetery.
When the funeral is over, you can place the flowers on other graves. Just make sure you’ve got the flowers tagged with a sign that indicates your gift.
Robert Falcon (left) of Heritage Funeral Home in Killeen, Texas took our advice to heart and tested it Easter 2007. He visited the cemetery and gave away carnations.
Even though they had an unexpected snowfall and cemetery attendance was down, Robert still passed out a few hundred dollars worth of flowers.
Robert now reports that one of the women he spoke to in the cemetery has made funeral prearrangements with his firm.
While I don’t think you should spend $200 to attract just one pre-need contract, I do know that Robert had more impact than just the one sale. each person he spoke to (hopefully) left with a better opinion of Heritage Funeral Home and their staff.
Banks, government offices and the Postal Service will all be closed this Monday for Memorial Day. Many of your clients may have decided to postpone arrangements because of the day.
Why not take a quiet day to not only honor the dead who served our military, but make a positive impression on their families? I’d suggest that you try one of the following:
- Call a nursing home supervisor and offer to take a group of seniors (the more mobile ones) to visit loved ones in local cemeteries. Use your limousines or a big van.
- Position yourself at the entrance of a local cemetery and offer visitors an American flag and flowers to place on their loved one’s grave. If they say that their loved one wasn’t a veteran, explain the purpose of Memorial Day and offer a flag to be placed on a veteran’s grave in the cemetery.
- Place a flower (with a tag that indicates your funeral home’s name) on the grave of every veteran in a local cemetery
- Place an ad in the newspaper announcing free flowers for veteran cemetery placement if the requester comes to the funeral home. (Have your staff place each flower arrangement while you’re at the cemetery on Memorial Day.)
Do more. Be an asset to your community. They’ll remember it.
Written by Jamie K. Wilson, the story is a general overview of the industry by a casual observer who, it seems, has turned two or three sensational stories about isolated criminal behavior into a indictment of the entire industry.
She begins a section on sales tactics she mistakenly believes all funeral directors utilize with the heading “Morticians: Scruples of Used Car Salesmen.” It goes downhill from there with headings like “Don’t Get Scammed By Funeral Homes” and “Do you want a stranger to profit from your loved one’s death?”
Presented as well-researched facts, many of these attacks can be dismissed as sensationalism, until you reach the headings that begin to inform your community. She talks about “The Funeral Rule: Your Consumer Rights” and answers the question “What About Prepaid Plans?” by warning her readers to “under no circumstances” pre-pay for a funeral.
And it only gets worse.
Beyond a normal attack against hardworking, caring professionals that seems to increasingly come from lazy news reporters digging for a sensational story to justify their salaries, this story reaches farther into the make-believe world to bring forth “facts” that just aren’t true. Such as these quotes:
Modern funeral directors often work on commission, or commission plus salary. To give you an idea of how big that commission can be, caskets alone typically have a 300%-500% markup from the wholesale price.
Few companies offer appreciable commissions for funeral sales, unless you work in the pre-need department. Most funeral directors are paid a salary without overtime. That means that the director gets paid the same if he goes home to get some sleep or wakes up at 2:00 am and goes to a family’s house because there’s been a death. Few directors I know make more than $50 – 60,000 per year for their efforts.
Unfortunately, your pastor may not be a person to turn to. There is evidence that some pastors are in collusion with funeral home directors, and may get kickbacks.
Under no circumstances should you sign a preneed agreement, though you can preplan your funeral with a specific funeral home. Not every funeral home exercises fraudulent practices when setting up prepaid funerals, but enough do that AARP strongly recommends against it.
Doesn’t leave much room for Medicaid qualification or for dealing with the speed of funeral price hikes as opposed to the small amount of interest offered by savings accounts.
Funeral homes sometimes substitute substandard items for your nice ones, and then claim the one you chose was sold out.
This is illegal. to accuse funeral homes of this (even if you write “sometimes”) borders on slanderous. I’m personally offended by her use of this sentence because it suggests that “all” funeral homes “sometimes” do this.
For the last decade, four giant corporations have controlled about 90% of the funeral parlors in the United States.
While many smaller firms have spent the last couple of decades bemoaning the rise of SCI and other corporates, they have not had the reach that Ms. Wilson suggests. In recent years, SCI, Alderwoods and others began selling off underperforming units and lowering their market share.
I counted less than 2,500 firms between the big FIVE funeral service consolidators. Conservative estimates (and because I’m too lazy to count all the firms in the Yellow Book) show 20,000+ firms in North America. That’s scarcely over 10%, not the 90% she blatantly states in her article.
WHY THIS AFFECTS YOU
The most unfortunate part of this issue is not that Ms. Wilson got her facts wrong or that she latched onto the misguided few who give our industry a bad name; it’s most distressing that she chose to present her wrong information as fact and distribute it to the world.
Associated Content, the site where her story is published, ranks 552 out of millions of websites for U.S. internet users. To give you some perspective, here are some other well known companies and how their websites rank:
Ms. Wilson is reaching a large audience. People are reading her stories and all the others written by misinformed or malicious journalists. You community wants to know the facts about funeral service. When will you step up to properly educate your community?
A Savannah funeral home has garnered free publicity by taking care of the heroes in their community.
Fairhaven Funeral Home held a luncheon to announce a program that provides free funeral services to fire, police and EMS personnel killed in the line of duty.
“We want to do it out of the kindness of our hearts,” Bird Hodges told WTOC, the local CBS affiliate. “We know police, fire and EMT’s are underpaid and we want to make sure their families are taken care of for taking care of us in a line of duty death.”
While this type of program garners good will in the community (who doesn’t think that police, fire and EMS personnel do important work?) it’s also relatively inexpensive.
First, the program has no upfront costs. The only expenses are generated when someone dies in the line of duty. Fortunately for most communities, line-of-service deaths are uncommon.
Secondly, the program can be set up to run for only one year, allowing you to change the program or add benefits each year that it’s reinstated. This also allows you to send a press release about the program each year and tout the number of years it’s been in effect.
Imagine a press release that celebrates the ten-year anniversary of the program. Or the year that you add discount benefits for spouses and children of the personnel.
There are so many options with such a program, but, at its core, any such benefit is designed to publicize your business, build goodwill in the community and encourage fire, police and EMS personnel to think of you as their funeral home.
This is the second part of my hour-long interview with funeral industry copywriter Kim Stacey.
I’ve split the interview into independent sections. In Part 1 we discussed yellow page advertising.
Part 2 is a discussion about her services, her vision for funeral home websites and the way that funeral homes can use the internet in their marketing.
Robin Richter (who received the email and is my mother) received an email from Legacy.com which asked her to rate her experience wth Legacy.com. She responded with a reference to the story I’ve laid out in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. the interview and the conclusion.
Legacy has responded with this email, which reads as a standard answer to questions about spam email:
Dear Robin,
We understand your concern about spammers harvesting your e-mail address from our Web site. To prevent this, we do not display any user’s e-mail address in the Guest Books. Instead, a link labeled “Contact me” is displayed in the Guest Book. Clicking this link allows anyone to send e-mail to the author of that Guest Book entry without ever obtaining his or her e-mail address.
Unfortunately, we cannot prevent spammers from sending e-mails through the “Contact me” links. Please note that nobody will ever see your e-mail address, and entering your e-mail address is not required to sign a Guest Book.
If you would like us to remove the “Contact me” link from your Guest Book entry, please let us know and we would be happy to do so.
Would this pacify you? Or would you, like me, be even more annoyed because they haven’t listened close enough. While I have really tried to see this through less-impassioned eyes, I just keep coming back to the idea that someone who makes $8 an hour scanned an email until she saw “spam” and fired back a pre-written response.
Worse yet, some companies have computer which can handle this task, saving them the $8 an hour. Linnea could stand for Library of Intuitive Natural and Normal Email Articulations.
I hope they haven’t trusted their customer service responses to a computer.
Many of you have been kind enough to comment (on the site and in emails) about this story. I’ve heard the horror stories. I’ve discussed with several readers the issues that this type of outreach (cold, impersonal email) creates.
But most of all, I think I’ve told the story the best way I know how and I’m ready to move on to more interesting topics.
I know that I promised that we’d hear from Legacy.com and TBO.com and Stowers Funeral Home, the firm which actually handled the arrangements for John Winter.
Here are my excuses for flaking out and not printing anything about those companies:
1. Legacy.com hasn’t returned any detailed response.
2. TBO.com has not responded.
3. I decided not to contact Stowers Funeral Home as Ms. Blackburn did not contact a large number of guestbook signers and I didn’t want to put Stowers in the position of badmouthing their competition.
So I’m ending this story unless anything else substantial develops. I have, however, formulated some conclusions based on this story and am ready to share them with you.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM THE JOHN WINTER GUESTBOOK EMAIL:
1. Email is, by it’s very nature, impersonal. Because it doesn’t allow for the complexities of vocal or phsyical conversation, it prevents the receiver from understanding the full context of the message. Since email hampers this understanding, the reader is forced to make decisions about intent and tone from only the words on the page. As my friend, Kim Stacey, points out, email is best used for making appointments or confirming information. Email is very bad for introductions, unless you’re really good at it.
2. The internet has evolved into a place to read static information about an issue or a place to converse with others about topics of interest. Web surfers have come to expect ads to be static (something they choose to click on and read) and conversations to remain commerce-free. If I comment on a blog, I don’t lead (or, heck, even mention!) that I sell quilted cot covers for funeral homes. Why? Because my role as a blog-commenter is to add to the conversation, not stop it with a sales pitch.
3. Grief is personal and different for each person. While we can identify the stages of grief, everyone is different, and we must remember that there are no shortcuts when it comes to speaking to or helping someone in grief.
4. Sometimes people don’t think their actions through. When this happens, it’s often best to act graciously and gently tell the person of their mistake. I should have done that with Ms. Blackburn at the beginning. I hope my later email was much nicer than my first post about her here.
5. Everything you do, every email you write, every phone call you answer and every personal interaction you have defines your brand. And since your brand is how your community sees you, and your community decides whether you stay in business, making sure all those things are done in a pleasant and dignified way is important!
6. The best way to market to people who are grieving is to take care of them. They will remember that more fondly than you pushing your promotional materials on them.
7. Online guestbooks are becoming quite popular.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
I’ve interviewed both Robin Richter (the person who received the email) and Sharon Blackburn (the sales counselor who sent the email to dozens of people) and will be bringing those interviews to you tomorrow.
PICTURED ABOVE: John Winter and his wife Karen, both of whom were
mentioned in the unsolicited email sent by Sharon Blackburn to offer a free
Simplicity Planner to those who had signed the online guestbook for John.
But before I share each side, you should know that I am not a seasoned journalist. This issue was brought to my attention because of the nature of this website. Final Embrace is primarily a forum to discuss funeral home marketing and management and as a place for me to share ideas and my own perspective.
When I began investigating this incident, I had no idea the level of complexity involved or the difficulty I would find in trying to present a fair story. Having sifted through the details of this tale and continuing to gather facts and reactions, I am surprised that journalists are ever able to provide a fair accounting of any story without including their own bias.
Or maybe most journalist DO have an agenda when reporting stories and you ARE getting a biased reporting most of the time. Hmm…
So, before I give you all the dirty details of this sordid story (don’t the words ‘sordid’ and ‘dirty’ already make you think a certain way?) I’ll let you in on my own take.
I hate subversive pre-need marketing. I loathe it. If I had easy access to a better thesaurus, I’d write a few more sentences about my disdain and disgust for subversive pre-need marketing.
Why am I so averse to it? Because most of it becomes aggressive and predatory. Pre-need agents and their managers, egged on by corporate bosses who ache to provide higher quarterly numbers to please stockholders, quickly exhaust the three or four reasonable, pleasant ways of generating funeral pre-arrangement plans and soon find themselves tricking or badgering their targets into purchasing burial plans.
Need proof that these tactics are used? How many chargebacks (cancelled contracts) do you see in a given time period? In Florida, all arrangements made away from the funeral home are subject to a three-day no-penalty cancellation period.
When I worked in a large, pre-need focused funeral home, we saw regular chargebacks. And while these cancellations hurt the prospective client, who had wasted time hearing a sales pitch he/she didn’t want to accept, they also hurt the funeral home in lost productivity because of the paperwork, lowered morale (salespeople are proud folks who take pleasure in closing a deal and take cancellations especially hard) and tarnished public image.
It’s even worse for funeral directors and the staff handling at-need services; they don’t have anything to do with pre-need sales (in most cases) but still have to battle the negative perception of the public regarding predatory funeral pre-need sellers.
Of course, I’ve spent most of my career serving at-need families, but I also held a state-issued insurance license for a few years and sold funeral pre-arrangements, mostly to walk-in customers, so I understand some of the arguments of the pre-need agent.
However, I use this blog to discuss marketing your funeral home, not selling a bunch of pre-need at the expense of your brand image or the community goodwill that can, in lean times, sustain your business, so I will not recommend you take the same actions that Ms. Blackburn took to tell her community about the importance of pre-planning.
MY OPINION (in 35 words or less): Ms. Blackburn’s words are misleading. She interrupted a conversation about grief and tried to sell her pre-planning services. Robin was right to be upset. Ms. Blackburn may, in fact, have had good intentions.
TOMORROW: An audio interview with Robin Richter and a summary of my non-recorded interview with Sharon Blackburn.
WEDNESDAY: Reaction from Stowers Funeral Home, the firm that actually handled the arrangements for Mr. Winter.
LATER IN THE WEEK: The role of the media (TBO.com and Legacy.com) in pre-need sales.
BONUS: See the well-made tribute to John Winter hosted by Making Everlasting Memories (owned by SCI/Dignity).
A recent story posted on 
While this type of program garners good will in the community (who doesn’t think that police, fire and EMS personnel do important work?) it’s also relatively inexpensive.
Why am I so averse to it? Because most of it becomes aggressive and predatory. Pre-need agents and their managers, egged on by corporate bosses who ache to provide higher quarterly numbers to please stockholders, quickly exhaust the three or four reasonable, pleasant ways of generating funeral pre-arrangement plans and soon find themselves tricking or badgering their targets into purchasing burial plans.
