Heritage Coach Dealer Blog USA

The 2011 S&S Masterpiece is everything a coach should be. This top of the line hearse comes in two models. The S&S Masterpiece Commercial Glass Coach is an extraordinary vehicle with a superbly magnificence history behind its story. The S&S Masterpiece with Limousine Windows and a Tiara Band is impressively stylish and everything you’d expect it to be with a name like that.

First, what is “commercial glass”?

In the early days of coachbuilding, engineers designed a hearse on a commercial chassis. This took a great deal of ingenuity since the hood was a base Cadillac design with front fenders and a chassis. S&S maintains this tradition of historic craftsmanship by starting with a heavy-duty Cadillac chassis and removing the body and windows. They replace those with the dignity of a hearse body and high “commercial glass” windows. These features give the Masterpiece all the room funeral directors need for stately caskets and flower arrangements. It truly is a masterpiece.

The S&S Masterpiece with Limousine Windows and a Tiara Band is elegant, stylish and a profound work of craftsmanship just as the commercial glass is. It features the industry’s widest opening loading doors, as all S&S coaches do, built from galvanized steel and designed to last a lifetime.

S&S has been building funeral coaches since 1876, long before automobiles took over where the horse and carriage left off.

S&S limousines are beautiful, stately, elegant and full of grandiose comfort from top to bottom. You can’t go wrong when you start with a Cadillac chassis. If you have the skill and experience that S&S brings to the table then you end up with a best of class vehicle superior to everything the competition has to offer – like the 2011 S&S Masterpiece.

Facebook recently announced that they have over 500 million users; easily making it the largest social network on the planet. Some Innovators in the Funeral Industry are already leveraging Facebook for business, like ConnectingDirectors.com; the first online funeral publication and networking site. Funeral home owners can use online tools like Facebook to reach customers & prospects and educate them on their services. Facebook is also a great tool for driving traffic to your funeral home website. In this post, like other recent articles on Funeral Homes using social media, we will dive into why Facebook makes sense as a marketing channel for funeral home owners and funeral directors, as well as, how you can leverage Facebook for your funeral home.

Facebook provides business owners with a platform for reaching people, engaging them in discussions around products & services, and turning them into customers. It’s a great platform for speading your online content. Do you blog about your funeral home, create Flickr Slide Shows for your customers, or shoot YouTube videos about your Funeral Services? If so, Facebook is a great platform for promoting that online content to your connections.

Here are a few ways that Funeral Home owners can leverage a business page on Facebook:

• The first steps are to fill out relevant information about your company, add links to the Website section within Facebook to help drive traffic to your online real estate, and add branding elements to your Facebook business page.
• Promote funerals under Facebook Events — I know we have to tread lightly here because of the sensitive nature of a funeral. If it’s positioned as a way to help your customers easily provide funeral information to friends & family, then it becomes a useful tool for funeral home owners.
• Create a FBML page for your Facebook business page – FBML pages allow you to create custom Facebook pages. You can put any relevant information about your business on these pages. You can also create more than one. Custom Facebook pages change the Facebook experience for your connections — in a positive way.
• Engage your Facebook Connections — If you produce online content, say through a blog or videos, you can post links to those articles/videos on your Facebook Wall and then write a sentence or two describing the article/video. Be sure to elicit feedback from your Facebook connections. When someone leaves a comment, be sure to respond, and even ask yet another question — keeping the conversation going. The goal is to engage as many of your connections as possible. Engagement helps build relationships.

As you can see from reading the information above, Facebook offers funeral home owners a platform for connecting with their target audience. Not only is it the largest social network out there, but it’s absolutely free. All that it takes is a time investment. If you’re looking for ways to promote your funeral home and communicate with customers and prospects, then consider creating a Facebook business page for your funeral home today.

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If you’re looking for a superior funeral coach then the 2010 Superior Diplomat Lincoln is about as upscale as you can get. This is class, luxury and superior quality all rolled into one.

Superior is synonymous with comfort. It always has been. But the 2010 Superior Diplomat from Lincoln takes that to a new level. There is plenty of head and leg room in the driver’s compartment and the beauty that should only be skin deep flows right from the outside of the coach to the interior with smooth boldness. It just doesn’t get any better than this and every funeral home that offers this vehicle for its services can boast of class and tastefulness without equal.

Standard features include:

• Heavy duty chassis
• Your choice of OEM exterior paint
• Pinstripe (again, your choice)
• Full vinyl top
• Stainless steel Lincoln emblem
• Leather seats
• Cloth headliner
• Velcroed, one-piece cloth drapery
• Interior sidewall, cloth or vinyl
• Laminate rear compartment flooring
• Spare tire storage under the floor
• Two-piece rear partition glass

Those are your interior standard features. The exterior standard features are just as impressive. Check these out for extra comfort and beauty:

• Name plate brackets on side doors
• Church truck (open)
• ABS bumper protection
• 10 rear rollers
• Widest opening load door available
• Left hand load door hinge
• Full size spare tire
• Loading lights in rear bumper

And if that isn’t enough, the optional features on the 2010 Superior Diplomat Lincoln include:

• Oval rear windows
• Flag staff holder
• Manual extend table
• Electric extend table
• Air suspension switch
• Stainless steel roof band
• Stainless steel applique area
• Open church truck well
• One-piece partition glass
• Name plate brackets on rear load door
• Strobe headlights
• Turn signal strobe lights
• Beacon ray roof

And there’s a lot more besides.

The 2010 Superior Diplomat Lincoln is one full stretch of class and style. 253.4 inches long, 72 inches high, 78.2 inches wide and 36 inches extension. The casket floor length is 116 inches of usable space. The loading door is 38 inches high and 46 inchees wide. The angle is 121 inches. If you’re looking for a funeral coach that speaks superior in every way then this is it.

Are you looking for ways to drive new sales for your funeral home? If so, our Monthly Blog Series is worth checking out. Each month we write an article about how funeral home owners and funeral directors can use new technologies, mainly online tools, to market their business and drive new revenue sources. Last month we discussed how Funeral Home Owners and Funeral Directors can create blog obituaries in order to create a revenue source for Funeral Home Owners. In this month’s article, we are going to take Blog Obituaries to the next level, and throw out the idea of creating Memorial Websites as a new service for funeral homes.

Everyday people who have passed are remembered. They are remembered in the thoughts of their friends & family. They are also remembered through actions like leaving flowers at their grave site, or just the simple act of stopping by their grave site to say hello. While people are alive, they want to feel like they will be remembered when their time on this earth is up. Even though it’s not yet possible for technology to allow us to live forever, technology has made it possible to be memorialized forever. The Internet makes this possible. To us, the combination of people wanting to be remembered and the technology allowing us to do so, provides a great opportunity for innovative funeral home owners.

Funeral home owners can use tools like Ning or even WordPress to create a Memorial Website for the deceased. Customers can pay funeral home owners to develop, design, host, and maintain their memorial website. This can create upfront income for funeral home owners, as well as, residual income through hosting and maintenance fees.

Let’s use Ning as our tool of choice for creating the Memorial Websites. You can create a ning for your funeral home. Those customers who purchase the service will become a member of your Ning in the name of the deceased. A ning page can be created on behalf of the deceased. Friends & family can sign-up to add to the Ning and interact with one another on behalf of their lost loved one. The Ning can contain a blog, so that people can post their memories of the deceased, write about causes that are going on in the name of the deceased, etc. Images can be shared. Videos can be uploaded. Comments and interaction can take place, all through their very own Memorial Ning Website. The memory of their loved one will live on online.

Funeral home owners can make this a reality for their customers. It may be possible to charge anywhere from $500 – $1500 for the development of the site, and then you can charge a small monthly hosting/maintenance fee – only a few dollars, as this will add up the more of these that you develop. The actual maintenance needed will be minimal. Funeral Directors can even outsource the entire service to an online marketing agency if they wanted. Then you can simply take some profit off the top for selling the service, but you don’t have to worry about executing on something that isn’t in your core skill set.

Offering to create Memorial Websites as a service at your funeral home could be a great way to drive new revenue for your business. We think that people would be interested in having them created on behalf of their loved-ones, and the most likely place to go when someone passes away is to a funeral home. If you can offer this innovative solution, customers won’t look elsewhere.

What do you think about the idea of creating memorial websites? Has anyone offered a service like this in the past? We’d love to hear from you.

Elegance. Style. Classic luxury. These are the attributes of the 2010 Cadillac S&S Medalist.

When it comes to funeral coaches, S&S doesn’t set the standard. It is the standard. Synonymous with prestige, you’d expect one of their funeral coaches to offer class and style. And that’s exactly what the S&S Medalist from Cadillac offers. Nothing less.

Standard features include:

• Heavy duty Cadillac chassis
• Choice of exterior paint OEM
• Pinstripe choice
• Full vinyl top
• Coach lights
• Leather seats
• Cloth headliner
• One-piece cloth drapery with velcro
• Vinyl or cloth interior sidewall
• Laminate rear compartment flooring
• 3-piece rear partition glass
• Closed church truck

And it just keeps getting better. The Medalist options include:

• Limousine style rear windows
• Oval rear windows
• Hidden side-door umbrella storage
• Flag staff holder
• Manual extend table
• Electric extend table
• Chrome wheels
• Stainless steel roof band
• Flip-up church truck compartment door
• Rear floor storage
• One-piece partition glass
• Cornering strobe lights
• Beacon ray roof

And a whole lot more.

The 2010 Cadillac S&S Medalist is designed for comfort and style. It meets the following dimensions with all the elegance and style you’d expect from Cadillac.

• Length = 245.2 inches
• Height = 70.3 inches
• Width = 77 inches
• Casket floor length = 116 inches of usable space
• Loading door height = 34.3 inches
• Loading door width = 43.5 inches
• Loading door angle = 135 degrees

The inner body structure is completely steel all the way around and crash-test proven. Cadillac went all out and made the S&S Medalist as safe as it is elegant and you can’t get any better style if you spent twice as much time shopping.

Last month we discussed how Funeral Home Owners and Funeral Directors can add a funeral home to Google Places in order to build awareness of their services and drive more traffic to their website, blog, and other online assets. For this post, we are going to discuss a new revenue source for Funeral Home Owners.

Obituaries printed in the local newspaper allow readers to know if anyone they knew has died. Obituaries usually describe the individual who died, provide funeral arrangements, and state the surviving family members. Obituaries have been around for a long time, but they haven’t really evolved much. This provides an opportunity for creative Funeral Home Owners. Funeral Home Owners can create a service whereby they produce Blog Obituaries for their customers.

The benefits to family members in having a Blog Obituary versus a standard newspaper obituary are:

• Much more information about the person’s life can be included, as space is not an issue
• Images can be inserted
• The Blog Obituary can technically be online FOREVER — Keeping the memory of their loved-one alive
• A Blog Obituary can link out to other sites that are relevant to the deceased, such as a charity or even a Flickr Slide Show about their life.

A blog obituary would probably take 2-3 hours to create, and funeral home owners can probably charge anywhere from $250 – $300 for each blog obituary. If you get really creative with your pricing, being that blog articles can be hosted forever, you can price the obituaries two separate ways. The first price would be to create the blog obituary and host it on your blog for 1 month, which would be in that $250 – $300 range. The second price would include the same as the first price, except that you’ll host it as long as the blog is live (theoretically, forever), which you can charge say $400 for. For an extra $100, the family can keep their loved-ones’ memory alive forever.

To create a Blog Obituary Service, you must first start a blog. WordPress offers a great free platform, as well as, a paid service. You should blog about more than just obituaries, as blog articles are a great way to drive traffic to your website. The Obituaries Section can be one section of your blog, just like it is in a newspaper. For those customers who purchase this service, simply schedule some time to learn about the life of the deceased, collect images, and find out how the family wants the person portrayed. Then write the article and send out your invoice. Blog Obituaries are a great way for Funeral Home Owners to add new revenue sources for their business.

As many of you know, we have created a new Blog Series focused on helping funeral home owners, and funeral directors, drive more revenue for their funeral home. So far we discussed two ways that funeral home owners and directors can add new revenue sources, one by adding video services for funeral homes, and the second by adding Flickr Slide Show services. In this month’s installment of our new Blog Series, we are going to talk about the benefits of adding your funeral home to Google Places.

Google Places, which used to be Google Local, is a free Google Tool used by business owners to list their business online. Adding your funeral home to Google Places will allow your listing to come up in search results being performed for your local area. Local Search is really beginning to build momentum. Next time you use Google, add a location to your search term, such as “funeral homes philadelphia pa” and notice the listings that come up next to the Google Map. These are Google Places listings. If your funeral home is not listed on Google Places, you will not come up in those results.

By adding your funeral home to Google Places, you have an opportunity to drive traffic to your Google Places listing, and then to your blog and/or website. The ultimate goal being to drive these web viewers to take action, such as email you for pricing, or giving you a call to answer questions. In order to drive this action, you must first get the eyeballs to your site. Google Places can help capture interested prospects, and then direct them to your other (more robust) online properties.

Setting up a Google Places listing is actually pretty easy. The only pre-requisite is that you have a Google account. If you don’t already have one, simply create one and then get started on your Google Places Listing – it’s FREE. Here are a few steps to help you out:

1. Navigate to the Google Places Business Center and click “Add New Business”
2. Fill out your profile as completely as possible, the more details, the better
3. Add your business listing
4. Add your business information – TIP: Add a few custom fields and insert relevant search terms for your small business. This will help you rank for those search terms
5. Last, but not least, claim your new Google Places Business Listing – You can claim your listing by phone, text message, or postcard

Not only will having a Google Places Business Listing help increase traffic to your funeral home website or blog, but there are also a number of other benefits. Here are just a few:

• You can add coupons for your Google Places Listing
• The Google Places Business Center allows you to track stats for your funeral home listing
• You can provide your business contact information on your listing
• Customer Reviews can be added to your listing to help build credibility for your small business

If you don’t already have your funeral home listed on Google Places, we hope that this post helps shed some light on why it’s important to have one, what the benefits of a Google Places Listing are, and how to create a listing for your funeral home. If you have any questions about creating a Google Places Listing for your funeral home, leave a comment below and we’ll get back with you.

Move out of the way because Superior is here. The 2010 Cadillac Superior Statesman Hearse, that is. And believe me when I say this is a coach that lives up to its name. It is superior, built for a statesman and it carries the Cadillac name. What more can you ask for?

The Statesman has some impressive stats. Check these out:

• 245.2 inches full length (20.43 feet)
• 70.3 inches high
• 77 inches wide
• 147.3 inch wheelbase
• 116 inch casket floor
• 34.3 inch high loading door
• 43.5 inch wide loading door
• 135 degree loading door angle

Regal, elegant and classy. How else can you describe it?

In addition to size, elegance and style, the 2010 Cadillac Superior Statesman Hearse comes with the following standard features:

• Leather interior
• Heavy duty chassis
• Cloth headliner
• Stainless steel motif area
• Laminate rear compartment flooring
• Vinyl or cloth interior side wall
• ABS bumper protection
• Your choice of pinstripes
• Stationary bier pin in front
• Quick adjust bier pin in rear

Optional features (brace yourself because this is just a partial list, barely touching the tip of the stately iceberg) include:

• Limousine style rear windows
• Oval rear windows
• Flag staff holder
• Chrome wheels
• Closed church truck well
• Beacon ray roof
• Rear compartment carpeting
• Engine block heater
• And a whole lot more

You can also opt for the Superior Package, which is only available on the Statesman. It includes:

• Sovereign style interior landau box
• Stainless steel roof band
• Padded motif
• Carpeted bumper protector
• Dual front bier pins

The 2010 Cadillac Superior Statesman Hearse truly does live up to its regal name. And you should settle for no less.

There are few vehicles that can match the 2010 Cadillac S&S Imperial in terms of luxury, status and VIP appeal. It is the consummate hearse limousine and the perfect luxury vehicle for driving short distances.

Available in any color, the S&S Imperial handles very smoothly with an automatic transmission. The Imperial hearse does look awesome in black with a black interior and I’d highly recommend this coach in those colors, especially if you’ll be using at a funeral car.

If interested in the 2010 Cadillac S&S Imperial hearse vehicle, better get your cash out now because they won’t last long. Heritage Coach is taking deposits now.

Like the 2010 Cadillac Eagle hearse it features the high back flat top with a side-swinging back hatch. Alternatively, you can get the flip-upwards-to-open rear hatch. The back doors open butterfly style to make entering the VIP seat with lots of leg room much easier and more convenient. The front seats are spacious as well.

The interior leather seats are plush and comfortable, just what you’d expect in a luxury funeral car or hearse. Your VIP passengers will love riding in this car. The 2010 Cadillac S&S Imperial is as beautiful to sit in as it is to look at.

The Internet has created countless opportunities for new businesses, as well as, helped existing businesses create new revenue streams. As I’m sure many of you know, the funeral industry has taken a hit over the past few years, and without innovation, it’s looking like sales will continue to decline. This is where Heritage Coach comes in.

As you may have read, last month we wrote about Funeral Directors using video as a new revenue source by allowing out-of-town family and friends to attend the viewing remotely. With ideas like this, and the one we want to talk about today, we are hoping to use this blog as a vehicle for promoting innovation in the Funeral Industry. For this post, we want to talk about how Funeral Home Owners and Funeral Directors can use Flickr, a photo-sharing social tool, as a platform for creating a new revenue stream for your business.

Flickr is a Photo-Sharing social platform that allows users to upload photos, comment on those photos, tag them for easier search, and share them with the world. Best of all, Flickr is free. By getting creative, Funeral Home Owners can use Flickr to create a brand new service offering to sell to customers. Funeral Directors can collect digital photos of the lost loved-one and setup a Flickr Slide Show full of photos of the lost loved-one. You may be saying, well, I’m sure customers don’t want to share their photos with the world. That’s OK. Flickr has privacy settings that can be leveraged.

For privacy, create a new Flickr group for each customer and then invite family and friends to join your Flickr group. This way all photos and discussions will be private to group members only. Creating groups is easy and free. Within a group, people can upload photos and videos, as well as, use the discussion board to communicate with one another. For Funeral Directors, they can have a process whereby the collect photos, create a Flickr group, share photos within the Flickr group, and send out invites to all family and friends to join the Flickr group and participate in photo-sharing and discussions around their lost loved-one.

Here’s how Funeral Home Owners can execute on this new Flickr Photo-Sharing service offering:

• Set guidelines on what customers will get and for what price – It’s recommended that there is some sort of limit on the number of photos that you will upload into the Slide Show
• Create a process for explaining the service to potential customers
• Setup a way to collect digital photos from customers’ friends and family
• Create a Flickr account and learn the tool – Determine how exactly you’ll setup your groups and inform friends & family
• Promote the heck out of your new service – Use it as an add-on service

I think Funeral Home Owners can charge somewhere around $200 – $300 for this service, but ultimately, the market will decide. The most important thing is to get started. Figure out your plan for how you’ll offer this service out to customers, what you will charge for it, and how you will execute on it when the first set of customers order the service. Over time, Funeral Home Owners will learn what a fair price is (based on what their market is willing to pay). Either way, setting up a Flickr Slide Show for customers is a valuable service, yet one that has high margins for Funeral Home Owners. Another option is to buy a scanner and let customers know that if they don’t have digital photos, you can scan their hard-copy photos (for an additional fee of course). I hope that many of you will consider adding Flickr Slide Shows as a service for your customers.

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