Funeral Homes Offer Memorial Websites to Honor the Deceased

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.

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Filed Under: Funeral Industry • Insider Email

Tags: Memorial Websites for Deceased • Revamping the Funeral Industry • Revenue Streams for Funeral Homes