ObituaryShare WILL Grow Your Business — And Here’s the Proof
Strong analytics skills may not be a requirement to become an incredible deathcare professional, but you don’t have to be a data geek to appreciate metrics like these:
- 16,000 website visits from one obituary post
- 13% Facebook-to-website click-through rate (the average is around 4%)
- 370% increase in flower sales over nine months
- $853 per-contract increase in preneed sales
- 8% increase in market share over five years
These are the actual, proven numbers that Bob Arrington and his team have driven with their extremely easy to use yet intriguing powerful tool, ObituaryShare. ObituaryShare strategically shares and boosts your obituaries on Facebook, effectively directing specifically-targeted traffic to your funeral home’s website. The results, as evidenced above, speak for themselves.
ObituaryShare has received a lot of attention. Since the NFDA convention they have onboarded 49 funeral homes in eight states and 10 regions with many, many more in conversation to get started.
ObituaryShare is expanding quickly because more and more directors are realizing the power of ObituaryShare, and the exposure is leading to big gains for their business.
Meet Bob Arrington
Chances are you’ve heard of Bob Arrington — not just because he’s an all-in funeral service visionary, but because of his reputation as a highly respected funeral director, funeral home owner, and industry leader. Arrington began his career more than 50 years ago, and founded Arrington Funeral Directors in Jackson, Tennessee in 1995. He has served as president of the Tennessee Funeral Directors Association and the Tennessee State Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers, and is the only Tennessean to be elected president of the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA).
In other words, Arrington is a man who knows, lives, and breathes the funeral home business, and most certainly a man other deathcare professionals can trust.
About six years ago, Arrington partnered with his friend and colleague Roy Heatherly, a Gannett media executive with an impressive 30-plus-year career in newspaper publishing and advertising to create ObituaryShare. Since then, Arrington, Heatherly, and their small but mighty team have leveraged their combined experience and first-hand feedback from the deathcare community to continually refine and improve their platform.
Tests for success
“From where we started to where we are now, we’ve done a 180,” Arrington says. “With any startup, you test things for four or five months, then you stop and you test things again. We attended two, maybe three, NFDA conventions to do nothing but listen […] and gather data. And then, because I owned a funeral home, I was the test junkie from day one.”
One of the first tests conducted at Arrington Funeral Directors demonstrated the unbelievable capabilities and the powerful potential of ObituaryShare. As Bob Arrington recounts, it’s the perfect way to explain how ObituaryShare works.
“[We handled the services for] the past president of the Tennessee Tire Dealers Association and was very, very active in the Boy Scouts,” Arrington explains. “His wife was a Realtor here for 30 years, and at the time of his death, his daughter-in-law was on the board of the Tennessee Bankers Association. So we promoted — boosted — his obit to each of those organizations on Facebook. And that one obit drove 16,000 visitors to our website.”
Arrington adds that in addition to those professional groups, the obituary post on Arrington Funeral Directors’ Facebook page was shared to people in the deceased’s hometown and alumni of the university from which he graduated.
How it works
The premise behind ObituaryShare is straightforward, and again, easy to use.
“Instead of waiting for people to come and find the obit, we send it to the audience that would have an interest in the obit,” Arrington says.
First, a funeral home copies and pastes an obituary as-is into the ObituaryShare portal, which is modeled after the newspaper obit portals you’ve been using for years. You can add notes about potential targets based on the deceased or the survivors’ careers, locations, involvement, interests, etc., if you’d like. Most posts to ObituaryShare take only minutes of your time.
From there, the digital marketing certified ObituaryShare team gets to work identifying all of the relevant and appropriate Facebook groups or demographics to which the obituary should be shared. Lastly, they share the post with those audiences, and the obituary appears in the news feeds of friends, colleagues, or acquaintances of the deceased or their family members.
When someone clicks the post, they are sent directly to your funeral home’s website where they can learn more about the services, leave a message, or purchase memorial products. Some funeral homes, including Arrington’s, have also added banners suggesting that visitors explore their pre-planning options — with amazing results.
“Our average preneed has gone up $853 per contract because people are coming to the website in a different mindset when they click the preplanning banner,” Arrington explains. “We put a banner at the bottom of the obit that just says, ‘Pre-planning makes sense.’ And so that’s usually the first page we found that they go to after reading the obit. So our preneed interest from our website has increased. For instance, we got five preneed requests yesterday.”
The best reasons to try ObituaryShare
While the metrics Arrington shares tell a compelling story in themselves, he believes that the best way to learn what ObituaryShare can do for you is to try it for yourself. And there’s one more number you’ll be interested to learn before you do: The price is only $139 per obituary.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s the first obit or the 51st obit, whether it’s 200 lines or 1200 lines, whether they include a picture or they don’t,” Arrington says, with his funeral director hat firmly in place. “And that’s the way it is for everybody, right? So that way, funeral directors are charging families the same. They know what the price is and you don’t have to limit the family. You can say, ‘Send me whatever you want and we’ll put it up there.’”
Although you’re free to test the power of ObituaryShare anytime, obligation-free, with only one obituary. Arrington suggested testing multiple obits for a more holistic view of the tool and the results it can provide, reports of which are provided to each ObituaryShare client on a monthly basis. And at $139, the cost is comparable to — if not drastically less than — today’s newspaper’s obit rates, and it’s a cost that most families are ready and willing to pay.
Arrington, as well as many of ObituaryShare’s clients, have included this service in an optional memorial package with memorial cards, video tributes, register books, temporary grave markers, thank you cards, and the like. In many cases, the total cost of this package for the families is less than they would pay for publishing an obituary in the local newspaper.
There’s no time like the present to try ObituaryShare! Reach out to Bob Arrington and his team today at https://obituaryshare.com/contact/ to get started. It is worth a try.
