Does Your Funeral Home Need an Email Marketing Newsletter?

You might have heard that email marketing can be extremely effective. When done right, email marketing can have outstanding returns—as much as 4,200 percent (that’s $42 per dollar spent) on average.

But email marketing and a regular email newsletter are not exactly the same thing. Find out the difference below and discover whether you might need a newsletter for your funeral home.

Email Marketing vs. an Email Newsletter
Email marketing refers to the act of getting your message out via email. A regular email newsletter to subscribers is a type of email marketing. But it’s not typically one that involves hard sales of your services and products.

An email newsletter requires people to subscribe—to agree to receive that communication from you. In return for that agreement, people usually expect something of value. Email newsletters tend to work best when they include entertaining or helpful content. Funeral homes might include links to local events, short articles about preplanning, or even profiles or obituaries (with the permission of clientele, of course).

The goal of this type of newsletter is to remain prevalent in the minds of potential clientele when they aren’t at need. That makes it more likely that they think of you when they are at need or are ready to consider preplanning.

Another type of email marketing is the drip campaign. It’s a limited series of emails that kicks off in response to a consumer action. For example, if someone comes to your site and says they’re interested in preplanning (and they agree to receive emails), you might send them four emails over the course of a month to help persuade them to sign up for preplanning services.

Do You Need Email Marketing?
Yes. At minimum, funeral homes should use drip campaigns to help convert interested leads into clientele. But whether you need or want a regular monthly email newsletter depends on your marketing strategy, your audience, and your content capabilities.

If you do decide to publish an email newsletter, you must fill it with high-quality content that positions your firm as a compassionate expert people can turn to at appropriate times. Make sure you set aside time to create that content or partner with a marketing firm that can do it for you.