Funeral Home Marketing by the Numbers: What Should You Be Counting?

In the novel White Noise, Don DeLillo writes, “When I read obituaries, I always note the age of the deceased… The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.”

Numbers are powerful. They can tell stories about many things, including the performance of your funeral home marketing efforts. If you’re not keeping tabs on the following metrics, you don’t know if your marketing campaigns are working well or what things you should be doing more or less of for better returns.

• Traffic. Not the kind you fight in the morning on the way to work. This is the kind that tracks how many visitors come to your site. Web traffic is measured in a number of ways, but here are some metrics to watch:
  • Page views: How many times people viewed individual pages on your site. It helps you understand what content is driving the best SEO or being shared more.
  • Time on page: How long someone spends on your page. It lets you determine whether your content is effective at engaging the visitor.
  • Traffic source: Tells you where visitors are coming from so you can see whether SEO, social shares, or other marketing efforts are driving traffic.
• Conversion rate. Sure, you need to drive traffic to your site to sell your funeral home services. But once people get there, how many actually take action? That’s your conversion rate. If it’s especially low, that means your SEO is performing, but your content isn’t. Either you’re not driving the right users to your site or your content needs a refresh to be more compelling.
• Email open rate. Email marketing is extremely lucrative, but people have to open your messages for it to work. If your email open rates are low, it could indicate that your list isn’t well targeted, you’re sending messages at the wrong time, or you’re falling flat on subject lines.
• Social engagement. Likes and follows are great, but engagement is even better. Engagement metrics help you understand whether your social marketing content is capturing the attention of the right audience.

These are just a few metrics important to funeral home marketing. If you’re already overwhelmed by the technical details, don’t worry. Professional funeral home marketing firms such as Ring Ring Marketing can handle the burden of gathering and analyzing metrics to provide you with actionable advice about your marketing strategy.