Three Places You Can Integrate Automation into Funeral Home Marketing

Marketing automation is the process of using software and hardware tools to make certain parts of online marketing faster, easier, and more effective.

It’s not replacing the people in your process with machines or taking the human element out of your message. In fact, when you employ a couple of these automation tips, you might find that your marketing is more “humanized” than ever, and families will have a positive experience with your business from the start almost every time.

1. Use Chatbots on Your Website.
Have you ever visited a site and had a chat window pop up with a message asking if you need more assistance? That’s a chatbot. Chatbots help you provide faster service and answers to people who come to your website.

Some things you can do with chatbots include:

• Greeting people who visit your site in a friendly manner.
• Helping people find information on your site.
• Providing answers to simple questions, such as funeral home location, directions, hours of operation, and what types of services are provided.
• Scheduling appointments.

All this can be done with the same friendly, kind service that you’re known for — at exactly the time family members want to engage without you worrying about having staff at all times.

2. Automate Email Marketing as Much as Possible.
If you’re not automating email marketing, you’re far behind your competition. You can use automation to:

• Personalize emails with recipient’s names for greater engagement or offer customized content.
• Segment your lists appropriately for every campaign.
• Determine what day of the week or time of day garner the most open rates and responses so you can maximize email marketing return.

3. Rely on Automated Analytics, but Don’t Skip Your Own Gut Experience.
Determining what time of day an email should be sent is one example of automated analytics. You can rely on computers to automatically help you determine the best keywords, how long your content should be, and when and where ads work best, among many other things.

Automation can be a great addition to your funeral home marketing toolbox. Just make sure you’re not relying 100% percent on machines — you know your target audience better than any computer and should be an active decision-maker in marketing efforts for your firm.