Stokes Mortuary Business Expansion Plan

Stokes Mortuary Summary
The mission of Stokes Mortuary (all names have been changed) is to gather people together to celebrate life when it ends and to move forward with living. Stokes Mortuary will have facilities that bring families and communities together to remember the life of the deceased and renew bonds of social support.
Because 71 percent of people choose a mortuary based on reputation, the key to success is quickly establishing a reputation for the community to celebrate life when they die.
The mortuary’s cornerstone will be its reception facilities. These open and spacious rooms will promote uplifting interactions after the funeral and may also be used for nonprofit organizations. This will make the mortuary more of a community center, which will uplift, connect it to the community, provide the basis for publicity, and make it a center for the living.
The reception room and website will feature digital photos and audio of the persons whose lives are being celebrated. This web presence will increase the center's exposure by letting people participate in the celebration of life after the funeral and reception are over.
Providing the greatest choice of quality caskets and headstones will make the center the place to celebrate the lives of locally prominent persons. This will foster publicity and further promote our reputation.
Stokes Mortuary currently has a website but is seeking to expand the current information, features and products available on line.

Viability
The decision to be on the internet came many years ago. It was an easy decision to make. Before technology came along, the mortuary had to pay someone to literally sit in front of a phone 24/7 because you could never predict when someone was going to die. When cell phones became available there was and still is the option of forwarding the office phone to the cell phone making no one tied to the office. The internet also freed up countless hours of time from the mortuary. Now instead of constantly answering a phone to let someone know what date and time a funeral was going to be held, the people can go online to retrieve that information. The ease of use to update funeral information has made the internet a very valuable use of knowledge for a mortuary.
Mortuaries aren’t thought of as a retail business. A smart mortuary will also not be using the internet as a self-promotional tool to sell their services. A survey has found that 71 percent of the people will use a mortuary’s services based on reputation. The primary purpose of a website for a mortuary is to add valuable information to the community it serves. It has a priority to serve as a resource first and secondly, and minimally as a marketing tool. There are still updates to new caskets and headstones as well as memorial gifts that can be purchased online. The information, references, and the need to update memorial products makes sense for a mortuary to be online.
The cost of a website typically outweighs the revenue that it generates for a mortuary since its primary purpose is information. So in that sense, there is no viability or perhaps a poor viability. However, the benefits of having access and information provided to the community, instead of paying someone to sit by a phone, is well worth any expenditures of the website and therefore truly makes it a viable option. Therefore the viability of having a website is a moot point because whether or not it can sustain itself doesn’t matter. It will still be a viable and extremely important source of information for grieving family and friends.

Competitor Assessment
To successfully have a competitive advantage over your competitor you must first know who your customer base is. In the case of a mortuary, defining your customers is complicated. Very few customers pre-arrange funerals for themselves while they are still alive. This leaves the decisions to the grieving relatives or friends of the deceased.
“According to a 2002 survey by the National Funeral Directors Association, the most common reason for choosing a funeral home are location (78 percent of respondents), reputation (71 percent) and that it previously served the family (70 percent). Only 36 percent cited price, suggesting that for those who choose funeral services, price sensitivity is relatively moderate. Some 23 percent said they selected the funeral home because it was suggested by a friend, and seven percent by clergy, but only 11 percent said it was from advertising.” (Ever Green, 1996)
This makes customer service very critical both in taking care of the deceased body and the family members making the arrangements for the funeral.
Location and reputation are everything for people choosing a funeral home. Some of the most successful funeral homes have been operated by the same family for generations. Some chain operations have bought up such funeral homes and have used the family reputation after it is no longer owned by the family. The power of reputation is such that many people appear unaware of the change of ownership, or their perception is unaffected by it.
As far as websites are concerned, here are three categories I used to compare the three different mortuaries that serve the same area. I will address each category individually.
|Stokes Mortuary|Hometown Mortuary|Serenity Mortuary|
Grief & Healing Support| |X|X|
Memorial Gifts|Partial|X||
Mobile Device Compatible|X|Partial|Partial|

Grief & Healing Support is quickly taking a more important role in the emotional and physical healing process of individuals who have lost a loved one, especially if that loved one died unexpectedly or at an early age. The healing comes to those that have resources of support. Although our mortuary has grief counselors, you cannot find that information on our website. You will only find that out if you come in for a consultation. In addition, I have found that the other websites have topics that a person may choose from to either help themselves or to help someone else who has lost a loved one. I have seen information in the form of questions that link to a podcast, audio presentation or just a word document with advice or counsel. Each page of those should have a grief counselor’s contact information attached to it. Our two competitors both do this better than we do.
Memorial gifts are all the rage of this “reality show” generation. If someone dies, you want to remember them. By having a compilation tribute video of photos and/or videos available to the friends and relatives of the deceased, you provide this permanent keepsake. This is something we currently provide but is not listed on the website. The competitor also offers this tribute video in addition to websites; webcasting of the services that are archived for delayed viewing and can be downloaded to a DVD (we only offer audio of such services); and Personalized Printing such as bookmarks, service programs, prayer cards and folders. We are looking at a minimum of adding our memorial gifts to our website. We will also look at the possibility of adding to our collection of memorial gifts that are offered. A cost analysis will need to be done to determine if the additional items are something we would like to offer.
Mobile Device Compatibility was an important factor to us in our original design. With so many users that have mobile devices and access data information on them, we wanted to make sure that there were no issues at getting all the information they need. The other two sites are accessible, but some of their information has either glitches or missing pages completely, depending on the device you access it from. This is one thing that we definitely are doing better than our competition and will continue to emphasize as the technology changes.
A website was recommended to me that provides free, global web metrics. I was able to compare myself against my two other competitors that are in the same service area that I am in. The site is called Alexa. Its purpose is “to discover the most successful sites on the web by keyword, category, or country. Use Alexa’s analytics for competitive analysis, benchmarking, market research, or business development. Use Alexa's Pro tools to optimize your company's presence on the web.” (Web Information, 2012)
By using the site Alexa, which takes the top queries from search engines driving traffic to a particular site in the last 30 days, I have found the following information about me and my competitors:
Stokes Mortuary|Hometown Mortuary|Serenity Mortuary| stokes funeral home - 98.70%|hometown mortuary - 45.89%|sirenity funeral home - 4%| stokes funeral services - .43%|hometown mortuary utah - 23.3%|funeral services - 3.62%| funeral services - .23%|david turner - 12.61%|serenity funeral - 3.56%| john smith - .22%|kirk miles - 1.72%|serenity funeral home - 2.40%| funeral home - 98.96% IP*QCI = 43|funeral home - 1.83% IP*QCI = 43|smith & jones - 46.67%QCI = 43|
||Funeral home – 16.75% IP*|
Traffic Rank (3 month)|||
11,972,444|13,500,609|3,772,101|
Load Time = 0.37sPage Size = 120KB|Load Time = 2.74 sPage Size = 1.94 MB |Load Time = 1.33sPage Size = 539KB|

*Impact Factor (IP)
A high value indicates that this particular website is “getting significant organic search traffic for queries containing these phrases, despite high advertising competition for these phrases. Impact Factor is a combined measurement of the importance of a particular phrase to the site's search traffic and the level of search engine advertising competition (QCI). The index is on a scale of 0 to 100.” (Web Information, 2012)
The Query Competition Index
“QCI indicates the typical number of ads displayed for keyword searches on major search engines. A large number of ads indicates strong advertising competition for a query. The index is on a scale from 0 to 100.” (Web Information, 2012)

Online Marketing Suggestions and Strategies
Internet marketing is typically divided into the following categories:
· Display advertising: using web banners or ads on a third-party websites or blogs to bring traffic to your own website.
· Search engine marketing (SEM): where you try to promote your website by increasing its visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) by using paid placement, contextual advertising, paid inclusion, or via the use of search engine optimization techniques.
· Search engine optimization (SEO): increasing the visibility of your website in search engines by the "natural" or "algorithmic" search results.
· Social media marketing: trying to get traffic or attention by using social media websites (examples are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.)
· Email marketing: directly “annoying” a group of people using electronic mail with a commercial message. Also known as SPAM.
· Referral marketing: using word of mouth to sell or promote your product
· Affiliate marketing: used to reward an affiliate for each customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.
· Inbound marketing: creating and sharing informative content to use to convert persons to customers and customers into repeat buyers.
· Video marketing: uses videos to get viewers into a buying state by presenting the video and then guiding the customer, via a link, to the product or service. (Internet Marketing, July, 2012)
There are only a couple viable options that a mortuary can use without coming across as being tasteless, tacky and cheap. Those two are Search Engine Optimization and Referral Marketing.
Although marketing a mortuary is not practiced like a traditional product or service would be, I would consider the following strategies about online marketing and how to improve the customer experience:
There are some advantages as well as limitations to online marketing. Obviously one of the advantages is the expense of advertising. Companies are reaching a wider audience for a smaller fraction of advertising dollars. The internet also allows the customer to research and purchase products and services at their convenience. This appeals to the customer as it brings immediate results.
Another advantage is that companies can measure statistics easily and inexpensively. They can measure consumer purchases, messages, company offers and clicks and find what items are more appealing to the customer. The results tracked are immediate because online marketing require customers to click on something or perform some other targeted action.
There are limitations to online marketing as well. The biggest one seems to be that there are so many scams or other promotions with deception that it makes it difficult for consumers to know what products or services are real or not. This is particularly the case with services or products that are supposed to aid in making money. Ethics is something that is easily hidden on the internet.
Another limitation is that a customer is physically unable to try on or feel a specific product. However, if you market this type of product, it may entice the customer to visit a store to try a product or speak with a salesman. If the customer visits the store then the salesman may use the “x-factor” or personal touch factor to influence the customer into a purchase rather than just leading the customer to another website or blog.

Optimization Strategies
“The bottom line in search engine optimization is link building. The popularity of any web page is dependent on its reaction off-page. Simply putting it, your link popularity on the web can easily upgrade or degrade your popularity with the search engines.” (Search Engine Optimization, 2001)
Link building means the number and the quality of links that point to your website. Link building will allow you to raise your popularity with webpages which in turn, raises your graph with all of the search engines. Given the results of the previous comparison, we ranked a distant 2nd of the three mortuaries. We fill that adding more links will help move us closer to the number one spot. For example, we could add a link to the local florists’ websites, to the city website and to the local newspapers’ website. Every time we run an ad in the paper and the papers’ website, we could add a link to our website. This brings a lot more focus on our inbound links and helps us target our service region.
Another important way of driving page optimization is by inserting target keywords in the URL, title tags, meta description, header tags, and page content. Adding keywords in the headline will help people understand our basic purpose. We could also optimize pictures and videos with localized captions, headlines, and alt-texts. This is not something we considered previously, but have been told that image optimization presents a comparably easy opportunity to drive additional traffic. (Search Engine Optimization)

Social Media
Social media is one of those things that just will not work well for a mortuary. There was some consideration to having a Facebook page at one time. However, after further review, there just seemed to be too many complicated situations that would hinder a Facebook page from being practical and respectful to the deceased.
Facebook is a social networking service and website used to exchange messages, including automatic notifications when one updates their profile. Users may join common-interest groups as well. With so many people using Facebook, a serious consideration was made as to instantly updating the community when a funeral would be. Judging the tactfulness of the situation made us change our mind.
This could be a useful tool if my business had regular consumer products for purchase. I could post messages of upcoming products, release dates, new features and promotional items that could help drive users to my website to purchase such items. The ease of use, immediate interaction and exchange would be beneficial to both the consumer and company. Especially since the growing customer demographics of everything are typically internet users that like to research, compare and shop online.
Twitter is another social networking service that instantly messages a person who follows you. It is used somewhat the same way as Facebook.
A Blog is another social media service that discusses or shares information on a site published on the web consisting of discrete entries typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. It also allows visitors to leave comments. A Blog is not something I would consider using to promote my business no matter what product I was selling. I view a Blog as more of an online diary, or a site of information and would only consider a blog for internal employees to keep them informed of the happenings of the company.

Customer Relationship Management
The customers for a mortuary are typically filled by the community members in which they serve. Typically, a mortuary has a “service area,” however it is not uncommon for a mortuary to serve a family in another area if that relationship of trust has been established. Mortuaries that compete in the same area gain new customers if the other mortuary had treated their customers poorly in some way. The best competitive advantage one would have over the other is outstanding professional service. This is the only way to improve the customer experience.
Customer relationship management is a widely implemented model for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects. It involves organizing, automating, and synchronizing business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients; nurture and retain those the company already has; entice former clients back into the fold; and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. Measuring and valuing customer relationships is critical to implementing this strategy. (CRM, 2012)
We have found that the best way to get customer feedback is through our “Grief Counselor.” After ever funeral service, our counselor calls the customers both for follow up in assistance with the funeral process and to check with the customers on how we could improve the overall experience. While visiting with the customer, a follow up survey is given to them. This process has allowed us to improve possible situations that we were not aware of, before it became a boiling point for a customer. We have considered adding a page on our website where you could add comments, but decided not to. We have an email addressed listed on our website, but feel that a personal phone call or visit from us is the most effective way to resolve any situations that come up. Our most important feedback is our thank you letters and word of mouth.
We have tracked customer comments and are just above a 98% positive experience. We will continue to track customer comments, even verbally given, so that we may continually improve our professionalism and our customer service. Of that less than 2% bad experience, it is almost always based on the price of the services. We are competitively priced and with a 98%+ rating, we feel that this is an area that we do not need to improve on at this time.

E-Commerce Solutions
Because of the products that we currently offer, you cannot make purchases online. We have phone numbers and an email address listed if you would like to call to get information on our products. Typically a casket is purchased for a funeral and is part of a funeral services package. Life Insurance will cover the cost, but it must be purchased through a Life Insurance Agent (which our funeral directors are.)
With so many options of caskets, embroidery, lettering, etc. that can be done, it is best to have a customer come into the mortuary and look at our display to get an exact match of what the customer really wants. The same goes with head stones and the other products that we currently offer online. The only items online that would be available for purchase, (if we add it later) are the memorial items that were spoken of under “Competitor Assessment.”
Taking into consideration our business versus another business that would have products for retail sale we should consider these factors for Ecommerce.
We currently use a Web Hosting service. This has allowed us to choose our needs for space, bandwidth, merchandising and even design. The biggest benefit we get is peace of mind knowing that customer support is available to assist us 24/7 if any questions or problems arise concerning our online business. All businesses should consider Web Hosting services.
Another important service is a Professional Web Design. Anyone can build a webpage using easy-to-use web design templates. We felt it important to keep our design simple and to avoid overuse of flash and graphics. Either way, our focus was on the user experience instead of the look of our site. We feel we have accomplished this already, which is why we are the only site between us and our competitors that are completely accessible by any mobile device. All business should consider a Professional Web Design.
In addition to the previously mentioned services we already use, we would also consider three other items for our ecommerce solutions. A domain name that is catchy and easy to remember is one of them. All online stores have a unique web address, which makes registering a domain name a very important ecommerce solution. The internet is connecting businesses with customers at an unprecedented rate. If you have a domain name that is complicated to remember and a competitor that has an easy name to remember, then you can guess where more business will be going.
We also feel strongly that if we were selling products online, then some sort of Shopping Cart Software would be needed. This software can help set up inventory, managing orders, delivery of products and customer service. We would first have to determine our business model before deciding on the type of software to buy because there are so many options. There are open source, hosted and licensed solutions. We don’t want the software to determine our business model, but the model to determine the software.
One last item that would be extremely important in ecommerce is the ability to accept credit card payments. Most online shoppers favor credit card payments which are done through merchant accounts. A merchant account takes “money from the bank and an online gateway takes the money from the merchant account.” It would also be one of our requirements to have an SSL certificate for accepting payments online. This would give our customers confidence that we are doing everything we can to protect sensitive information and encourage them to complete their transactions.

International Considerations
Obviously a mortuary does not do much for international clients. There has been a case when we need to ship a body overseas. Currently any and all considerations for international customers are taken care of through a translator over the phone.
Again, considering the challenges of a different business, we would need to account for several items. We would need to start by assessing our target market and audience. Are we targeting a region (Europe), a language (German speakers) or a country (Spain)? Defining this will impact all other decisions that follow.
We would then need to assess the limitations of our existing content. Are there legal requirements, is local hosting necessary, are there advertising laws that are relevant to our industry?
With experience being overseas, it is a known fact that the search engines used don’t mirror that of the United States. For example, Yandex is used in Russia instead of Google. We would need to identify which ones are popular in the countries in which we will be targeting our products to. Rank checking and keyword research will be required at the local level prior to going global.
Site structure is another consideration. Is there a uniform format and design for all of the expansion locations or is there flexibility and diversification between the websites? What if a country code top-level domain is chosen (for example: site.fr)? Language and cultural differences should help drive these decisions. A picture of a tall, blond woman may be right for a women’s magazine in Germany but not one in Japan.
Language localization is also something to consider since on average, German words are 30 percent longer than English words. This may cause space problems if you use wireframes across all languages. Establish clear guidelines for style, script size, word or character count; and leave space in your original language layout for localized text length variation.

Costs
Prices for various components of a website change from time to time, but at the time of this research our current costs of setting up a website and other services are as follows.
Item|Cost|
Domain Name|$10 / yr|
Hosting Services|$20 / mo|
Website Design|$50 / hr ($500)|
Internet Service Provider|$50 / mo|
Major Changes to Website|$50 / hr|
PC Care Support (Data Backup company)|$35 / mo|
Directors Assistant (Software)|$695 / yr|
The company we worked with did not have any startup fees or maintenance fees (part of the hosting services charges.) The ‘Directors Assistant’ is the funeral home management software and the fee is for the annual maintenance upgrade.

Website Index
See attachments

References
Customer Relationship Management, (2012), All sections. Retrieved August 1, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management
Ever Green Life Memorial Center, (1996), Section: Competition and Buying Patterns. Retrieved August 6, 2012, from http://www.bplans.com/funeral_home_business_plan/market_analysis_summary_fc.php#.UCAhRqCwXrY
Internet Marketing, (July 2012), Types of Internet Marketing. Retrieved August 1, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_marketing
Search Engine Optimization, (2001), All Sections. Retrieved August 8, 2012, from http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/search-engine-optimization-tip-links-surrounded-by-text/
Web Information, (n.d.), Section: Information Data. Retrieved August 3, 2012, from http://www.alexa.com