Excellent Lunch & Learns from Soup to Nuts
Proven Strategies for Sharing Your Story, Reaching the Right People, and Optimizing Events For Increased Preneed Volume
BY Tyler Anderson
Think about the power of a successful community event. You get to share your story. Connect with families. And build up the value of a funeral so more people are excited about prearranging with your funeral home. As a platform for building trust and delivering a meaningful brand experience, events are hard to beat. They're popular for good reason, but if you're not careful they can turn into a money pit, leaving you footing the bill for the same folks who keep coming back for a free meal.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is to assume an event is just a one-off. They plan an event, market it, a few people attend, and then they move on. The problem is that many of your most valuable touchpoints will take place before and after the event itself. The whole event pipeline, from beginning to end, is important to ensure success.
Thankfully, there are a few proven strategies to avoid the mistakes that can be made and any challenges along the way. In the past year, Precoa has hosted more than 2,2oo events for our funeral home partners with an average appointment hold rate of 50%. Together with some of our event specialists, I've compiled a few proven ways to drive interest, increase event attendance, and make every event you hold a successful one.
The most effective marketing programs – in our profession and beyond – begin with one question: "Who is my audience?"
Your aim is to become an expert on your customers. One of the things Precoa marketing strategist Shirell Hennessy says is that you should strive to excite and delight every customer you reach. When it comes to preneed marketing in particular, the next question to ask yourself is one that Shirell words best: "How can I super-serve the people with the highest propensity to preplan?" Casting too wide a net – marketing to people who are too young or part of an income bracket outside the ideal customer for your community – is a critical mistake your funeral home can fix with a few changes.
The first thing to do is focus your attention on targeting. This means getting granular about the details and data points that reflect your ideal customers. What do they like to do? Where do they like to eat? Where do they spend their time? Some businesses even give these ideal customers names to better personify the people they are trying to advertise to: Preplanning Patty, Veteran Victor, etc. If you can tell a story of your ideal customer's daily life, you can better focus your marketing to super-serve them.
Beyond that, there's a very practical reason for targeting. It's the first in a long line of dominoes that have to be set up just right. When your targeting is off, it throws everything else off as well. Get it right and you can start becoming more streamlined.
With the right targeting in place, it's much easier to make the adjustments, tweaks, and tests that are a necessary part of getting more of the right attendees to your events. For one thing, you can better tailor your messages. It's hard to cut through the noise when you're trying to speak to everyone.
Even more, the wrong targeting can attract the wrong people. Sometimes referred to by a few creative names like "plate lickers" or "event groupies," they're the kinds of people who just want a free lunch and aren't all that interested in learning more about preplanning. The right message, combined with effective targeting, can help you reach potential attendees who will be interested and engaged.
The other benefit of targeting is that you learn which messages and marketing channels are most effective. By zeroing in on your core customers, you see where people spend their time so you know exactly how to reach them.
For instance, you may already know that Baby Boomers are more active online than ever before, but which platforms are they using most? On average across the nation, 78% of Boomers are active on Facebook, but that percentage may be different in your community.1 Your targeting and customer data can confirm this.
Not only that, but you can keep making adjustments and improvements because now you have data to back up your decisions. A successful event is no longer a fluke. Now you have a repeatable process for connecting with the right people and consistently reaching new families.
If you're receiving RSVPs, but still not seeing people actually show up at your events, Precoa Regional Manager Kyle Aler has one key piece of advice to get people through the door: Confirm, confirm, confirm.
Preplanning is one of the most important things a person can do to allow their family to heal after a loss. We know this as funeral professionals. But people – myself included – forget items on their to-do list. Priorities can and do shift as an event approaches.
The good news is that families usually just need a brief reminder. By checking in with prospective attendees, you increase their likeliness of attending your event. A while back, we found that when our Funeral Planning Center followed up with RSVPs and provided a gentle reminder about the date and time of an event, the likelihood of attendance increased. Now we do it every time.
Preneed marketing takes time, sensitivity, persistence, and innovation. By nurturing your RSVPs and leads, you get more people through the door who are interested in learning about taking the next step and prearranging with your funeral home.
How skilled are you at creating a-ha moments? When families show up to a preplanning event, many of them may be under the impression that they can get everything squared away in a matter of minutes. They may not know how involved the process can be, which is why it's up to you to help enlighten them.
A lot of people put all their energy into making what they think of as the perfect presentation. Don't get me wrong—the presentation is important, but you want to always keep in mind that you're there to do two things: 1) Create curiosity and interest, and 2) Get families excited and inspired to take the next step.
It may come as a surprise to realize that the whole goal of an event is to set an appointment. You're helping families take one step further in their journey. To do this well, our field leaders are always coaching advance funeral planners to focus on both the beginning and end of the event.
The beginning is important because you set up the idea that you'll only be able to provide the broad strokes, explaining that an appointment is where you can dive into the specifics. After the presentation, you reinforce this idea by actually going around the room and setting appointments.
Naturally, people will have lots of questions. One tip is to remind them that while you'd love to answer every question right then and there, you'll be able to spend as much time as they need at the appointment.
Thomas Edison once stated that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. While he certainly wasn't speaking about preneed, his century-old wisdom applies to the event planning process. When you are looking at venues, look for a location with few distractions. That includes music, loud open kitchens, even other people. Remember that while you want the right place to present, it's even more important that it's the right place to set appointments.
You'll also want to think about seating. How do the chairs fit in the location? The venue may allow for, say, 30 people. But is that only if the tables are lined up near the walls? You want to make sure the space allows for connection – one-on-one conversations where you can answer quick questions and schedule time with families to continue their journey in the preneed pipeline.
The ultimate goal of the event isn't to prearrange people on the spot. That takes a lot of individualized attention and time. The actual goal is to simply build up the value of an appointment and inspire families to take the next step. The layout of your event space should allow for that.
You should start seeing better event results if you've taken all the steps so far. Your advance funeral planner will have more appointments on their calendar, and you'll increase event attendance through confirmations and follow-ups.
But what about the event attendees who don't set appointments? Some make the mistake of just writing these people off. And yet they already demonstrated enough interest and initiative to show up, take a seat, and listen. As quality leads go, they're the cream of the crop. Make it a point to follow up with them first.
Then there are the leads who RSVPed but never showed up. While it's rare to see perfect attendance at an event, every RSVP was filled out for a reason. It represents someone raising their hand and saying, "I'd like to know more about preplanning." But as I mentioned above, life happens and schedules get busy.
Think about how this plays out in your own life. We all have that proactive friend who takes the initiative, and maybe it's even you—the person who reaches out, checks in, sets up a time and place to meet for drinks, and so on. It's up to us to be that friend to families. Even if they've raised their hand and expressed some interest, they still need a little nudge. Developing a consistent system for following up with no-shows gives you another chance to connect and nurture them along their journey.
It's also another opportunity to position your funeral home as the source of expertise and guidance. When you're educating and inspiring families, you're giving them a positive experience with your brand that they'll remember. I should also mention how much your follow-up team will love these leads. Whether they end up attending or not, people who sign up for an event are ready to learn more.
Putting together a successful community education event may seem simple, but we've found that the most successful preneed programs start working on their events long before the event starts, and keep working long afterward.
Telling your story takes time, effort, and constant improvement. It can feel overwhelming to put together all the steps on your own, and that's why many funeral homes work with a trusted partner to track and manage their entire preneed pipeline, from lead to sale.
By nurturing your RSVPs and leads, you can start to increase your preneed volume and start turning them into lifelong brand advocates for your funeral home.
Tyler Anderson is senior vice president of business development at Precoa, a preneed company that helps hundreds of funeral homes prearrange more families and grow their markets. Born and raised in the funeral profession, Tyler appreciated the importance of ceremony, ritual, and gathering from an early age. He is passionate about sharing a new vision for preneed that helps more families across the country experience a meaningful funeral service.