One of my web clients sells funeral caskets.

Their primary appeal is that they are a manufacturer, not a reseller, so can customize and personalize easily. Also, their caskets are better quality than the major name brands that the funeral home chains usually provide (at VERY high markups).

Basically they sell a better than name brand casket at a better than discounted name brand price.

Their major price advantage is within a 100 mile radius of their factory where they can deliver. Beyond that range, the cost of shipping eliminates their advantage against the warehouse-based discounters.

I've got my own search engine recipes that aren't PPC and have quadrupled their visitor traffic in the last few months. They just aren't getting many phone calls.

Before I got a hold of it, their site seemed more B2B oriented as they were once a provider to funeral homes. Now they are venturing into direct sales and the sales pitch has to be very different. They were once just a boring catalog. Now I'm trying to drag them into marketing-speak where they need to address the viewer's pain.

Tips VERY welcome.

You're right, it's tough because people don't want to think about it.

The critical key, here, is to survey prospects and past customers. Ask customers why they chose this company, this casket, over their other choices. What did they FEEL? What other options did they look at? How did they find out about you?

You increased traffic, which is great. Now you need to find out why they're not calling. Maybe you can pop up a little survey. Maybe you could offer a report (about dealing with death, arrangements, etc?) as an incentive for taking the survey.

Are they within your 100 mile radius? Why did they visit your site? What were they looking for? Why didn't they buy? What would have made them decide to buy? What other needs do they have that you could fulfil to help them through this difficult time?

Let your market tell you what they want and need. Hope that helps a bit.

Aaron

You did not give the URL, so we can't look at the sales page. But here a few general tips --

1. Display your phone number prominently at the top and at various places within the body copy. Something like "Questions? Call 1-800-FUNERAL".

2. Look horizontally. If someone needs caskets, what else do they need? Look at those sites and try to work out Joint ventures.

3. Here are some popular terms related to funeral. Try to build pages on these keywords and write a short useful piece on the topic. You can weave a note about the caskets in there with a link to your sales page.

56563 funeral home
45225 funeral
11379 funeral flower
7564 funeral poem
6308 funeral director
5570 friend funeral
3940 funeral services
3448 funeral sermon
3315 funeral planning
3185 funeral flower arrangement
3153 funeral song
2941 funeral arrangement
2862 dark funeral
2426 funeral casket
2159 funeral etiquette
1896 funeral cost
1679 funeral picture
1666 funeral music
1648 funeral program
1503 funeral john ritter
1481 funeral insurance
1428 four wedding and a funeral
1251 funeral speech
1233 funeral plan
1182 funeral poetry
1103 funeral service
1099 funeral reading
1053 funeral urn
1041 funeral car

(Credits - taken from Overture)

HTH

Arun

Just some headline ideas for you. Not sure if they'll work for your market or not.

Appeal to their vanity...
"Embarrassingly Simple Secret Shows How To
Get The Casket You Want, Not The One
Your Cheap Relatives Will Pick Out After You're Dead"

Appeal to their desire for exclusivity...
"Space-Age Casket Padding Means
You Would Enjoy Staying Inside For Eternity
Even If You Weren't Dead -- Guaranteed!"

Appeal to their generosity...
"Don't Be A Bother To Those You Love
After You're Gone -- Choose Your Own
Casket Now So They Can Enjoy The Wake"

Appeal to their paranoia...
"Learn Ancient Secrets To Buying A Casket
That The Fat-Cat Casket Conglomerates
Don't Want You To Know!"

You might also try beefing up the guarantee and bonus section. Something like...

"Try our casket for 90 days with ZERO risk! If you don't agree that it's the absolute best casket you've ever been buried in, return it for a full, no questions asked refund. I insist! And keep the matching throw pillow and perpetual calendar as my gift for giving the casket a try."

Hope that helps.

Jay

LOL

The suggestions have given me ideas... and some of them have caused coffee to spray on my keyboard in laughter (90 day guarantee... thanks Alakazam!).

We're #1 for "funeral homes [our metro area]".

I'll devise a questionnaire, a pop-under or the like, that launches when someone exits the site. I need to figure out good questions to ask the looky-loos. I'm concerned with pop-ups/unders since an increasing number of people now have pop-up blockers.

I'm also trying to find a good affiliate program to give commissions to churches, synagogues, florists within 100 miles that generate sales (not clicks). I'm sure there are lots of congregations and home-businesses that would love to make something like a $25 commission a few times a month for referring business. (I'm still working with the owners to find out if we're going to do a flat-fee commission or a percentage of the sale price.) It's a business nobody has yet figured out how to avoid.

Because they are the only manufacturer within 1200 miles, they really have an ideal market for customization and personalization and can do ethnic and other personal requests.

The hardest part for me is that they aren't great writers able to write their own sales copy. Before their website, they were used to 90%+ conversion rates for anyone who went to their factory... once you saw it, you could tell, immediately, that they were the best deal in both price and quality. The spoken pitch is excellent and warm but it doesn't translate to web-text so easily. They've been featured on TV and I'm trying to convert those shows to digital so they can be viewed on the site.

I'm trying to get them to compare themselves EXPLICITLY to the name brands and show how, quantifiably, they are superior in both construction quality and price. This is legal and because the name brands are mentioned, we get the search engine traffic for people looking for their competitors. It's like Volvo stating that they beat Chevy in crash-test safety.

I'm trying to come up with a pitch that would be like comparing IKEA furniture quality (pressed board) to Ethan Allen (solid wood)... but imagine being able to buy Ethan Allen quality at the IKEA price.

It's not the search engine placement we need... we're doing great for a ton of terms. It's increasing the "closing" rate and getting the phone to ring. (Yes, the phone number is prominently placed on every page.)

I have another client who sells exclusive-by-market 800 vanity #'s and was trying to negotiate a deal between them. 800-MEMORIES was available. The casket client is reluctant to pay for such a number. Sigh.

Alakazam... I loved your "appeals" to vanity, exclusivity, etc.

I want one that would be suitable for a child or niece/nephew or close friend to buy for a loved one. Needs to be a little "warmer". Humor might not work or be taken as insensitive.

Aaron -

Thanks for the comments. =

Okay, something warmer, eh? I'm not a headline/copywriter (yet, but I just got John Carlton's course last week so maybe there's hope for me!) but perhaps something more along the lines of...

"There's Never A Good Time To Think About
Buying A Casket, But Waiting Until It's Needed
May Be One Of The Worst Mistakes You Can Make."

The death of a loved one should be a time of remembrance and of coming together with family and friends -- it shouldn't be a time of dickering and comparing prices. Blah blah blah

Jay

PS - Or, since I just got Carlton's course, maybe "How A One-Legged Mortician Discovered The Little Known Secret That Will Save You Hundreds Of Dollars On a Casket, Get One That's Better Constructed Than The Name Brands, And Take Six Strokes Off Your Game!"

Now that I get to thinking about it, that style of headline would appeal to someone who *wants* to do something, and I'll bet most people buying caskets don't want to, but they know they need to. So maybe appealing to their sense of responsibility is the way to go (if marketing to the casket's future-occupant).

It may not have to be a popX at all. If you created an incentive (report, checklist, etc), you could have a link right on the site, "Get this valuable XXXX for answering just a few questions."

Perhaps Ethnic is a good niche for you. Contact various ethnic groups and get some endorsements.


What incentive are you offering to get them to call? It's not enough to hope they'll call to ORDER. You need to give them some other reason for calling (report, video tape, audio tape?).

From my perspective, it is important to step back and take a look at the bigger picture.

It would be one thing if this manufacturer already had a fairly successful direct-to-consumer sales model in place offline, and your job was to expand it to the web channel for lead generation or 1-step sales. In that situation you would know a lot of things about the market that would be helpful to know.

Here, however, it sounds as though the company is pioneering direct-to-consumer sales with regards to all channels. That makes your job kind of difficult, because you are trying to hit a market that has not yet been clearly defined.

I am not sure how you would go about doing this, but the client's money would be extremely well spent searching the country for other casket makers who have successfully gone down the direct-to-consumer road. It would be equally valuable to find manufacturers who had tried this and failed. If there are successes, find out what is working and see what can be modeled, and see what can be adapted for the web.

What you don't want to do is follow in the fooststeps of an outfit like furniture.com. Here was a company with a beautiful online catalog of furniture, but nobody bought from it. Pepole looked at the site, made selections, printed out what they wanted, and took the printouts to their local furniture store to bargain with. I would speculate that a typical consumer wants to see the furniture in person, open and close the drawers of a dresser, sit in the chair, etc. Caskets are a little different, I am sure, but I would view your task as one of getting the people physically in front of the company's sales force where closing is known to be strong.

Bottom line: It's hard to know what web-based marketing approach will work best when you're not sure who (if anyone) is going to be perusing the web to find a casket for Grandma. I would guess that lead generation would be the most fruitful objective, but given that the physical market is within a 100-mile radius, there are probably a number of other avenues of communication that should be looked at as well.

(If the markets are that local, it's funny that no one has come along to organize something analogous to F.T.D. or 1-800-FLOWERS whereby people can make remote choices of some standard designs through participating suppliers.)

Meanwhile, to me the most valuable kind of pop-up would be one that somehow captured some kernels of contact information about the visitor. You might have to "buy" this information, for example by agreeing to make a $5 donation to one of six major charities (they get to choose) if they answer a small handful of questions and give you an address to mail something to.

Good luck.