When you are the owner of a funeral home you have to have a plan for marketing the business.  Most funeral director proprietors think about their advertising, their on-line presence, and their pre-arrangement program as a way to market.  What many don’t think about, however, is that the services they provide after the funeral to the client families should be an area given great consideration in that it can help build future clientele.  We’ve come to call this area of the profession “Aftercare”.

It is true that providing aftercare can be seen as “part of the mission” of the funeral home.  It can easily be seen as mission much like serving the funeral and conducting the interment is part of the mission.  However, aftercare is one part of the mission that can easily bring customer  attraction, acquisition, and retention.  Because of this, it can also be seen as a marketing opportunity.

Back in the early 1990’s I was approached by a young widow in our community who came from a teaching background.  She told me that our funeral home did an excellent job in handling the funeral of her husband, but now that that was over and she was back to what she called a “new normal” there was nothing in our community where she could go for the resources she needed to fully understand her role in the community as a widow with four children.  She yearned for a group with who she could talk things out.  Suffice it to say that I hired that young lady to put together something for our community.  It is now about 30 years later and that trailblazing lady has retired.  However, the programs that she put together continue to operate in our community today.

Today, the Anderson Funeral Home New Horizons group has some 400 people on their monthly mailing list and has all kinds of activities from special remembrance services, to social gatherings, to creating our “Andy Bears” from clothing of a deceased family member.  These activities, while creating social and healing value for all who participate in them, bring another avenue for the funeral home to be seen in our community.  The funeral home continues to keep an aftercare employee on staff and fund all the activities of the aftercare program. . . and I am certain that it more than pays for itself with the brand awareness that it creates.

• Here is an idea of the New Horizon Aftercare activities for December and January
• Here is a story from the local paper on the Andy Bear project

I thought of this subject today because of this article from the Hickory Record of  North Carolina.  In it, very similar to our New Horizons program, the Bennett Funeral Service has created a monthly dinner and meeting and christened it “Healing Hearts”.  According to the funeral home’s Robbie Bennett, “These dinner meetings help bring people together who share a common bond and provide a bit of healing during a difficult period of time.”

Funeral Director Daily take:  Think about what you could do to keep your mission moving after the services are all done.  My guess is that it will not only become a part of your mission. . . . but a part of your marketing as well.

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