Alrightly hello everybody, this is Albert from Parting Pro and in this video, I’m going to talk about how you can ten times the number of 5-star reviews your funeral home has in 12 months or less.
Now this is something that we’ve done pretty successfully with a lot of different funeral homes and is actually much easier to do than most people think.
Here’s an example of a funeral home in California we’ve been working with for about 18 months now. When we started working with them, they had about 20 reviews on Google, which is definitely more than your average funeral home today, however, fast forward to now, they’re at over 275 reviews or 278 reviews with a 4.9 rating. Alright so from 20 to 278.
Here’s another one. Check these guys out. This is our friend Milos out with Caring cremation in Chicago. They added about 120 reviews in a 6 month period working with Parting Pro. They’re currently at 170 with a 4.9 star rating.
Here’s another one. Eric with Green Cremation Texas, they’ve been working with us for about a year and they’re already at 107 reviews with a 5 star rating.
So we’ve completely – completely changed their businesses in a number of ways, reviews is just one aspect. But you can imagine, how much more business they’ve been able to generate because of these reviews and how this creates a snowball effect because when they get more business they get more reviews, and when they get more reviews they get more business.
Ok, so before I get into how we were able to do this, I want to really briefly cover why reviews are important. And I can probably make a whole video on this subject alone, so I’ll try to keep it brief.
If you haven’t really put much thought into your reviews yet, I’d really encourage you to go out and read some of the statistics on reviews. I’ve compiled a short list here from Bright Local, and as you can see these stats are pretty compelling. To name a few… Reviews have gone up over 600% between 2015-2018. 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. And the number of reviews you that have will directly correlate with your ranking on a google search.
So these are all good reasons on why you should make an effort to get more reviews. But to summarize, why reviews are important in my mind, is because reviews are by far the easiest, the most cost effective way to generate trust. Right?
With reviews, you can very quickly get a family who may have never heard about you before to actually trust you to take care of their loved one in an incredibly short amount of time. It’s going to be much faster, and much more effective than any commercial or marketing content you can spend money on.
And building this trust very quickly is very important for any business because this will directly affect how many people, for example, go from finding your website to actually giving you a phone call to inquire about your services… right?
This will also affect, probably more important is, if you make good first impression, it will also directly affect the number of people who may reach out that actually end up choosing your services.
So – by far having reviews is probably one of easiest and most effective ways to build your business and have that snowball effect I was referencing earlier.
So why is it that the funeral homes that we work with have such a high number of reviews, and the average funeral home in America has less than 10?
Before I get into that, I do want to cover a really important concept.
It’s very simple, if you’ve seen my other videos, I probably have talked about this before, but the main goal of your business, or any business for that matter, should be to make everything as easy as possible for your families. Because, the easier you make it for someone to do something, the more likely they will do what you want them to do.
It’s pretty straight forward. Actually, very straight forward.
And we’ve seen this apply to winning price shoppers, selling more merchandise, getting forms signed faster, and this obviously also applies to reviews.
Ok so with this concept in mind, let’s answer the question… why don’t you have more reviews?
First of all it’s not your fault, don’t worry. I think in general most funeral homes are naturally at a disadvantage to get reviews for a number of reasons.
#1. You don’t have a ton of repeat business
I’m not saying that families don’t come back to use your services, but just mathematically, it’s not like you’re a restaurant where someone can come and visit you once every couple weeks, right? So just the sheer number of chances you get to have a review written is naturally lower.
#2. Another thing is you don’t really have the luxury, let’s say a restaurant again, you can’t be like “If you check in on yelp, I’ll give you a free appetizer.” There isn’t really an incentive offer you can work in there. It’s just not going to work.
#3. Finally, it can be a difficult time to ask right? A lot of funeral directors shy away from asking for a review because honestly it can get a little awkward, especially because the family is grieving,
So these are all reasons why you’re at a disadvantage. But I think the real reasons funeral homes aren’t getting reviews are these two I haven’t read.
So before I get into this, I just want to point out none of these reasons are because the family was unhappy with your services. I think it’s pretty safe to say that most of your families are happy with your services, right? I think it's pretty safe to say...I talk to funeral home owners every day...it’s probably safe to say that most of the people I talk to, the mass majority of their families are happy with your services. So the reason the family isn't writing a review about you is not because they're not happy with their services. There's a separate issue going on.
There's really two other reasons I think people don't want to write a review for you. And it's pretty obvious.
One is people don't really care. They don't really care about your business enough to go back and write a review. Typically people only come back and write a review when they're incentivized in a way where they're upset with you and they want to get back at you.
So that's why people have few reviews and negative reviews. Very rarely will someone go out and write a review about you on their own. And that means that you have to ask for reviews and like I said before, for some of those reasons why it's a little bit awkward most funeral homes aren't asking for these reviews or I guess even more importantly is, they're not asking in the right way.
A lot of people tell me like “Hey, I always ask the family to write a review. I always tell them how important it is and I hope that they go home and they write a review.” Realistically someone that you dealt with is not going to go home and write a review about you.
That means that they go look you up on google, sign in, type the review in and hit enter. That's a lot of steps and most likely they're not going to remember to write about you or if they do, it's not really on to the top of their to-do list.
In addition, a lot of people may be sending out surveys to get reviews as well, but a lot of times those surveys are like asking you to fill out like a ten step questionnaire, rate me from one to five five of this and that. And this is a lot of work. And then on top of that when you get that survey back it doesn't really go into like a Google Yelp Facebook type of review, and that's not really seen.
So the goal of getting a review like I said before is you just need to make it make it easy. Okay and I guess it would be helpful if I define what easy means. So think about yourself as a consumer and let's say you just work with a business and you want to write a review about them. What's the easiest way you can make this process happen for them. Really it is the least number of clicks to get someone to write a review.
So asking them to write the review in person is great but they're not going to remember to do it. Emailing them to say “Hey write a review about me.” is great but how can you make that process easier.
So let me show you a secret here. I'm going to go to Omega Society’s page. This is their page right there's their google business page. If i click on this review button right here, this will give me a link here. If i copy this link and I were to send to somebody…. so let's say i just i'm gonna paste this link and send to somebody then this link will bring me directly to the place where one may write a review.
So you can imagine if somebody was on this page right here and they had a good experience with you and all i had to do is hit a button and hit post. You can imagine many more people would actually write this review. Instead you have to go back home and look you up. So you could potentially just send everybody this link and that would cut down two or three steps and that would help reduce the friction of getting a review.
So that's a one very simple way to do it. There's obviously other processes in place that can help with this and help filter reviews a little bit as well that we can talk about later, but this is a very simple way to get reviews.
So the way you want to think about making things easy, in order to get people to do what you want to do, is you want to think about a format of less friction for the family. Okay. So you're gonna get more reviews this way.
This is how we did it for Omega Society. They have over 278 reviews because we've been asking all their families to write a review about them. They've been in business for 20 plus years before working with Parting Pro and they had 20 reviews. And then all of a sudden they have 278, it's not difficult to tell why.
It’s just the more people you ask and the way you ask it, you'll get a higher conversion on reviews. So that's a quick summary of how to get reviews and there are different other strategies to work with on how to do this and this doesn’t just apply to reviews. It applies to really every aspect of your business. So if you want to improve your business and streamline processes please reach out. This is Albert with Parting Pro. Thanks
