Starting a funeral home newsletter is a great way to engage with your community. You can stay connected with your current client families and gain some new leads for your funeral home.

A newsletter provides your subscribers with educational resources as well as an opportunity to get to know your funeral home. It’s an easy way to continue building trusting relationships and start new ones.

These dos and don’ts can help your funeral home start your own funeral home newsletter.

Don’t Be Too Salesy

Your newsletter isn’t the place to promote your funeral home’s products and services. You can save the promotion for your other marketing efforts, such as online ads and social media ad campaigns.

Instead, it should serve as a resource for your community. As funeral directors, it’s your job to educate your community about funeral planning and grief. This can be overwhelming, but creating a newsletter is one easy way to do this. There are many types of content that you can share, which we’ll dive into in the next section.

Do Include Interesting and Educational Content

An easy way to repurpose content for your newsletter is to share blog posts from your funeral home’s blog. This also helps bring people to your funeral home’s website and gain more website views. You can share the links to your blog posts and include short descriptions that are quick for subscribers to read.

You also can share relevant articles related to funeral planning, grief, and memorialization. Just make sure that you link to and give credit to the original sources. Another idea is to share employee features for your families to get to know your staff. Or maybe your funeral home recently renovated your lobby or you’re hosting an educational grief webinar. Your funeral home newsletter is the perfect place to share this type of content.

Along with engaging content, don’t forget to add media such as photos and videos. It can be as simple as using the stock photos from your blogs. Or share a video from your latest event or of one of your staff members sharing a few preplanning or grief tips.

These are a few other important things to do:

• Brainstorm a concise, yet compelling subject line for your newsletter.
• Include a call-to-action for your newsletter that isn’t too promotional, such as asking subscribers to follow you on social media.
• Make it personal. Instead of using your funeral home’s info@ email address for the newsletter, have the newsletter be from the funeral home owner’s email address.

Don’t Be Afraid to Have Some Fun

Don’t be afraid to get a little creative when appropriate. For example, include an emoji in your subject line or share a silly gif in your newsletter. Your newsletter is a place where you can add a little creativity and fun. Of course, when discussing more sensitive and serious topics, use your best judgment when using these elements.

Do Consider Hiring a Marketing Intern

A marketing intern can tackle the newsletter and test out what works for your funeral home. They can dedicate their time to this task and other marketing efforts, so your funeral home’s staff can focus on taking care of your families. It also provides the intern with real-world experience. And if all goes well, you can consider hiring them on full-time.

The intern can test what time of day works best for sending the newsletter and how frequently you want to send it, such as weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Starting with a monthly newsletter may make things easier at first and then you can choose to do it more frequently if you wish. They also can see what types of content perform best and keep track of new leads for your funeral home.

You also should have multiple people proofread your newsletter for spelling, grammar, and fact errors and any formatting issues. If you’re using an email automation platform, many of these allow you to send out test emails before sending it out. Don’t forget to check how they look on your mobile devices too. Many people check their email on their mobile phone or tablet.

What content do you share in your funeral home newsletter? Share your ideas with us in the comments!