Not long ago a typical condolence book would be made up of a wide variety of (sometimes difficult to decipher) handwritten messages from friends and family. With recent restrictions on travel and attending funerals this has been flipped completely on its head with the majority of messages now being delivered in an electronic format. This rapid change of circumstance is what led to Obit quickly developing an Online Condolence feature.
Benefits of enabling Online Condolences
The benefits of offering the ability to leave tributes through your own website are myriad. For one, you can continue to offer the highest level of service to your clients who otherwise might have to forego on one of the most cherished keepsakes from any funeral, the condolence book.
Another important benefit of hosting condolences on your own website is the considerable extra traffic that brings with it, which can be boosted by as much as ten times. Mourners who would otherwise have visited a third party site where your competitors can advertise are instead coming to your website, giving you the chance to foster relationships with potential new clients. And a more immediate advantage is that if you offer any other services such as flowers, those will be more visible to people visiting your site to leave a message.
Technical Difficulties of Self Hosting
Of course, creating an easy-to-use and reliable online memorial experience for your customers is not straight forward. A developer would be required to create and maintain the system and all this could prove costly and take quite a lot of time. Not to mention the usability testing required to ensure it’s easy to use. And then you need a backend where you can actually process the messages, remove spam, fix typos and prepare a beautiful remembrance book for your customer. There are of course plenty of sites dedicated to online death notices which allow condolence messages but that comes at the cost of losing the traffic to your own website and all the benefits that can bring. However you can have the best of both worlds and self host without the technical worries.
Advantages of using Obit for digital tributes
When we designed Obit’s Online Condolences feature we wanted to tackle all of these problems without making any compromises and provide it for free to all of our clients. Here’s a quick summary of the benefits of using Obit’s Online Condolence books.
Quick Installation
Our code snippet can be installed in your website in under two minutes. We support WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly and many more popular website builders.
Customisable
You can easily modify the styling to suit your own site, keeping the look and feel in line with your own brand.
Easy to use
Obit’s interface is simple to use and allows anyone to leave a condolence message with the minimum of fuss.
Works on any Device
Our condolence feature will work across any device, be it a regular desktop computer, a tablet or a smartphone.
Built-in Spam Protection
Our setup is automatically configured with protection against spambot attacks so you will never have to deal with unwanted floods of messages.
Easy moderation
Condolence messages come directly into the relevant funeral in Obit and the relevant staff members are notified so they may review the message and ensure it is valid.
Professional Templates
Using our templating system you can very quickly create a professional condolence book to deliver to your customer.
No Hidden Costs
We offer all of this completely free to all our clients with active subscriptions.
Many Obit clients have been using this feature since day one and this has already enabled over ten thousand friends and relations to connect with bereaved families and deliver messages of sympathy. Since we added condolence messages the traffic to our clients online notice areas has seen a sevenfold increase, with some clients seeing much larger peaks in some months. For an example of our condolence books please see the Massey Bros site
Whether you’re an existing customer or new to Obit, and would like to know more about Digital Condolences, just get in touch through our website and we’ll be happy to speak to you.
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