The smart trip tool makes the online obituary a powerful way to communicate logistics at a difficult time
Yes! The average funeral or memorial service in the US has 80 attendees and out of those, approximately 12.5% are from out of town. That is 24 million people that are on their own to find a hotel nearby the service. And worse yet, within hours of the death, the family regularly has to answer several dozen phone calls that include some variation of the phrase “where should I stay?”
While funeral attendees might normally stay with the family when they come for a visit, a funeral is different. The last thing that a grieving widow or someone that has lost a parent needs is to be host to visitors, family or not.
Whether the service is held at a traditional funeral home, at a park, at a church or synagogue or there is a trip to the coast to spread ashes, TripProximity can help.
With 528 million annual visits to Legacy.com and another 18 million visiting Tributes.com, how many of those nearly 550 million visitors are the 24 million that want to actually attend the service?
The benefits of integrating the TripProximity smart trip tool into Legacy.com and Tributes.com
Benefits for Legacy.com and your Investors
- Simple, same day implementation of dynamic tool that will help increase your relevance to the marketplace
- No cost to implement or support the new revenue stream, so ROI is literally immediate
- Improve your earnings and cash flow with incremental, transactional revenue from existing base
- Better returns for your investor
Benefits for Newspaper Partners
- Better service for your readers
- Simply need to make it easy to give Legacy.com link to friends and family
- Incremental revenue stream from use of the tool
- Reduce reliance on subscription and advertising revenues
Benefits for Funeral Homes and the families they serve
- Better service to those wanting to attend the services
- No need for funeral home staff to answer the “where should I stay” question
- 24x7x365 service for travelers provided in 40 languages
Benefits for the Family and Loved Ones
- Family can share the link via text, email or social media as they advise loved ones about the death
- For each person that learns about the death, provides a one click way to share logistics with others, either via email or social sharing
- Finds available hotels near the service plus driving directions
- Guaranteed lowest published hotel rates for those traveling
Learning More
Pilot Idea
Obituary
Funeral Home Directory
PILOT RECOMMENDATION
We heard you loud and clear that the quickest way to pilot the TripProximity capability is through using the Ad Server units on the right rail.
Here is a suggestion for how that could work, without displacing other paid ad units.
If it is possible to put a second hyperlink in the Funeral Home ad unit, it could be linked to a custom landing page that is dynamically served. Like the flower page, the data on the resulting page would be served dynamically using our tool instead of the flower purchase widget. Once this page template is built on your side, plugging in our dynamic widget is very straightforward.
In this mockup, we also show a sample medium ad unit for attending the service, although we realize that you would not likely displace the high yield flower ad, but instead put this one below the fold. We will look to you for your experience and your lead on this front.
Display and Conversion Considerations
If the image on the main obituary landing page requires scrolling to find it, you may not even reach the base 1% conversion rate that is the industry average in travel.
On the landing page, we recommend making the widget visible above the fold, which should yield a 4.6% conversion (of the pool of people that need or want a hotel room).
If it is below the fold, requiring scrolling, you will see a lower conversion rate. Our experience shows us that this placement yields a 2.6% conversion (or less) from the pool of people that need or want a hotel room.
If the date of the funeral is past, we do not recommend showing the widget, as it is no longer relevant. At that time we would recommend shifting to the “anywhere” Memorial tool that can benefit charity. You can use a business rule to detect if the service date is past.
Please be aware that if you put the link to the tool or an Attend the Service graphic in an ad server, ensure that it is not in a rotating ad, as then some will see it and some won’t. This of course means that for the loved ones reading the obits that want to go to the service, they may not be able to find it, even if on their previous visit to the site, they saw the image.
Why Solutionz and TripProximity
- Lower your risk – The first and only company with experience in adding integrated trip capabilities into the obituary, with deep knowledge of conversion metrics and best practices in death care industry
- Content Partner – Patent pending technology that aggregates many kinds of content (beginning with hotel, driving directions, car rental and air) into a single location specific user experience, with multiple dimensions to the revenue sharing relationship
- Don’t Compete with your Partner – 100% focused on B2B tech to serve relevant, location based content near the service
- Shared Goals and Ethics – High ethical standards and a commitment to always bring you the highest possible revenue stream and the most relevant content offers for your audience
- Companies that give more, make more – Focus on giving back and a unique model to work with your charity partners
- Innovate without investment – Patent pending smart trip technology serving up not only proximity based travel elements (air, car, hotel), integrated driving directions for the 89% of Americans that travel by car, but also adding a suite of curated hyperlocal content (including I’m Discovering and I’m Going Out and Configurable Concierge tab) , available in late 4Q19
- Specific milestones to reduce revenue risk – Propose a minimum 90 day pilot with a revenue sharing model and clear milestones, then consider shifting to either a fixed price model for the real estate or a CPM model.
- Launch Faster (time is money) – Adept at implementing ideas faster and are nimbler in addressing technological change than bigger companies
- Built to configure dynamically – No programming required on your side if we implement in the ad server (see pilot ideas) and 24×7 access to the portal for access to analytics and the ability to further configure the tools
- Super light Integration – While we understand that the elapsed time of the implementation process may entail a number of departments, the actual tech integration can be done in hours, not days, weeks or months once the placement decisions have been made
Picture this use case for the smart trip tool (repeated nearly 2 million times a month)
Imagine….
Everyone that wants to come to Alice’s service has all the information at their fingertips to celebrate the life with friends, family and colleagues. Because when the family notified them about her untimely death, they sent along a link to the smart trip plan integrated on the obituary page on Legacy.com or Tributes.com.
Our funeral home just sent me the link to Alice’s obituary in the Tampa Bay Times. I was really pleased to see that there was an ATTEND THE SERVICE button.
- Friends and family don’t have to call the funeral home or bother the family to find out where they should stay.
- With just one click (because the date and location are already filled in), everyone can see that the AC Hotel is available for a reasonable price and is just 2.3 miles from the Funeral Home and exactly how much it is (along with many other choices).
- The family from Miami can rent an SUV there, so that they can drive and bring the kids, oh and Cousin Hector’s dog. They see that there is an affordable Residence Inn just 2.8 miles away that allows pets.
- After 35 years of working for a local lawyer, many of the attorneys now live all over the country. Most of them would likely be more comfortable at the LeMeridien hotel that is just 3.2 miles away or may want to stay in a five star gulf-front apartment on the beach.
- Our family from Bogota can find a hotel that they can afford and it can be priced in Columbian pesos and they can get customer service in Spanish
- And Aunt Maria from Houston can fly into Clearwater/St. Pete airport. She is staying with Cousin Elsa and they’ve decided to rent a house by the beach so they don’t have to eat out and they can get some sun while they are here. Elsa needs driving directions to the funeral home.
With TripProximity, it’s all there and its easy to use, even for Aunt Maria.
Financial Impact
We believe that Legacy can easily achieve these numbers if you take our recommendations on placement, as a new Attend the Service navigation in the body of the obituary This avoids looking like an advertisement and also ensures that the travel always has access to their itinerary with the link provided on the widget. They can make changes and even cancel a booking without needing to call for service..
Here are the numbers on a single two-night booking. The total impact of a booking without the donation is $16.40. This number is impacted by the average daily room rate, the average number of room nights, the average number of rooms (often one family member will book multiple rooms for the various family members) and whether the booking is prepaid or they pay on checkout. The former has a higher royalty rate and the latter has a lower rate, plus a much higher cancellation rate.
Try it, it is live!
Now imagine that this mobile responsive tool can be embedded one time directly into the obituary page template using our dynamic tool, in just minutes.
It is true. It isn’t days, weeks and months to implement.
NOTE: For this sample, we’ve changed the date on the service to a future date so that you may see the search results.
ADD ATTEND SERVICE AS A NEW FEATURE
This feature allows attendees to use the hotel, driving directions, car rental and air options. There is no cost for this function if you provide us your Google API key.
We already have a map
Right now, anyone coming to Legacy.com or Tributes.com who accesses a map is taken off to Google. The TripProximity widget can replace your existing map tool. From the map, those coming to the funeral can book hotel, flight or get dynamic driving directions to the service location.
OPTIONAL MAP VIEW OF SMART TRIP TOOL
Rather than leaving your site when they hit VIEW MAP, you can display our smart map. It then allows your visitors to use the hotel, driving directions, car rental and air options. There is no cost for this function if you provide us your Google API key.
Even for trips to spread ashes, we can find a hotel nearby
We recognize the shift in the trend toward cremation and that more and more people are opting for trips to spread their loved ones’ ashes.
The tool can be used for the memorial service and then we can also help them find a hotel near wherever they would like to begin that final journey.
Lead Innovation in Death Care by Making Remembering Matter
Long after the service is over, colleagues, friends and family can honor the loved one by using TravelingToGive to donate to the family’s cause of choice. Every trip matters.
Getting Started
Your Portal is Live
When we say that implementation of TripProximity takes hours, not days, weeks or months, we know that is tough to believe, but it is true. We know that you likely have hundreds of items on your development plans and product road map (we do too!), so we built the product in such a way that it was as easy to set up as a tool like AddThis or ShareThis for social sharing on your site.
Just configure the dynamic tool on our portal, write a script to pull your data elements in (name and photo for deceased, service date and location) and plug it in to your site. That’s all there is to it. We’ll support the testing and also the communication to your existing clients.
TripProximity comes with a full featured portal that allows you to manage your own tools. You can customize them online and once they are installed, the changes automatically flow to the live site.
The system also maintains analytics and records the booking activity for the Dignity Memorial and Neptune locations.
As we add new features and tools, they will be available to you via your portal
Device and Container Responsive
Where ever you plug in the tool, it will respond to the environment. If you put it in a narrow right rail, you’ll see the same version as the mobile view. Just plug it in and it works.
With the dynamic tool, you pass us the information to be displayed at the time it is rendered. No photo available? No problem, just use the same default image that you do for the obituary.
How do I get started?
It couldn’t be simpler. We don’t require a long term contract and only ask that you give us one year to pilot the product on your newspaper client sites and on your B2C obituary sites.
You can literally be live the same day and begin accruing royalties and donations right away. It is that easy.
- Set up a call to get any of your questions answered (use button at right)
- We will invite you to the portal once we get you registered (no long term commitment)
- Together we will customize your dynamic tool (it takes minutes, really)
- You will write a script that matches our variables to your data (name of deceased, photo, location and date of service)
- Install on the page template on your system for the Obituary (or in multiple places)
We help you test on all platforms. The product is already mobile responsive.
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