How Hoff Funeral & Cremation Service Found Website Success

Tim Hoff, Owner & Funeral Director
Ashley Hoff-Czaplewski, Funeral Director
Hoff Funeral & Cremation Service
St. Charles, MN
Average call volume: 400 calls/year

For more than 20 years, Tim Hoff has partnered with Funeral Directors Life (FDL) to help manage his funeral home and connect with families. Tim and his daughter Ashley Hoff-Czaplewski saw how FDL improved several parts of their business, but they still needed help with their website.

After trying multiple website management services over the years, they couldn’t find the right provider who could help their website stand out, nurture preneed leads, and take the responsibility of managing their website off of their plate.

But once they heard about FDL’s new website management service, they couldn’t wait to try it.

Since using FDL for their website needs, Hoff Funeral & Cremation Service has seen a nearly 30% increase in traffic and a 400% increase in monthly preneed leads. Tim and Ashley also rely on FDL for preneed and accounting services to make their funeral home efficient and successful.

“I can’t imagine what our business would look like without our partnership with FDL,” Tim said.

Read more to learn how FDL’s full suite of services has helped Hoff Funeral & Cremation Service.

Why did you decide it was important for your funeral home to have a high-quality and resourceful website?

Tim: Families expect you to have a good website nowadays. If you don’t have a meaningful website where families can contact and interact with you, then they’ll look at you as behind the times and probably not the funeral home they want to use.

Ashley: Having a quality website shows families that you are a leader in the funeral profession. Our website shows families that they can come to us with any needs they have.

How have you liked your new funeral home website?

Ashley: We’ve been really happy with it. Like many funeral directors, we’re so busy serving families that we don’t always have time to update our website or see how those updates impact our website’s traffic. With FDL, we get a monthly analytics report that shows how our website is doing and what families are interested in.

This new website has helped us in our marketplace. Other funeral homes in our area still have older websites, so FDL has helped us stand out. Plus, our new website has so many easy ways for families to find helpful information. I love that families can turn to our website to gain valuable information rather than having to go to another source that may not be as reliable. We’ve even gotten a couple of calls just because of our Google reviews on our homepage. We’ve just focused on serving families as best as we can, and the positive Google reviews have followed.

How else has FDL helped you stand out online?

Ashley: FDL’s social media management service has been very helpful for our funeral home. Like our website, we just didn’t have time to keep our social media active ourselves. For a while, we had a funeral director who managed our social media, and she was great at it. But when she left, our posting fell by the wayside. FDL has our Facebook page looking great because they’re the ones who figure out what to post and when to post. Plus, their graphic designers and copywriters make it all look and sound very professional.

Has your new website impacted your average number of preneed leads?

Tim: We’ve seen significantly more leads. Our preneed counselor has been doing very well lately, and I’ve definitely seen an improvement in her sales. I think it has a lot to do with the website. We’ve worked with website providers in the past that didn’t help us nurture leads. FDL is different. The team helps us get the lead and move forward on them.

Why have you continued to be an FDL preneed customer for so long?

Tim: Because it’s tremendous! I like the long-term approach FDL has for preneed. Many preneed companies promise big commissions up front, but the policies see little growth over the next 5-10 years. That puts the funeral home in a bad financial position, and it doesn’t set the funeral home up to be a very good steward of a family’s money. FDL believes in sustained long-term growth at a fair level, which is wonderful.

Are there any other of our services you’ve enjoyed using?

Tim: We just started using Directors Business Solutions (DBS), your accounting service, and I have nothing but good thoughts so far. They do a good job of letting us know where we are financially each month, especially with funeral service-specific reporting.

The lending part of it is also much easier than going through a traditional bank for a loan. The DBS team understands that a funeral home’s value is more than its hard assets, whereas a bank usually only looks at hard assets. You all know the funeral profession deeply and have gotten us funded in weeks rather than months with traditional banks.

Do you think it’s important to partner with companies that understand the funeral profession?

Tim: Absolutely – in fact, it is critical to work with people who understand the funeral profession. That’s a big reason we’ve worked with FDL all these years. You need to work with vendors and providers who know funeral homes and can help your funeral home succeed. With FDL, we’ve walked hand-in-hand with them as partners instead of just being their customer. FDL has a mission statement of “being the best, most-respected provider of service,” and they’ve achieved that over and over again.

What would you say to someone who is considering FDL’s services for their funeral home?

Tim: I’ve recommended FDL to several colleagues over the years and plan to continue doing so. I would advocate for potential customers to take a serious look at all of FDL’s offerings. FDL has so many different ways to help funeral homes, and the partnership is outstanding.