Flowers
For the past several years, Legacy.com has been improving our Sympathy Flowers service that we provide our users and newspaper affiliates. Our innovative approach continues with the launch of an exciting new flowers solution that provides a superior user experience and makes it easier for customers to select and send flowers. You may notice testing of this new solution in your market as we optimize this service offering, and refine it in the coming months.
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Funeral Home Directory Pages
On Feb. 18, we launched the redesigned Funeral Home Directory Pages to deliver a better user experience for readers across all devices. We created a more compelling, fluid user experience that has been optimized to offer more ways to find and explore your obituaries, increasing traffic and user engagement. These pages offer your funeral home partners increased branding opportunities and help enhance their presence on your site, the most-visited source for online obituaries.
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February and March have been busy months for the affiliate managers! We had representatives at SCAMA in Dallas; Mega-Conference in Las Vegas; MediaXchange in Denver; and America East in Hershey, Pa.
Coming up, we will be attending INMA World Congress in San Francisco, Calif., and Ink+Beyond in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. If you are attending one of those events, please reach out to us, as we would love to schedule a time to meet!
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The past few months have been busy at Legacy.com, and in order to help keep you better informed, we will be sending you this newsletter once a month. We hope that this becomes your go-to source for revenue-driving solutions; product information and performance results; category and company news; and our latest innovations and ideas.
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Revenue Share Increased in 2013
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In October, CEO Stopher Bartol sent an email predicting that 2013's fourth-quarter revenue share would be the highest we've seen ... and he was right! We shared back more revenue than we ever have before. The average revenue share per notice from 2012 to 2013 increased by 36 percent!
We offer many revenue-driving solutions that can help you meet your online revenue goals. To learn more, contact your affiliate manager.
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Performance Results
Next Generation Obituary (NGO) continues to perform very well in the markets where it has launched when compared to our standard obituary platform. If you're wondering how NGO can help your online obituary strategy and meet your digital goals, please contact us. T o date, we've seen that NGO users are much more engaged within the obituary page:
>Time on page is 14 percent higher.
>Views per notice are 19 percent higher.
>Visits per page are 29 percent higher.
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 My Experience with NGO
Proving that Next Generation Obituary isn't only for large markets is Mona Bass, Advertising Director at Post Community Media, LLC. Two of their papers, Gazette.net and FairfaxTimes.com have launched NGO.
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I have a long-standing career in media. My roots began in Springfield, Massachusetts, at the Republican. My branches have allowed me to experience media in several areas throughout the country. I have enjoyed an extensive sales management and training career working for Tribune, McClatchy and Fayetteville Publishing. In 2010, I migrated to the Washington, D.C., metro to be closer to my children, who both reside in this area. I believe that community media will continue to have a strong voice and I am excited to be a part of it!
What interested you in (NGO)? We are a group of community newspapers and NGO provides the look and feel of a larger news entity, which in turn has commanded more traffic to our website. I worked with Legacy.com in the past, but the benefits that NGO offered, including the increases in traffic that we saw, made it the economical solution for our community papers. Why would you recommend this product? We found that NGO is great for our community newspapers because it is economical and creates the opportunity for new business segments. We strive to provide the best for our readers, and the new design is much more appealing. There are many more added features that helped us make our decision. What new business segments were created? We have seen increases in organically driven traffic to the site from readers visiting the obituary and sharing it with their family and friends. We also have an environment where we can offer advertising placements that are applicable to the page, such as life planning. We've even had funeral homes contacting us wanting to be a part of the site when there wasn't interest before. It's been a great way to create new opportunities for the category. What do you like most about NGO? For us, the ease of use makes it seamless when placing the notice online. For the families, the new Guest Book is a nice touch that really allows interaction. The "listen to obituary" feature has been very popular for older or infirm family members. www.gazette.net |
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New & Improved Guest Book
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As more and more newspapers launch NGO, we introduced a redesigned Guest Book to further enhance our newest platform. We updated the look and added even more features to offer the best user experience. And, the statistics prove how popular the new Guest Book is:
>Guest Book entries are up 16 percent.
>Photo entries are up 12 percent.
>Social shares are up 124 percent.
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Thanks for taking the time to read this! Next month, we plan on talking about revenue-driving solutions to help you reach your online goals.
Sincerely,
The Legacy.com Team |
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We're continuing to engage visitors by creating viral editorial content about the legacies of celebrities, ordinary people and more.The Did You Know? section, featuring quizzes about the lives and legacies of favorite celebrities, is the top-performing content section in 2014. But the new Photo Galleries section, launched in mid-January, is close on its heels! Today in History and Legends & Legacies remain popular as well.
To date, here are the top three content pages that have been featured in 2014:
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Promotions
Stopher Bartol, Founder and CEO of Legacy.com, promoted Steve Parrott to President. Craig Ziegler was promoted to SVP, Business Strategy and Product, and Jessica Voelkner was promoted to Director of Product. We welcomed a new Chief Marketing Officer, Kim Evenson, to the Legacy.com team. We can't wait to see how these key players will help continue our growth and innovation!
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Have you visited our sales site yet? This site hosts marketing collateral, news, information and much more to help keep you up to date.
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