Stewart Enterprises, Inc. was founded in 1910 and is the oldest publicly traded death care company in North America. They own and operate funeral homes and cemeteries throughout the United States and Puerto Rico, with principal executive offices located in Jefferson, LA.
Approximately 5,000 employees are currently employed across 24 states throughout Stewart Enterprises funeral homes and cemeteries, making them the second largest provider of funeral and cemetery products and services in the death care industry in the United States.
The cemetery operations include the sale of cemetery property and related merchandise, including lots, lawn crypts, family and community mausoleums, monuments, markers and burial vaults, along with the sale of burial site openings and closings and inscriptions.
The industry, as a whole, is slow to change and experiences no seasonal spikes. Even with the previous year's revenue reaching just over $500 million, Stewart, along with their top competitor, only comprise approximately 20% of the market. The other 80% is made up of mostly small family-run services.
The Need For a More Efficient Process
Because Stewart Enterprises has acquired new death care companies over the years and these new companies have, for the most part, kept their same name and local management, Stewart now has funeral homes and cemeteries operating under 175 different names countrywide. Outside of the New Orleans area, the name Stewart is virtually unknown - customers would know them by their local funeral home name. While Stewart Enterprises embraces this fact, to the corporate office this meant the control and maintenance of 175 individual websites.
"All of our websites were static websites and were basically just brochure ware," said Blake Killian, Internet Marketing Manager. "Each website had standard information, and the only information that was regularly updated on the websites was the obituaries." Over 80% of the traffic that came to their websites was to view an obituary and/or sign a guestbook.
At the time, a third party vendor maintained all of Stewart Enterprises' websites. Stewart knew they wanted to control more of the content themselves and would need a Content Management Solution to manage each of their websites. "I wanted to empower our managers in the field to be able to update their own websites and reduce the amount of website maintenance we had to do here at corporate," said Killian. Any time a change needed to be made, Stewart's corporate office would have to submit the change to the third party vendor that maintained the websites. One of the biggest obstacles with such a process was lack of timeliness. A prime example being an instance in Arkansas when a property had two numbers in their zip code transposed on their contact page. The corporate office submitted this change to their web developer, and it was fixed...in eleven days.
In addition to this being a time consuming process, it was also quite costly. Stewart Enterprises was charged every time they needed a change made to any one of their 175 websites. A content management system was greatly needed.
Stewart Enterprises Selects Eprise
Stewart Enterprises found SilkRoad technology's Eprise content management solution through a whitepaper. After an informative presentation from SilkRoad, the pool of potential providers was narrowed from six down to three. Of the three potential providers, SilkRoad was the only company that came to meet with the Stewart team personally. "That made a huge impact on our decision," said Killian. "We were able to sit down face-to-face and go over what we needed and what could be provided. They made us feel very comfortable and everything was personalized to illustrate how we would use the solution. The SilkRoad team was really interested in our needs and how they could work with us."
With Eprise, Stewart Enterprises would be able to create a unique website for each of their 175 businesses. Stewart was able to leverage SilkRoad's partnership with Onramp, a brand consultancy dedicated to accelerating differentiation and uniqueness, to design the look and feel of the websites. This partnership allowed for a complete end-to-end solution that not only addressed the technical side of the project, but the strategic and branding side as well.
Choosing to implement Eprise as a Software as a Service solution meant Stewart would not have to rely on an IT team to launch each website. By taking advantage of a hosted solution, they were not only able to launch quickly, but they were also able to work with Onramp to upload, test, and make changes quickly.
Eprise Provides Results
Having just hired a new ad agency that was getting ready to launch several new initiatives on November 1, Stewart Enterprises was on a very tight deadline to get their 175 websites up and running by the same date, with time quickly running out.
"We told SilkRoad we needed everything done by November 1," said Killian. "It was an insane timeline and, to myself, I kept saying that there was no way we were going to get this done. To make things worse, we lost close to three weeks to Hurricane Gustov at the end of August."
Come November 1, all 175 websites were live. "Our SilkRoad team has been unbelievable. They never backed down from a challenge, but at the same time, they never led us in a direction that they knew they wouldn't be able to follow through on. If we asked them to do something that wasn't possible, or out of scope, they were very up front with us. During the launch phase we connected every day, and I always felt like a priority," said Killian.
Due to the implementation of Eprise, web traffic is definitely increasing for Stewart Enterprises, as are the number of returning visitors. They are now able to go in and optimize the site themselves and that is drawing more unique visitor numbers. In October, prior to the launch of the new websites, Stewart Enterprises was at 140,000 unique visitors a month across the network. At the end of January, just three months after launch, they were up to 190,000 unique visitors.
Stewart Enterprises can now go in and maintain pages on a global, regional, or site-specific scale and they are now able to empower their field managers to maintain their own websites. Killian noted, "This is enabling the corporate office to do more to include the field and allowing the individual funeral homes and cemeteries to make their own choices and become more autonomous. It's helping us to connect to them in a way we weren't able to before."
Before, where websites were static and needed to be maintained by an outside vendor, now the websites are more user-friendly, interactive, and easy to maintain.
