Sereni is a Belgian funeral business with more than 42 undertakers under their umbrella – a continuously growing number. While funeral planning is their core, Sereni offers multiple other services as well. From psychological guidance and grievance counseling to insurance and administrative help. To ensure top quality, they work together with several specialised partners for each specific service. On top of that, Sereni organises all sorts of events: both informational as well as art in its purest form. Their goal is to make death less of a taboo subject, giving it its proper place in our society. Sereni also offers a wide range of memorial items, to remember loved ones that have passed. Think of ash jewelry, customisable frames, urns …
Baldwin works together with Sereni on two aspects: development and digital marketing. By now, we managed to tackle several projects together, with many more on our planning. We know each other through and through, resulting in a harmonious and successful partnership.
Developing an ecosystem for Sereni
Sereni came to us with two major projects. Firstly, there was the need for a renewed webshop to sell their memorial items on. Secondly, they were looking for an easy and swift solution to set up a website for every undertaker. Our traject originally started as a Magento project. It was only in a later phase that we decided to switch to WordPress with the WooCommerce module. Magento might be a powerful platform, but WordPress takes the crown when it comes to user friendliness for administrators without a background in development. The platform simply is easier to use and has much less technical complexity.
Sereni Webshop
The Sereni webshop offers quite the amount of memorial items. To make this happen, Baldwin synchronised WordPress with Akeneo, a Product Information Management system. We also synchronised Akeneo with the Sereni app, in order to establish a link to ExactOnline, Sereni’s invoicing partner. As Akeneo stores product information differently from how WordPress stores data, our developers had to come up with a solution. They developed a custom module that basically translates product data form Akeneo to understandable information for WordPress. There is an automatic daily product import, but it’s also possible to do this manually.
Undertaker websites
All undertakers will get their own website on which they can present themselves and their services, but also get the possibility to offer their own selection of memorial items. Baldwin set up an ecosystem that stores all current and future Sereni websites. The highlight here are the customisable themes. We provided multiple themes, allowing undertakers to pick & choose. This gives them the flexibility to determine how their site will look, while staying true to the Sereni brand as well. There are different colour schemes possible, as well as several webpage designs.
Sereni furthermore offers their undertakers the possibility to sell memorial products of their choice on their website. The same applies to Sereni’s blog articles: the ecosystem also serves as some sort of database on which Sereni makes their own content available to use. The Baldwin development team built a feature to simplify the process. Undertakers only have to select which articles they want to share with their website visitors, which are then automatically added. No further ado, no copy pasting – just checking a box and that’s it!
Future projects
A major advantage of this ecosystem would be how easy it is to add future projects. As an administrator, you only need 1 account to access all websites. Setting up a new site is now technically possible within the hour. That is, of course, without taking into account all content alterations. It’s the same for any other website Sereni wants to release. Extra development time is only needed for new features and major structural changes, as the initial setup barely takes any time.
Our most recent project on top of the webshop and undertaker sites, is Samen Onderweg. This is an event website, where you can find an overview of all events organised by Sereni, and obviously can buy tickets for these events. Our developers built a module that generates a unique code for each ticket. As students can go to these events for free, we also needed to create two types of tickets. A standard ticket that requires payment, and a student ticket that automatically sets the price to zero. After some research, our developers succeeded to fully optimise the purchasing flow, without these ticket types causing us any trouble.
Digital marketing for all Sereni projects
We’re mainly focusing on Google Search. Every undertaker gets their own Google Ads account. This gives us the flexibility to play with budgets that we finetune depending on ones needs, without drowning in hundreds of campaigns. Budgets are decided on according to the population of an undertaker’s (wide) location, as well as the undertakers size and capabilities. This way, we will only generate the amount of traffic and potential leads that meets the potential of an undertaker. This approach also ensures that no one gets a preferential treatment, as we only use factual elements to distribute budget.
Needless to say, SEA isn’t the only aspect we invest in. Baldwin aids the Sereni team to improve their SEO efforts. We guide them through keyword research (which can also be used for our Google campaigns) and help where else necessary. Writing metadata, on page copy, articles … whatever Sereni needs, Baldwin provides.
It’s furthermore our goal to boost their social media efforts as well. Last year, we actively worked together on ONT Roerd, a major event that was organised by Sereni. We went for a creative approach that has proven its success, as this will also be rolled out for the official Sereni social channels.
Curious in how we can help you move forward? Don’t hesitate to reach out – we don’t bite. We’d love to take your (online) business to the next level!
