Small Businesses and Toll-Free Vanity Numbers

Even if your business is booming, getting more new customers and keeping old ones is all a part of the goal to keep growing. That’s why getting a toll-free vanity number could be the key to your marketing strategy: advertise it and listen as your phone calls increase.

To be clear, a vanity phone number is when the phone number actually spells out a word. And when companies obtain one and it perfectly advertises their company, it’s a match made in heaven. Just take the results of a recent study:

According to a demographically representative in-house study of 110 adults conducted by Burlington, Vt.-based Response Marketing Group, 58 percent of consumers can recall a toll-free vanity number after hearing it just once in an advertisement. Compare that with "hybrid" numbers (combinations of words and numbers, like 800-555-HOME), which only 44 percent of us can remember, and exclusively numeric phone numbers, which only 8 percent of consumers are able to recollect.

Other benefits to having a vanity number include:

• Higher phone number recall for customers from printed advertisements
• More advertising potential for audio advertisements
• High name recognition associated with the vanity number
• Customers can easily recall vanity numbers when away from a phone book or other phone directory
• Higher rate of referals from current customers

There are dozens of benefits to having a vanity phone number for your business. If you haven’t gotten one for your company, now’s the time to find out what all the excitement’s about.