1-800 Summer: Staying Safe & Protecting Your Revenues by: Custom Toll Free, June 23, 2011 Historically summer is the most notorious season for accidents and one of the busiest times for 800 numbers. There may be lots of fun in the sun going on, but on average there seems to be a lot more accidents, especially involving children. You have new toys, BBQs and fires going, blow-up pools and a lot of great outdoor activities going on. All of which can result in incidents and injuries not handled in the right way. Read More
866, 800 Numbers Or 888 What’s The Difference by: Custom Toll Free, June 7, 2011 f you are looking into acquiring new toll free numbers one of the big questions you probably have is which type of prefix is best. Are 800 numbers really the best or does it matter at all? Read More
Illegal Methods Of Advertising by: Custom Toll Free, May 23, 2011 Every business needs marketing and advertising to promote themselves and their products or services. Though if you are not careful and get caught up in illegal methods of advertising you could find yourself fined out of business in no time at all. Read More
5 Reasons A Vanity Number Is The Best Marketing Tool You Can Invest In by: Custom Toll Free, May 6, 2011 1. Vanity Numbers Work For Everyone Vanity numbers work for every type of business in every industry. In fact not only do they work, they are essential for excelling and growing. It doesn’t matter whether you are a for profit corporation or a charity organization, if you want to survive and accomplish your mission you need a vanity number. 2. Vanity Numbers Make All Your Marketing Efforts Better Read More
The 4 Types Of Toll Free Numbers & Why You Need Them by: Custom Toll Free, May 3, 2011 1. Vanity Numbers Premium vanity numbers that spell out words or phrases provide incredibly powerful marketing and branding tools that can help you take your business to a whole new level and dominate your industry. These prime toll free numbers, help position your company, make referrals easier and are easily memorized. Using the most advanced toll free number search tools you can now search for available numbers in seconds using your business name, web domain name or keywords. Read More
Toll Free Numbers and Automating Your Business by: Custom Toll Free, April 25, 2011 The phone and the Internet are now the primary points of contact today between businesses and their clients. Due to the competitive nature of the business environment, companies should make the effort to make the cost of communication as cheap as possible for their customers. This can be made possible with toll free numbers. Toll free numbers can provide an efficient way for your company to handle transactions. This is especially true if you automate the phone system. Read More
Transferable 800 Service by: Custom Toll Free, April 13, 2011 Transferable 800 services provide premium toll free numbers with the complete control to port or move your toll free services to any carrier of your choice at anytime. Options and flexibility are always a good thing and are important to the continuity and profitability of your business. Don’t worry if you really haven’t thought about who you want to manage your toll free services yet, the best toll free providers that offer transferable 800 service normally provide activation and will host your number until you decide when and where you want to move your toll free numbers. In fact most often you don’t really need move your service, but it is nice to have the control. Plus you will often get a grace period of around a month after you reserve a new toll free number with transferable 800 service that comes a range of features including free minutes, online voicemail, online faxing, access to online details and advanced routing capabilities. When acquiring any business phone number, especially 800 vanity numbers you definitely want to check if it is a transferable 800 service. You do not want to be held captive. However, the one exception to this rule is for those who are taking advantage of toll free shared usage plans. Shared usage is a great option for those looking to get the most out of their budget or who want to harness the most powerful 800 numbers for specific areas even if they are owned by someone else. However if you are making the investment in a high quality number and the sole use of it you you need full control of the the toll free management and which carrier is handling your business phone lines so that you can switch carriers if there are issues later or in order to take advantage of more powerful routing options and improved customer service. Read More
Positioning and Toll Free Numbers by: Custom Toll Free, April 11, 2011 Positioning is crucial for any enterprise's success and toll free numbers could be just the tool you need to do the job. For those of you who are new to brand positioning, you can use toll free numbers to position your business both to hone in on your niche and to differentiate yourself from your competitors, or in some cases use your competition’s position to leverage credibility. For example, acquiring generic and broad industry related vanity numbers can help boost your brand’s visibility and gain masses of new leads. However these numbers are not always available, or at least not for nationwide coverage. If you can take advantage of shared usage plans to harness the power of these premium toll free numbers for certain geographic areas, you should definitely do it as well. However targeting your toll free numbers towards your niche will bring you a more qualified flow of prospects and is often easier on your marketing budget. You may be promoting exactly the same products and services as your competition. But what is it that you can hone in on that will make consumers choose you instead? What is most important to them? Speed, the inexpensive option, or just the easiest person to do business with? Think about how you can incorporate these terms in to your vanity toll free numbers and grab up market share quickly. While the above marketing strategy involves distancing and separating yourself from your competitors, you can also use their strength and larger marketing budgets against them by identifying your business with them using your toll free numbers. By comparing your organization with the leaders in your industry, you can position your business as also being a leader in your customer’s minds. Or you can simply piggy back off of their advertising. What toll free numbers are they using? Can you obtain the same toll free numbers that they have, only with different prefixes? Read More
Is A Toll Free Number Really Worth The Expense? by: Custom Toll Free, April 1, 2011 There probably isn’t any business owner or executive out there who wouldn’t ‘like’ to have a toll free number, but is it really worth the extra expense? Many businesses are not even aware of how affordable toll free numbers are these days so do not even make an effort. Of course there are some highly sought after toll free numbers that can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. However there are also many winning toll free numbers that can be taken advantage of through toll free shared usage plans that run as little as $20 per month! Remember toll free numbers and are not just for vanity; they offer a wide range of benefits from improved branding to making referrals easier to testing and streamlining your business processes. These benefits alone can add up to large sums of money every month, though will vary widely depending on your current business model and industry. So let’s take a look at some more specific numbers to really determine if toll free numbers are worth using. The biggest and most immediate tangible advantages of using freephone numbers are often seen in terms of response rates and closing ratios from marketing campaigns. Let’s say you are sending out a direct mail campaign to 10,000 recipients this month. Toll free numbers have proven time and time again to improve response rates to direct response marketing by 12-42% and often much more. So if you are used to getting and average response rate of 5% or 500 calls then by including toll free numbers you may likely see 60-210 more more responses from the same campaign. Businesses utilizing toll free numbers for their marketing have also reported triple digit increases in their closing ratios. So if you normally expect to close 25% or your 500 leads, 125 of them you could be seeing as many as 355 closed deals from the same campaign. It really doesn’t matter whether you have a $10 product or a $100,000 annual membership program the benefits to the revenues and the bottom line are obvious. Read More
4 Advantages Of Toll Free Shared Usage Plans by: Custom Toll Free, March 29, 2011 1. Toll Free Shared Usage Is Affordable Toll free shared usage plans mean only having to put out money for exactly what you need. If you are only doing businesses locally or in a few states why expend money for national coverage? Plus this means not wasting your staff’s valuable time and running up your labor budget. So shared usage helps you get the most out of your phone budget but maximize your man hours as well. 2. Get The Ultimate Branding Tool Instead of just using any old business phone number or a numeric toll free number, shared usage gives you access to a winning vanity number that you can use to unify and strengthen your brand while improving the effectiveness of all of your marketing. There are few branding tools that can be used in many places and have such a large impact as a premium vanity number. 3. Look Big! Toll free shared usage plans will enable you to have access to better at a small fraction of the expense you would normally have to put out. This means being able to look much bigger than you actually are and quickly grow your business both in terms of the number of clients coming through the door and the premium you can put on your products and services. 4. Maximizing Your Marketing ROI By utilizing toll free number shared usage plans you not only get to look like the big dog on the block in your local area from your own marketing, but are able to benefit from the marketing budgets of those using the same toll free number in other areas of the country. If they are doing national advertising you could be getting free marketing done for you. Plus you will also be able to piggy back off of this additional branding visibility from those relocating to your service area of those who refer their friends, family and business associates that reside in your are to your toll free number Read More