Avoid random phone numbers. That’s the final word upfront on this blog post about choosing memorable customer-responsive phone numbers for your business. At 800.com, it’s our mission to help you choose a clever message or word association or…a wordless, but far from random, selection of numbers that can be just as effective at targeting and getting a response from your audience.
Let’s start with a basic idea of what a vanity phone number is and what it should accomplish.
What Exactly Is A Vanity Phone Number?
Your home phone number (excluding your area code) might be something like 273-4878. Not very memorable, is it? It doesn’t have to be. You don’t want thousands of people to know the number by heart and to call you at home 24/7. Friends, family, and maybe a small circle of business associates have your number plugged into their phones, so they don’t have to memorize it, and that’s all you care about.
It’s a different story with your place of business. You want that phone to ring and for customers to place orders or talk to your salespeople or at least ask questions that can lead to future sales. This is where memorability becomes critical.
In past posts, we’ve written about 800-FLOWERS and 800-GoFedex as prime examples of how to effectively use promotional messages to draw customers and help their brains retain your contact information.
Which is easier to remember? That fictional random phone number we used at the top of this section (repeat it without looking…we dare you) or the ones for FTD Florist?
How the Science of Working Memory Explains Vanity Phone Number Strategy
Every waking second of every day, we’re assaulted with millions of bits of information. Sounds exhausting, but it’s not. Most of those bits go right in and out of our heads because the information isn’t important to us. It’s not relevant.
But if you needed to order a Mother’s Day bouquet, and you went past an 800-FLOWERS billboard, do you think you’d take notice? Wouldn’t your brain retain that vanity number for as long as you needed it?
Our brains have so much to deal with that random numbers, even when they’re important to us, are nearly impossible to retain. We look for patterns that let us convert the random into organized information. Neuroscientists call what our brains do in this regard memory chunking.
Why Catchy Number Patterns Can Be Retained as Easily as Promo Messages
Our own phone number is (800) 800-4321. No fancy promotional message there. But it’s memorable. It’s easy to put into a memory chunk. The prefix is an exact repeat of the area code, and everyone knows the toll-free area code 800. Then the line number is a straightforward reversal of the first four basic numbers, a 4-3-2-1 countdown.
This all sounds very scientific and complicated, but the bottom line is that you just have to look at that sequence of numbers, and your brain captures and processes it a whole lot easier than…whatever that random fictional number we used earlier. Even we can’t remember it without looking back.
If your company sells shoes, you might look for an available vanity number with the word shoes in it. But what if so many other shoe companies had the same idea that all of the catchy shoe vanity numbers are taken?
What if your business is an investment consultancy for offshore fund managers? What you do for a living might not be so easy to describe in a word or two. However, if you have an all-digit phone number that brains can easily and immediately organize and store, that can be just as effective.
Memorable Phone Numbers Are What We Do for a Living
At 800.com, we’ll show you how to gain all of the advantages of having a vanity phone number based entirely on a word, a promotional message, or a non-randomized and highly memorable all-digit phone number.
We’ll start with an in-depth discussion of your company’s business goals and your promotional strategies and objectives. What we hope to leave you with is a vanity phone number that will be memorable and make it as easy as possible for your audience to reach out and connect with your team and conduct business.
Visit 800.com or call us at the very memorable (800) 800-4321.
