What Makes a Vanity Number a Good Investment?

Rather than simply list the features of a great vanity toll free or local number, we thought it would be fun to run the investment qualities of a memorable phone number against some common characteristics that the financial industry uses to judge a good investment.

For our purposes, we’ll just take some of the most common characteristics that most analysts would agree with and see how vanity numbers stack up. Our criteria will be:

• Risk: the potential to not break even or lose money on your investment, based on factors like cost and market conditions.
• Robustness: the ability to stand the test of time and weather adverse conditions.
• Dividend Potential: the ability to pay back on a reliable and regular basis.
• Efficiency: the potential for your investment to do a lot more when you add just a marginal increase in what you spend.
• Return: In the long term, an investment will stand or fall on when it has paid its own way and starts making you money.

Common Characteristics of a Good Investment

As you can imagine, there are a number of different views from financial experts of what makes for a sound investment. These can be based on cost, risk, return potential, and any number of other personal factors.

In the following five concepts we have a solid set of qualities against which to judge the investment potential of a vanity number, so let’s see how they stack up.

Risk

There’s only really risk if you don’t make your money back on an investment, but a vanity number normally pays for itself in months, if not within weeks of activation. A memorable number used across existing marketing materials is one of the most effective ways to increase inbound calls, and these leads convert to revenue 10 times more often than web leads.

Given just how affordable vanity numbers are, even for a small business, almost all risk is removed once those extra calls start coming in and your sales team goes to work.

Robustness

There was a period of time, at the dawn of digital marketing, when some anointed online channels as the future of connecting with customers and proclaimed the channels that preceded them dead. Some still do so to this day. Of course it was more experienced marketers who had the last laugh, taking the best of both worlds to build highly effective marketing campaigns.

As we’ve discussed when looking at the versatility of vanity numbers, a memorable set of digits has been crucial to the marketing crowd since the sixties and shows no sign of slowing in effectiveness any time soon. Where investors look for stocks with a steady track record of improved performance, your business can regard a vanity number as an investment that will stand the test of time and continue to deliver over all the years you use it.

Dividends

Once you have your memorable number out in the world and the calls are coming in, the only limiting factor is how many of the new opportunities your team can convert. Assuming an effective sales team, dividends continue to be paid by vanity numbers for as long as your marketing reaches the right audience and your product or service is in demand. In short, you can’t put a price on the recurring value of the regular inbound sales inquiries that a vanity number drives.

Efficiency

Not only is a vanity number efficient, it takes all of your other marketing expenses and makes them more efficient as well! Because calls tend to be the most effective way to convert and your number slots in easily to any marketing message, online or offline, audio or visual, it’s efficient as both a brand asset and a way to generate leads while using the least possible ad space or time.

Depending on your choice of vanity number, it can be used to reinforce your business name, add context to what you do by making reference to your industry, or incorporate a call to action that encourages potential customers to contact you. In our experience, there’s no other marketing tool that delivers quite so much in such a clear, affordable package.

Return

In much the same sense as risk, a vanity number provides financial returns quickly, and keeps them coming. While advertising can be tough to assign a value to, making ROI more difficult to judge, you know exactly when a call comes in to your vanity number.

Furthermore, by employing multiple vanity numbers you can track the relative return of different campaigns. So a memorable number not only provides a return on its own marketing investment, it also helps you to measure the ROI of others!

Are Vanity Numbers a Good Investment?

Of course, we’re entirely biased, but the results really do speak for themselves: vanity numbers start delivering almost right away and don’t stop unless your marketing sales team does. A memorable phone number can be out there all the time, working to build brand awareness and generate new leads for your business.

What this all comes back to is that calls aren’t just important to your business, they can often be its lifeblood. As Johnathan Dane recently pointed out phone leads have the highest chance of closing a sale. There’s something about the opportunity to speak to someone personally and what prompts them to call that makes a voice conversation much more likely to convert. That’s what adds to the bottom line, and that’s the bottom line for judging return on investment.

If you have questions about the best investment you can make in one of our many memorable telephone numbers, call us today to have a conversation. 1-877-RING-BOOST is the only number you need to remember!