What are “Toll-free numbers?”

A toll-free number is a phone number that can be dialed by anyone in the nation, at no cost to the caller. Toll-free numbers are often used by businesses with a widespread customer base in place of traditional local phone numbers that require the customer to pay for the call if they are considered a long distance away by their telephone service provider.

What are the benefits of using toll-free numbers?

The use of toll-free numbers in place of traditional local numbers can give your customers a fast and easy way to communicate with your company, service their accounts, make purchases, and get information on your products and services, painting a friendly picture of your company in your customers’ minds. Likewise, toll-free numbers are often easier to remember than local numbers, as they eliminate the use of area codes.

Can I track the source of my calls using a toll-free number?

The answer is “yes.” In addition to giving your customers an easy, complimentary way to communicate with your company, toll-free numbers are easily integrated with call-tracking technology, giving your business unlimited power to analyze the effectiveness of its marketing and advertising campaigns using unique toll-free numbers for each campaign, or in some cases, each form of media.

For example, imagine you have recently launched a new software product. Your marketing team has placed print advertisements in local newspapers and trade magazines, as well as produced radio and television spots. If you were to use the same local telephone number as the contact number in each of your advertisements, you would have little way of knowing which advertisements were performing well and generating the most calls. By contrast, if you used a unique toll-free number as the contact number in each of your advertisements, you would be able to identify the origin of each phone call with little to no effort on your part, using the reporting features included in call-tracking technology.

In this way, the use of toll-free numbers can open up a new world for your business allowing you to effectively analyze the performance of your advertising campaigns and, subsequently, tailor your efforts based on performance. In the end, this approach will maximize your profits and minimize wasted time, effort and money spent on advertising campaigns that do not produce results.

Additional Resources

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