Here at Grasshopper, we’ve done a LOT of marketing. We’ve run TV ads, radio commercials, pay-per-click ads, email campaigns, banner ads and so on and so forth. It’s a lot to keep track of! How do we know which ones are working and which ones aren’t?

The good news is many of these campaigns can be tracked with analytics. We can set up tracking URLs for things like email and pay-per-click, and when the person clicks through a link and purchases, we know.

But what happens when that person doesn’t click on a link and instead picks up the phone? How do we know what channel it came from? The answer is phone tracking and here’s how to do it:

If you are a business affected by Hurricane Irene, we’d love to provide you with a free three-month Grasshopper account to help you keep your business open and connected (for existing customers, we will credit your account for 3 months, maximum credit $150).

You can be set up in five minutes, have incoming calls forwarded to your cell phone or to other employees’ cell phones and create custom greetings letting your customers know what’s happening. You don’t even need to change phone numbers; you can port yours into Grasshopper.

Whether you are a new customer or existing customer, give us a call at 1-800-820-8210 and we will help you get set up.

Your business phone number is often the first solid impression a customer has of you. After all, it’s the only part of your ad they’ll go out of their way to remember. What it says about your business is important. A regular 10-digit number is hard to remember but a vanity phone number creates a lasting impression. These numbers create a clever or memorable association with the business, and provide a higher level of competition. At other levels, they are nice but unnecessary or not valuable at all.

Vanity numbers first hit the scene in the 1970s, as an adjunct feature to AT&Ts toll-free number service. They didn’t get much traction until a 1984 law mandated that all toll-free numbers must be portable between long-distance providers. This portability suddenly made vanity numbers an attractive proposition, since a memorable number you can’t move with you can be as much a liability as a benefit.

Why Get One

As cell phones, with their inherent free long-distance and portability, grew in popularity some expected vanity numbers and other toll-free services to fade. What they didn’t count on was that vanity numbers would become a matter of prestige among businesses and their customers. Since vanity numbers were once the hallmark of established national corporations, any company with a vanity number appears more established and professional. A brand-new company can take on an air of experience and importance simply by having a vanity number.

According to the FCC, over 25 million toll-free numbers are in operation in North America. And there’s a good reason for that: when it comes to running a small business, having a toll-free number can have a tangible effect on your bottom line.

When introduced in 1967, toll-free numbers were something of a novelty and a way for businesses to eliminate long distance charges for their customers. Now, toll-free numbers have come to be expected by customers seeking to make purchases and ask questions about products or services.

Here are some signs that your business could benefit from a toll-free number:

You Sell Products or Services Online

The advent of e-commerce created a boon for the toll-free industry. “When shoppers migrate away from brick and mortar stores to make an online purchase, they know they cannot go back to a store clerk to resolve a problem,” says Insight Research’s president Robert Rosenberg, speaking about research his firm conducted. “In this context, the toll-free call that the customer can make to register a complaint or resolve an issue takes on an even more strategic role than the 800 call did when first used to build recognition in the late 1980s.”

Providing a toll-free number for customer service lends credibility to your brand and reduces barriers to purchasing products online.

A Phone Number Is  Key Part of Your Marketing Campaigns

If leads from your marketing and advertising efforts come in primary through a phone number, having a toll-free number can significantly increase your conversion rates. Not only does a toll-free number establish trust with your potential customers, it also reduces their calling costs.

This is particularly important if your campaigns span multiple geographic areas. A toll-free number doesn’t have an association to one particular state or city, so customers won’t be driven off by the fact that your contact number isn’t local.

You Plan to Expand Your Business Nationally

If you’re serving customers in a small region with no plans to expand, a local number may work fine for you. However, if you’re planning to expand your business to a national level, it’s best to start with a toll-free number to begin with. Having a toll-free number won’t hurt your branding locally, and it makes expansion into other areas easy. Toll-free numbers are also portable, meaning you can bring your number with you should you choose to switch providers.

What are the other benefits to having a toll free number for your business? Tell us in the comments section below!

Information is everywhere — in our homes, on our phones, on our televisions. We’ve got web-based city guides like Yelp and Citysearch, location-based apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, and search engines at our fingertips to help us track down any address, phone number, or business listing we need. And yet, every few months the phone book people slam a four-inch-thick tome down on our doorstep.

In fact, half a billion phone books are printed and delivered in the U.S. each year, according to The Daily Green’s Jeff Yeager.

With all the free, paperless alternatives to Yellow Pages available in increasingly convenient forms, why do phone books still exist?

Local Advertising Is Stuck In The ’80s

Small, local businesses with limited budgets have narrow advertising options. Whereas the Internet provides myriad cheap or even free ways to advertise a local business (Adwords, Yelp, Blogs, etc), a busy local plumber simply may not be savvy enough to take advantage of them. Enter the Yellow Pages salesperson, a man or woman armed with a quota and a mouthful of statistics like “8 out of 10 calls come from Yellow Pages.” Because phone books have typically been cost effective advertising forms for small businesses, it’s easy to justify the expense to renew an ad each time the sales rep comes calling. And since the sales rep comes to you, it’s often easier to spend your budget on a phone book ad than on Google Adwords or something that requires proactivity.

It’s difficult to measure the return on investment of a print ad. That’s one of the reasons the print industry has been so profitable over the past few decades: advertisers don’t know where their money is being wasted.

The bottom line is that even if people don’t use phone books, as long as businesses are paying money to advertise in them, those big books will be printed.