Toll Free Business Numbers : More Customers Will Phone (Guaranteed)

By Mark Walters

A toll free number is a telephone number that can be called by your customers (existing and / or prospective) at no cost to them. Who pays for the call? You do. You might wonder why you want to do that, but it makes good business sense when you consider that it can really make the difference between them calling you or not calling you. For the low price of a phone call you could get yourself a new customer that you would not otherwise have had.

It is of little surprise that marketing campaigns that advertise toll free numbers for people to phone are much more successful than marketing campaigns that require people to pay for the cost of making the call. Of course, the fact that it does not cost people any money to get in contact is a major factor in this, as nobody likes to spend money unnecessarily, but there is a big psychological factor too. By paying for the call, you are saying that you really, really want people to contact you, and that can be enough to turn borderline customers into actual customers.

As well as making it more likely that customers will get in contact, having a toll free phone number will also improve people's perception of your business. The reason being that having just a local phone number tells people that you are a local business, which is fine if you are only targeting customers in your town, but not good if you want to target people in other towns. For some reason, people are reluctant to deal with companies that are not local to them unless they are an established, national company. Having a toll free number lets you get around this problem because prospective customers will not know where you are based.

The price you have to pay for each phone call made to you using a toll free phone number is approximately the same as the cost of a standard cross-city phone call. If you buy a package deal from the company that sets up the number for you then you may well even get discounted phone calls. There are plenty of companies around that can take care of the whole process for you. You just need to contact them, choose a number and tell them which phone you wants the calls to be routed to.

Toll free numbers come in certain formats, which vary depending on the country that they are registered in. For example, in the U.S. it is common for toll free numbers to begin with 800, 888 or 877, whereas in the U.K. they often begin with 0800, 0845 or 0844. They are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis, so the quicker you get one, the bigger and better the available pool of numbers will be. As a final point, you will not need an extra phone line installed if you get a toll free number because the number you choose will ring through to your office phone, cell phone or whatever other number you specify.

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