The Benefits Of Vanity Numbers For Ones Company Marketing, advertising and promotions are getting to be quite a challenge these days. People are understandably tuning out, with basically all aspects of life now hyper-saturated with commercial messages. This means that anyone with a service or product to sell must be increasingly innovative and use more sophisticated techniques for getting their message out there. There's a lot of discussion about content marketing, targeted messaging and subliminal advertising; but, you can still find some old methods around that will produce great results - for example vanity numbers. It is not very clear how these custom telephone numbers that spell out words, also known as "phonewords", got the name "vanity" since it usually is less about vanity and more in regards to the visibility to customers. Like short, catchy Web addresses, an easy-to-remember telephone number is invaluable when it comes to making certain that customers will make yours the first name they think of when they are searching for products or services. A lot of marketing research studies have shown this to be true. In 2008, one such study demonstrated the success of vanity numbers; more than 70 percent of test subjects easily recalled such phone numbers after as little as thirty seconds. In Australia, customer response increased by 30 to 60 percent based on a study that had distinct, memorable phone numbers that had phonewords that were used in direct marketing such as radio or newspaper ads. There was a time when just about all phone numbers used phonewords. Before the mid-1950s, rotary dial telephones were not used by everyone. Back in those days, you needed to pick up the receiver then click it a couple times to be able to connect to the operator. Once she came on the line, you would tell her what number you wished to call, which might be something like “PEnnsylvania 6-5000." That specific number, incidentally, was the one used by New York's Pennsylvania Hotel which was immortalized in the early 1940s by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Interestingly, the letters printed on telephone push button and rotary dial phones symbolize the last remnants from the old system. It was not until the introduction of toll-free Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) in the late 1960s that commercial phonewords started coming into use. There was limits, even then, since the prefixes were already hardwired to a specific geographic region. The digital revolution changed all that. Starting in the 1990s, prefixes of toll-free numbers were used to point to a specific database rather than a geographic area and can be serviced by almost any carrier. This way, all seven digits can be used to create the phonewords. Obtaining a vanity phone number isn't hard, and it doesn't need to cost a large amount of money. In some cases, a business emphasizing a particular service can share a vanity number on a rental basis. A good example of this could be using a number like 1-800-PETFOOD that can be owned by the company in one city and directed to other clients in every state. The great news is that there are a lot of possibilities out there, although vanity numbers like 1-800RECYCLE or 1-800-QUIT-NOW have already been taken. Your current number may already contain a catchy term or phrase hidden within it. To help you find them, you can use a web-based Number Experts
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