Using virtual phone numbers for marketing campaigns

Hey marketers! Have you ever run a campaign that required people to call a phone number, either to redeem an offer or enter a competition? Chances are these campaigns ran for a set period of time (days, weeks, or even months), and you were forced to use the main company phone number for these incoming calls.

The downside of this is that these calls are usually impossible to differentiate from ‘regular’ call traffic, and your phone lines can become a bit of a mess for the duration of the campaign. If you’re working for a company that tends to provide customer service over the phone, do you really want users that need help to be forced to wait in a queue as non-customers use the same number to enter a competition?

Fortunately, there is a solution! Companies that use an internet phone system like Nimvelo Phone rather than a traditional landline setup can add new virtual phone numbers to their accounts in a matter of seconds and at a very low cost, and remove them when the marketing campaigns they’re tied to have ended.

Using numbers for different campaigns

Being able to add phone numbers to your account in seconds means you can have as many numbers as you have campaigns! By setting a unique number – or multiple numbers – for each campaign you can measure the effectiveness of it and compare it to other marketing activities.

Some ideas you could try:

• Run a competition where users have to call a dedicated number to enter, or could choose between a few numbers (like a voting system).
• Make it easy for people to redeem an offer – rather than a new customer having to cite a code when they sign up for your service, they could just call a dedicated number so the operator automatically knows to apply a discount.
• A/B test different campaigns! All good marketers know that A/B testing can be used to make decisions online, but with virtual phone numbers, you can A/B test offline campaigns as well! For example, you could try two different flyer designs with a different phone number on each and see which gets the better response.

Understand where customers are coming from

As a startup or small business it might be difficult to figure out exactly where your customers are coming from. Although Google Analytics can help you track web traffic, it’s not always easy to find out where callers found out about you unless you explicitly ask them. Using virtual phone numbers in your marketing campaigns means you can directly attribute calls to individual campaigns, so you can invest more in the ones that are working, and potentially remove those that aren’t giving you a return on your investment. Services like Nimvelo Phone also allow you to have a mix of local and national numbers, allowing you to ascertain which city-specific campaigns are performing best.

Get more from your call data

Nimvelo Phone Analytics makes it even easier to understand the data behind your virtual phone number – as well as knowing how many people are calling from your marketing campaigns, you can also find out things like what time of day is busiest for calls, and how long the average call duration is. This monitoring can help your get an even better idea of the effectiveness of your campaigns, and deploy resources in the most appropriate way.

Get started!

Already a Nimvelo Phone customer? It’s super easy to add new phone numbers to your account. Just log into your dashboard, go to ‘Incoming numbers’, and add away!

If you’re not currently using Nimvelo Phone, you can be up and running in just a few minutes. Click here to sign up and choose your number – or if you already have a landline or virtual phone number with another provider, just send us a message and we’ll get the ball rolling.