Text Messaging

How to Get a Memorable Number for Texting Customers

by Kim Jaso

With an influx of digital advertising across channels, customers have shorter attention spans than ever—making it that much more essential to make your interactions with them memorable, easy, and convenient. Text messaging has been on the rise with a business to consumer audience for years now, but just like with any phone number, it’s not as simple as saying, “Send us a message at [insert 10-digit number].” To engage with your customers in a more memorable way, consider implementing short codes or vanity numbers to help get your message across quickly and leave a lasting impression.

In this post, we’ll explore the benefits of short codes versus vanity numbers and how you can start using them today for text messaging.

The Benefits of Short Codes

Short codes are a great way to engage with your customers for text messaging as they’re only five or six digits long, making it much easier to remember or for you to plug into advertisements to encourage your customers to text you (usually for something in exchange, like a discount code).

Furthermore, short codes are especially effective for getting your message out to a large audience simultaneously. With a short code, you can contact up to 100 people at once, whereas a traditional phone number is restricted to a maximum rate of one SMS or MMS message per second, no matter which carrier you’re using. So, a business could get their message out to a much larger audience, much more quickly, than if they’d used a traditional phone number.

That said, short codes can be expensive (to the tune of $15,000 to $20,000), so it may not fit into every marketing budget. In addition, short codes face a longer approval process for use and larger set-up fees. But if you’re launching a large-scale campaign where you want to get the word out to an audience simultaneously, short codes would be an immensely valuable tool to help you do so.

To learn more about setting up short codes, visit our Knowledge Base.

Why Consider Vanity Numbers

Okay, so maybe you don’t have the budget right now for investing in short codes. How can you still engage with your customers in a memorable, yet affordable, way? Consider vanity numbers.

Vanity numbers, or numbers that utilize a word like “1-800-FLOWERS”, have been used for years. They spell out for customers what your business does, and are also easy to remember in comparison to other numbers, therefore leaving a lasting impression. Plus, compared to short codes, they are relatively inexpensive to purchase and set up (typically costing around $100 for purchase, with low-cost monthly renewal fees). Vanity numbers also help establish legitimacy and build your reputation, as they’ve traditionally been used by large corporations.

There are endless options to choose from for vanity numbers and they can be purchased and set up within CallTrackingMetrics. Each vanity number has a one time set-up fee which will vary depending on the demand for the pattern, the area code, and the particular word you are looking to spell. If you don’t want to invest in particular word(s), you could also opt to have a pattern of repeating numbers (such as 5555) to help with the memorization aspect.

Learn more about the vanity number request process here.

Ready to start text messaging with your customers?

Visit our Text Messaging category for all of our content around how to utilize this channel to grow your business.