According to a study conducted by RescueTime, the average person spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone every single day. While that may mean phone-based marketing is still effective, it’s actually anti-productive if you don’t use a virtual phone number for your business.
6 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Virtual Number
Virtual numbers are telephone numbers that don’t have an extension linked to them but can be connected to existing landlines and mobile phones.
Here’s why your business needs one.
1. A Virtual Phone Number Makes You Trustworthy
According to the Pew Research Center, 81% of US adults don’t pick up cell phone calls from unknown numbers. If your customer can’t look up and find your number online, they aren’t going to trust you, which means they won’t buy from you. Building consumer trust is very important.
When you have a virtual number that uses a local area code, your customers will feel confident that you’re not a telemarketer or a foreign business that may not understand their needs.
2. A Virtual Phone Number Improves Customer Service
A well-trained customer service staff can also increase your business’s trustworthiness, but it can be hard to give your customers your best if you aren’t always online. With a virtual number system, you can transfer callers to the next available customer service agent 24 hours a day.
Features like on-hold music and welcome messaging can keep your customers engaged, which is essential for marketing purposes. Your customers want to know their call is important.
3. A Virtual Phone Number Enables Relationship Management
Knowing how to get a virtual number is one thing, but knowing how to use it in your specific industry is another. Banks and financial services often use relationship managers to provide one-on-one conversations with their customers, and virtual phone numbers can make this easy.
Since virtual numbers aren’t assigned to a specific phone, the relationship manager just needs to keep their cell phone on them to answer calls and support your company’s customers.
4. A Virtual Phone Number Can Track Field Sales Calls
If you work in an industry where your employees always have to be on the move, a virtual phone number can be a great asset. Virtual phone numbers can be used to track and manage field calls. Plus, field agents don’t have to use their own personal numbers to do business.
Pharma and real estate companies will really benefit from this system, as they can use it to log into their CRM automatically. This makes it easy to find required customer support tickets.
5. A Virtual Phone Number is Perfect for eCommerce Staff
Startups and eCommerce businesses typically don’t have enough cash flow to actually buy another number. If you’re an international business and want to sell products to a US audience, you won’t be able to get enough responses without purchasing an international or US number.
A virtual phone number system solves both problems. Not only are these systems cost-effective, but they also give foreign businesses access to a wide range of numbers and area codes.
6. A Virtual Phone Number Can Be Used for Campaigns
With a virtual phone number platform, you can add a new number to your campaign in minutes. Now that you have multiple numbers, you can run multiple campaigns at once. For example, you could have one number for redeeming offers and another for a virtual voting system.
What’s more, you can use multiple numbers to A/B test different campaigns. Some businesses will print flyers with different phone numbers to see which flier gets a higher response rate.
