Every phone number you’ve had was an afterthought
Don’t think of a vanity number as a phone number. Think of it as a business asset.
Every time you’ve gotten a phone number, it was an afterthought. You picked out the hot new phone you were excited about, and they just gave you the next number on a list somewhere. You didn’t think about it, because who even remembers phone numbers any more? Our smart phones make it irrelevant, right?
That’s true for your personal number, because you’re not advertising it. You’re not trying to get people who’ve never called you before to call you.
A business pays to get strangers to dial
But that’s exactly what a business is doing, and it’s spending a lot of money to do it. That’s the difference. It’s paying to get people who have never called it to dial its number. The phone number is the front door to new business, and unlike people, a business needs to do everything it can to get strangers to call.
Businesses try to make their advertising stick, to make it memorable, and they have to stand out in a constantly growing sea of advertising messages. So while you might not think of a phone number as a tool personally, it is one for any business that advertises.
Two kinds of value
In toll free, Generic = Expensive. Say the generic word you want is with a vendor asking $25,000. That’s a lot for a phone number. But a vanity number gives you two different things, and it’s worth looking at both.
The first is the benefit to your business while you use it: more people remember it, more of them call, and all your advertising works harder. The second is the value of the number itself, as an asset.
Think about selling it someday. If you sold a local number, aside from its use in your own business, you’d have limited options. Being in the business you’d probably have connections to get a fair amount for it, but it only reaches one area code. The toll free version covers hundreds of times as many prospects, so you could potentially get 100 times as much for it.
When you add the increase in the value of your business to the benefit it gives you while you have it, it doesn’t take a very big business to see that $25,000 is a real value. And if you sell it in the future, you’ll probably sell it for several times that, on top of everything it did for you in the meantime.
The moat
If you look at it as a business asset, and realize how much of a moat it puts around your business going forward, it’s not just a realistic price, it’s a great deal. There’s no other $25,000 asset in your business that will make as much difference for the life of your business. And on top of that, it’ll be worth more in the future than it is now. More on that in the long term value of vanity numbers.
If that’s more than you can do right now
You don’t have to get the most generic version on day one. Try a version with a 4 in front, like 844-4 and your word, for a few hundred dollars or less. Once it’s proven and you’re in a better position, you can revisit the seven-digit version. Phone numbers don’t get jealous, so you can start with the best one that’s available now and still keep after the perfect one.
And if the up-front price is the hard part, some numbers come with rent to own, so every monthly payment goes toward owning it, and you can buy it out any time.