When you look out at the vast marketplace — its complicated demographics, its hard-to-reach corners, its ever-changing dynamics — you can be forgiven for thinking that it’s a cold and indifferent place.

Trying to connect with today’s consumers can feel like you’re shouting into a black hole. What marketing strategies will deliver the best results? What are the right channels to target? How do you get customers to respond?

Amidst all these daunting challenges, Toll-Free Numbers can be your secret weapon. Companies large and small are using them in surprising new ways to connect with today’s elusive customers.

Toll-Free Numbers get people communicating with your business. That means product ordering, appointment setting, servicing booking — and lots of other sales-generating activity. And Toll-Free Numbers are increasingly used as unique assets to track ad campaigns, sales performance and business intelligence.

Toll-Free Numbers are trusted, national numbers that people can call – and now text. With brick-and-mortar business declining, the ability to converse with customers in new ways is more critical than ever.

The Search for new life

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In the following pages, you’ll learn:

How Toll-Free Calls Generate Big Sales from Your Best Customers

How Toll-Free Texting Attracts New Customers and Sweetens Relationships

How Toll-Free Numbers Serve Up Marketing and Business Intelligence

Phone calls are 10 times more likely to convert into revenue than web clicks — and Toll-Free

Numbers encourage your customers to get in touch when they’re ready to spend.

Texting enables your business to grow sales, lower costs and reach elusive millennials — and Toll-

Free Numbers are by far the best numbers to support person-to-person text messaging.

There are just a few simple steps that you can take to improve marketing analytics and increase your

campaign ROI — and Toll-Free Numbers bring unique abilities to generate responses, track campaign success, and elicit deep customer insights.

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So here’s your guide to learnwhat Toll-Free Numbers can do for you.

Talk can be the most powerful communications channel in the path to purchase. When customers dial your business number, they’re often at the moment of highest interest, empowering businesses to connect with their best leads in real time.

Today, phones are ringing louder than ever with the rise of mobile commerce. In 2016, more people accessed on-line retail from smartphones and tablets than from desktop computers. Calls to businesses from mobile phones are projected to reach 169 billion each year by 2020 (BIA Kesley).

Search Leads to Calls, Which Lead to Sales

According to an Invoca study, 52% of people that connect with a business after search do so by phone call. And 61% of mobile searchers say that click-to-call is most important during the purchase phase of shopping (INVOCA).

Inbound calls usually convert 10 times more than Web clicks. After a good calling experience, four out of five people say they’re likely to become repeat customers, while three out of five say they’re likely to spend more money on current or future purchases with that company.

Make Your Toll-Free Number Clickable

Placing a Toll-Free Number as your main point of contact is like laying down a digital welcome mat. And making your Toll-Free Number clickable practically opens the door. It provides a simple and powerful means of converting mobile ads into sales. According to Invoca, 58% of callers to a business want to make a purchase of $100 or more, and 24% of callers are about to make a purchase of $500 or more (INVOCA).

Conversations Drive Conversions

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Click-to-CallClick-enable Toll-Free Numbers on your

Website and in your advertisements.

Cashing in on CallsPeople who call are ready to do business with you, just like Jane. Follow her story below.

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Americans today are text-happy, sending six-billion SMS messages per day (One Reach: Texting Statistics That Prove Businesses Need to Take SMS Seriously). When Toll-Free Numbers are text-enabled, they offer a powerful new touch-point for marketing opportunities. By embedding a Toll-Free Number into a promotion or direct response ad campaign, you can give consumers an extremely simple way to start a conversation with your brand. Studies have shown a 265% increase in engagement (GeoMoment).

Consumers have made clear their preference for texting businesses — 85% of people said they prefer to text with a live customer support agent instead of calling or emailing (AT&T), and 75% of people said they would find texting as a better alternative to waiting on hold(Somos, Inc).

There are many reasons consumers want to be able to text a business, including:

• Asking questions about a product or service• Placing or refilling an order• Checking balance or due dates• Finding store locations• Making or confirming reservations• Getting updates on order statuses

Texting Opens a NewWorld of Possibilities

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Star FinderText-enabling your Toll-Free Numberwill help you find new customers across the galaxy.

Gets the Attention of Millennials. Text messaging brings in big wins for businesses targeting the millennial demographic. According to a Harris Poll, 77% of millennials say they’re more likely to have a positive opinion of a company that offers SMS capabilities (Harris). This group of shoppers that are projected to have $1.4 trillion in buying power in 2020 (Accenture).

Supports Multimedia. Pretty much anything you can do on your phone can now be done via text messaging. Sending photos, sharing videos, swapping media — it’s all doable with an SMS message.

Enhances the Customer Experience. Text messaging has proven to be the single most effective channel for driving customer engagement. A full 97% of companies that connect with customers via a text-enabled business line reported that communications were more efficient, customer response rates were higher, and sales conversions increased (AT&T).

Helps Build Brand Reputation. Companies that offer texting services to consumers are viewed more positively than those that don’t. According to One Reach, 62% of surveyed consumers said they would prefer to communicate with businesses via text (One Reach).

Increases Call Center Efficiency. When a call center is set up to interact with consumers via text message, it becomes faster, more cost-effective, and generates more revenue. Call center agents can:

• Interact with mobile users more simply• Reduce call abandonment• Foster customer engagement and loyalty• Respond to a larger volume of inquiries

Five Ways to Please a Crowd

For such a simple technology, text messaging sure does offer some galactic-sized benefits.

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Click-to-Call and Click-to-Text over a Single Toll-Free Number

Give your customers the convenience to both call and text you over a single

Toll-Free Number.

Meet the Texters

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Everyone has their own way of taking care of business. So, meet the Texters! These are the people your call center needs to be ready to serve.

When it comes to choosing the way that you text with your customers, the simplest choice is to text-enable your Toll-Free Number. It establishes a single business number that customers can both calland text.

Compared to local numbers, Toll-Free Numbers represent a trusted and recognizable symbol for your brand; one that not only conveys reliability and accessibility, but also inspires trust and confidence that professional support teams are standing by to offer immediate assistance. Toll-Free Numbers are also business numbers, designed to handle the texting volume of a national brand, not simply a local office or a single sales representative.

Compared to short codes, Toll-Free Numbers are far more cost- effective, pricing out as low as $12 per month versus $500 to $1000 for a short code. Toll-Free Numbers are significantly more affordable to acquire. And since they are capable of massive volumes of person-to-person communication, Toll-Free Numbers also offer greater versatility when it comes to customer connection compared with short codes, which are only capable of a limited volume of application-to-person communication.

What to Text-Enable: The Reliable,Recognizable, Reachable Toll-Free Number

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In today’s complex marketing universe, it’s essential to be able to trace your successes back to their source. Attribution is everything. And Toll-Free Numbers can help you map the entire customer journey from ad, to response, to sales, to call center performance, to business intelligence.

Mapping the Relationship

Track the clicks that lead to sales. Toll-Free Numbers can extend attribution from ads to actual sales. When a consumer responds to a click-to-call or click-to-text ad, the resulting conversation leads to extremely valuable information — namely, which ads drove purchases, for what products, at what amount, and even at what lifetime value.

Empower your sales agents withreal-time data. Marketers employ specialized software that links a consumer’s click-to-call or click-to-text response with relevant Web history. This equips sales agents with critical information to tailor the conversation and improve conversion rates. This data can also be used to route calls or texts to the optimal agent.

Call Analytics

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Listen to the voice of the customer. Today, businesses are exploring voice recognition technology to drive high-value insights from call center conversations. These solutions convert customer voice conversation into text for analysis, revealing a wealth of insights directly from the customer.

Business AnalyticsMarketing Analytics

Determine campaign attribution to refine your strategy. Embedding unique Toll-Free Numbers in different campaigns allows marketers to measure how well the ads performed based on content, channel, geography, demographics and other criteria. You can make on-the-fly adjustments to your strategy and spending to get the most out of your budget.

Measure the effectiveness of off-linemarketing sources. TV, print, and radio campaigns can be much more difficult to track than digital ads. Toll-Free Numbers are an effective analytics tool for off-line channels, especially vanity numbers that are easy to recall.

Using Toll-Free Numbers to Track Marketing Campaigns and Customer Conversations

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Sources Business Insider: “The Rise of M-Commerce: Mobile Shopping Stats & Trends.” | BIA Kesley: “Click-to-Call Influences More Than $1 Trillion in U.S. Consumer Spending.” | Invoca: “Call Intelligence Index.” www.invo-ca.com/call-data/ | Invoca: State of Mobile: “State of the Mobile Experience.” | One Reach: “45 Texting Statistics That Prove Businesses Need to Take SMS Seriously.” | Geo Moment: “Turn Your Clicks into Conver-sations.” | AT&T: “Connecting with text: The shift to landline and toll-free business texting.” | Somos: www.somos.com | Harris Interactive: harris-interactive.com/ | Accenture: “Who Are Millennial Shoppers?”

Key Take-Aways

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Phone conversations bridge the distance between you

and your customers. They’re a sales relationship starter that speaks to the most serious buyers, since most customers that call have at least $100 to spend. And Toll-Free Numbers are still the national number for business, especially as most new businesses are virtual-only and need a point of human contact. So, ensure that your number is front and center (and clickable) for your customers.

Texting is our preferred way of communicating on

our mobile devices, and when you text with your customers, you’re meeting with them on their terms. Texting is a convenient and friendly way to start and sustain a relationship, particularly with millennials, the emerging generation of consumers. Explore how to text-enable your Toll-Free Number — it’s quick, easy, and cheap to add another feature toyour advertising.

There are many ways to keep track of the customer

journey. If your business’ goldmine of data is customer conversations, then Toll-Free Numbers are the right choice for keeping track of those conversations. They’re a welcome mat for prompting as many conversations as possible, and keep track of both off-line and online advertisements. In this way, you can connect conversations to ads, and those conversations to sales and lifetime customers.

Choices, Choices

Toll-Free Numbers aren’t limited to 800 Numbers.Today, there are seven Toll-Free Number codes available to choose from:

How Do I Get a Toll-Free Number?

You can get all the Toll-Free Numbers and resources you need from a certifiedToll-Free Number provider, called a Responsible Organization. Check out www.somos.com/find-a-toll-free-number

How Do I Text with my Toll-Free Number?

You can text enable your Toll-Free Numbers through a Toll-Free Service Registrar. Check out www.somos.com/text-enable-toll-free-numbers

Since many land-line devices are not capable of sending and receiving text messages, your Service Registrars may offer a Messaging Application for your desktop or hand-held device. For high volume uses, such as for your call center, an Application Programming Interface (API) is commonly used to integrate messaging into the communications flow.

Somos Inc. is the Toll-Free administrator for North America.

844.HEY.SOMOS | www.somos.com

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