The Free Report: Effective Advertising Becomes Even More Effective With a Toll Free Number

November 21, 2007

Internet marketers and small businesses often have a need to get creative with their advertising methods.  One of the most effective methods of advertising involves a two or three stage process.  In other words, you aren’t trying to “sell” on your first contact with your potential customers.

In fact, people rarely buy on their first contact with a company, and this is almost guaranteed for online businesses.  Most people will not buy on their first visit to your website, which is why it is important to give them a reason to return to your site more than once!  Many people achieve this with an ongoing newsletter, and send out regular articles and information to their subscribers, which when done correctly, has a very high conversion rate for sales.

Another method that is use often for internet based businesses is the “free report” advertising technique.  When you get people to come to your website, you would then offer them a free report of some kind, related to the topic of your site, and related to the types of products or services you sell.  In order to get the free report online, people would just fill out a form with their contact information, and download the report.  This is a way to build your mailing list of course, but you always want to be sure your report offers valuable information to your customers.

If you are advertising offline, you can still make use of the free report method.  Newspaper classifieds and magazines targeted to your industry are good places to run an ad that offers a free report.  How do people get it?  By calling your toll free number, which you would have directed to a voice mail box, and leaving their contact information for you to mail them the report.  The free report method will give you much higher response rates using a toll free number than using your local number, so it is absolutely in your best interest to get one before attempting this marketing technique.

It’s not difficult to get a toll free number, and you can set them up so that any incoming call is forwarded to the phone number of your choice.  If you want to actually talk to the people who call, you can forward the calls to your cell phone or office phone.  If you want them to just leave messages with their information, direct it to your voice mailbox on your business or home line, and you can then add their contact details into your database of people to focus your ongoing marketing efforts to.

Posted in Toll Free Basics