Matching your local number

Some people go to our site and put in their local number, trying to match their local number. That is fine if it's available, but I always point out that, matching your local number is only memorable to the one group of people that you don't need to make your phone number memorable to, the people who already know your phone number.

Having a local number and toll free number matching does look cool on your business card and does have a cool professionalism to it, but if your local number is random it's throwing good money after bad and you should really look to see what better options you can find that will increase the response rate to all your advertising, not keep it the same as it is now.

And for anyone with a nice numeric number that ends in 00 or 000, don't get your hopes up for getting the matching '800' version. 00 or 000 numbers in 800 are literally a hundred more times harder to get than they are in most local area codes. That's because there are almost 200 local area codes nationwide so there are 200 times as many people competing for them in toll free area codes. And nice numeric numbers are visible to the phone companies so they don't give them up but take them and recycle them internally giving them to their biggest advertisers.

We'll be glad to get a toll free number that matches your local area code if it's available and that's what you really want, but my advice would also be to use our tools and see if you can find a number that is more connected to your advertising. Maybe you should consider both and use one in your advertising for new customers and the matching combination on all your operational materials. That way you can tell how many calls you're getting from new customers versus existing ones. That alone can be extremely valuable information. And it really doesn't cost you any more since you would be receiving the same number of minutes, just splitting them between two different numbers.