What is a vanity number?
- Vanity number
- A vanity number is a phone number chosen so its digits spell a word or phrase on the telephone keypad, making it easier to remember than an arbitrary string of numbers.
What vanity number means in practice
Radio and billboards made them valuable. A number you can say once and have people remember was worth real money when that was how adverts worked.
Then dialing changed. Most calls now start from a search result, a saved contact or a tap on a website, and none of those require anybody to remember anything.
Some value survives in spoken advertising and on vehicles. A plumber's van passed at speed is still a memory test.
Prices reflect the decline unevenly. Generic industry words still cost a lot; most other combinations are cheap.
What people get wrong
Spelling ROOF on a keypad
The keypad mapping hasn't changed in decades. 2 is ABC, 3 is DEF, 4 is GHI, 5 is JKL, 6 is MNO, 7 is PQRS, 8 is TUV and 9 is WXYZ. Smartphone dialers still print the letters under each digit.
Say a roofer wants a local number ending in ROOF. R is 7, O is 6 twice, and F is 3, so he needs a number ending 7663. He asks his phone provider to search their stock for that ending in his area code, and they find two.
Before paying, he should run the mapping backward. The digits 7663 also spell ROME and SOOF, which is harmless. A roofer eyeing 7246 for RAIN should know it spells PAIN as well. It's also worth dialing the numbers one digit either side. If a near miss reaches a competitor, part of his radio budget will ring their phone.
Testing whether the memory trick pays
A vanity number is a bet that people will recall it later without writing it down. You can test that bet cheaply before you repaint three trucks.
Put the vanity number only where memory matters: the truck, the radio spot, the yard signs. Keep your ordinary number on the website and listings, where people tap and never read. After 60 days, count the calls on each. Since the vanity number appears nowhere clickable, every call to it came from someone who saw or heard it and remembered.
Divide what you paid by those calls. A $400 number that brought in 35 remembered calls cost about $11 each, and you can compare that with what a click costs you.
Toll-free vanity numbers are their own market. In the US they're assigned through registered providers under FCC rules that restrict hoarding and brokering. If someone offers to sell you a famous 800 word outright, ask your carrier how the transfer would work before any money moves.
How GreetKeeper handles it
Forward it like any other number and the assistant answers it. Nothing about the digits changes how a call is handled.
Keep the tracking separate. A memorable number for the public and a distinct number on each advert measures better than trying to make one number do both.
Every call arrives with a transcript, so you can see whether the callers from that advert are the ones you wanted.
Vanity number questions
Are they still worth buying?
For spoken advertising and vehicle signage, sometimes. For anything clicked or tapped, the money is better spent elsewhere.
Do they have to be toll-free?
No, though the well-known ones are. A local number that spells something works the same way and costs far less.
What about the extra digits?
Words longer than seven letters just get ignored past the number's length. That is normal and it does not break the dialing.
Related terms
Hear it take one of your calls
Two minutes, your own scenario, no card.