A guy walks into an airport bar and asks the bartender if he can just take a look at the phone.  ”You don’t want to make a call?”  ”Nope, just want to look at the phone.”  I know it sounds like the beginning of one, but this is not a joke, and I actually did this a while back.  Why?  Well, I needed to call Southwest Airlines to reschedule a flight – and I knew the number was 1-800 -I-FLY-SWA.  Which is great, except for the fact that at the time, I didn’t know how to figure out what numbers all those letters mapped to, and I was staring at a Blackberry dialpad full of numbers – not a letter in sight.

Fast forward a few years…

I spend a fair amount of time on airplanes, and every once in a while a past occupant of the seat I happen to be in leaves something interesting to look at between the all-electronics-better-be-off phase until 10,000 feet.  Recently, I picked up a copy of the in-flight duty free magazine and found this little gem:

See what’s going on here?  The person who scribbled this out on the in-flight magazine was desperately trying to figure out what the phone number for Macy’s shop by phone service was.  Yes, they knew it was “1-800-45-MACYS”, but without a phone that actually *has* the letters over the numbers of the dial pad, that phone number is pretty useless.  This person actually drew out a telephone dial pad and tried to put the letters where they thought they should be…and incorrectly at that (the “ABC” starts over the “2″, not the “1″).

Alphanumeric phone numbers are great in 30 second TV spots or 60 second radio ads – they’re easier to remember than a string of numbers, and since the ad will likely be over by the time you reach the telephone, these are helpful for getting the phone call response to the ad itself.  But if you’ve ever tried to actually call one, well, we all have to admit alphanumerics are just plain harder to dial than numbers.

The web is a different animal

If you’re looking at an ad or a website that entices you to call a phone number, it doesn’t just “end” after a matter of seconds.  You don’t have to engrain an alphanumeric phone number into someone’s head with a catchy jingle, because odds are they’re going to punch those numbers into the phone while those numbers are right in front of them…and it will be easier for them to dial without having to look for letters.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of abandoning alphanumeric phone numbers for your online marketing pursuits is that you can use either dedicated phone numbers or pools of phone numbers to track the performance of virtually any advertising campaigns you use to drive traffic or phone leads.  If a goal of your website or your online marketing strategy is to get your phone ringing, then you need to be able to source an offline conversion (like a phone call) back to the click, the ad, the keyword, the email, the site, the content, the version, or the campaign in order to focus your advertising dollars on profitable advertising efforts with measurable ROI.

Many phone tracking solutions out there integrate directly with your web analytics solution.  One very nice solution is Mongoose Metrics, which integrates with Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends, Coremetrics, Unica, and more.  You can even use phone tracking with your conversion testing strategy – here’s a case study from a while back showing an integration between a phone tracking solution and Google Website Optimizer.

Summing it all up

Those easy-to-remember alphanumeric phone numbers do have their place, and they can provide some really nice advantages, especially in the offline world.  But online, not having to rely on a single, hard to dial number lets us gain so much from a measurability standpoint that you might want to think about leaving your alphanumerics off of your online initiatives.

So back to the in-flight magazine scribbles… even if Macy’s did eventually get that phone call, I’ll bet they’ll never know what ad campaign was responsible for it!

By the way, if YOU were the one who drew that picture in the airplane magazine, I’d love to hear from you in the comments ;-)

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David Booth
David is a co-founder and principal consultant at WebShare. You can find out more about David here.

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One of our most popular services at WebShare is to critique ecommerce sites, and one concept that comes up often is perceptual blindness.  This is the tendency to overlook something that is right in front of you because it’s not where you expect it to be.  Think of the internal site search box on a website.  If you moved this to the very bottom some customers may conclude the site is missing the ability to search because they are not used to looking for the search box at the bottom of the page.  This is why we say it’s often better to “Dare not to be different” in certain areas of website design.

I just recently experienced the perfect example that illustrates our point.  A friend of mine in Germany found out she is pregnant, and so I just had to send her two books right away.

I logged on to Amazon.com like I always do, entered her address and was about to pay when I saw that Amazon was estimating it would take over a month for her to receive the books, plus the shipping was more than the cost of one of the books!  At this point I was beginning to rethink buying these books from Amazon.  On a whim I decided to check out Amazon.de (the German version of Amazon).

One thing to point out is that I don’t speak a lick of German, but with Amazon you don’t have to!  I searched for the titles in English, the pictures of the covers confirmed I was ordering the right books.  So now it was time to add them to my cart.  While the text on the “add to cart” button was in German, the buttons and checkout process was so intuitive that I knew exactly what to do without even reading the text.  Since the spelling of the months are extremely similar to English, I was easily able to see that the delivery time was much more appropriate and since I was buying on the German site and shipping to Germany I was able to get Free shipping!  (which I knew because the location of the shipping charges are in the same place as on the US site—right where you would expect them).

By now you should be picking up on a consistent theme.  I was able to make this purchase without knowing any German because Amazon understood the value of consistency and meeting expectations.  While it is important to make your company stand out from the rest, be careful to ensure that you don’t actually make it harder for people to do business with you.  People abandon shopping carts for lots of reasons—don’t let a frustrating UI be one of them.

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Julie Ferrara-Brown
Julie is WebShare's chief statistician and conversion testing expert. You can find out more about Julie here.

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