My partner needed to reclaim our marketing number so he could use if for his Realtoring. The reason being is that he had the Google voice number already linked to his cell phone and you can’t have more then one linked as far as I know. He wanted to keep those calls separate from our investing calls so we decided to use a prepaid phone and new number on our marketing.
Let me tell ya, changing your phone number on your marketing is not as simple as you may first think and comes with consequences. Let me list a few of the issues that have popped up so far…
- We still wanted to have all leads who have received a letter (with the old number) in the past to get marketing pieces with the old number. So how do we manage that transition?
- Calls will be coming into both lines at first because we still have marketing out there with the old number.
- Any probate specific bandit signs we had with the old number will not be usable
- Any pre-printed postcards we had with the old number will not be usable
The last two are just sunk costs and can’t really do anything about them. To be honest I’m perfectly fine with never hanging another bandit sign again, so they can die in a giant fiery hell for all I care.
As for the transition, it’s not really that hard once I figured out how to handle this in SI Lead Manager. Because we still have a couple outstanding campaigns running with the old number letters, I couldn’t just change the phone number on those letters. If I did, then the next scheduled mailing to those leads would have a different phone number then the previous touches. That wouldn’t look good in my mind. So I needed to create a new campaign with new letters that have the new number.
Here is how I did it…
Step #1: Create new Letter Templates
The first thing I did was make a copy of the 3 probate letter templates we were using. I then updated the phone number on the new copies and imported them in the system.
Step #2: Create a New Campaign Template
Now in order to use the new letters (with the new number) I created a new Campaign Template. So now I have two Probate campaign templates setup, one with the letters that contain the old number and one with the letters that contain the new number.
Step #3: Setup the mailings based off the New Campaign Template
For all new Probate mailings from here on out I will be using the Probate Campaign Template that contains the letters with the updated phone number. Eventually all the mailings with the old number will finish up and we will be fully transitions.
There is still the chance that people who got our marketing with the old number might not call us for months or even years. We expect this to be the case and my partner will just have to handle those as they come.
It’s a fairly easy solution and should work great. I’ll let you all know if I run into any issues.