I’ve been personally following the Grasshopper journey the founder’s early days, when the founders would document the step-by-step process on how he found a designers to create the wireframes to how he launched the first beta.
Grasshopper, as this title suggests, is a call tracking software to help both marketers and businesses track their leads.
As a marketer, one of the worst things that can happen to is to not track your results properly.
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Especially when the results are positive, you have no proof!
This happened to me personally on one of my projects. After spending so much time and resources rankings page up to generate leads, I was only tracking the email form submissions, but totally forgot to track the phone calls.
For a while, I was reporting terrible results - when in fact, the sales team was busy all day long from fresh leads!
So this is why you need a phone tracking software!
Local and Toll Free Numbers
Grasshopper is able to generate both local numbers or toll free 1800 or 1300 numbers. Depending on what sort of business you would like people to perceive you as, you can generate the numbers you want.
Real Time Data
Grasshopper is able to track the performance and calls coming in real time. This means you can track your incoming calls anytime you need.
Custom Call Flows
Do you have multiple departments inside your business and don’t want multiple numbers? Custom call flows will allow you to set up a system to direct the right calls to the right people. Small hint: want to make your business sound bigger than it is? A custom call flow will make people think you’re a corporate, but in reality, all calls still go to the same destination!
Business Text Messaging
Now this is sort of a stand alone feature, which is a nice addition to their core call tracking functions. Business text messaging allows businesses to not only send out marketing SMS, but to respond back to customers when they reply. It’s no secret that SMS has an incredibly high open rate, and 2 way messaging will mean you can engage with your customers in a much more personal way compared to the generic marketing messages we always get.
Addons and Integrations
On of the best features of Grasshopper is their abundance of intetgrations to ensure that your call tracking software is working like a cog with the rest of your business systems.
Grasshopper is able to integrate with:
- Google Ads
- Google Analytics
- Multiple CRMs
- Slack
- Zapier
Ease of Use
Setting up Numbers
Grasshopper is incredibly easy to use. There really is only two things to do to get a phone number set up once you’ve signed up:
- Choose the type of number you want to create (local or toll free)
- Use the number!
Download the app
Grasshopper is simple to set up on your phone.
Simply download the application from the Apple store or Google Play to get started.
Pricing and Plans
Grasshopper breaks their plans down into 3 packages: Solo, Parter and Small Business.
Basically, the higher the plan you get, the more numbers you will be able to have.
Of course, having more numbers will mean you can further narrow down where your leads come from, so if you want to test out which part of the suburb will repoond best to a letter box ad drop and you want to find out exactly which streets the leads come from, then you may need to get the Pro plan.
If you’re doing marketing work for clients (like how I was), then the agency plan will be a must have for you.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Get multiple number to use on your phone
- Mobile and desktop applications
- Two way text messaging with multiple numbers
Cons:
- Not as well known as other phone tracking softwares out there
- Alternative services such as PhoneWagon give you more data for marketing use
Final Thoughts
To wrap this up, Grasshopper does what it claims to do, Give you multiple phone numbers to use instead of one.
The software is quite old, and it's evident that it hasn't changed as competitors such as PhoneWagon or Call Rail have entered the market, to give users more numbers for the same amount.
On top of that, it's strange that Grasshopper has extra useful functions, but don't highlight it. For example, the data tracking and analytics are essential for all marketers, but I had to dig deep to see if they even had that function!
To be honest, if you're reading this and you're either a small business looking to get a few extra numbers or you're a marketer looking to track your data, I'd go with an alternative, such as PhoneWagon.
With a better user experience and bang for your buck, you can't go wrong.