A successful marketing strategy relies on more than one way of delivering vital information. Your sales reps may be meeting with current and prospective clients. The marketing team and select members may attend industry events and trade shows to promote your company’s services and products. Staff or an outsourced group may labor to prepare mass mailings. But have you considered adding fax blasts to your advertising kit bag?
Fax advertising benefits
It is tempting to believe that fax advertising is too old-fashioned and of diminishing value in a techno world of endless apps and social media marketing. Yet fax marketing can be a complementary partner in your marketing strategy. Consider these benefits:
Low cost – the cost of using fax blasting can be considerably lower than that of direct mailing. Cost per transmittal is considerably less than standard postage costs, no cost for paper, ink, printing, or the labor related to preparing each direct mail piece. Outsourcing fax distribution further reduces the direct impact on your in-house workforce.
Faster delivery – fax blasts are delivered in a matter of seconds, not days. Thousands of faxes can be sent per hour while a direct mail piece will take several days to reach its destination.
Guaranteed viewing – people experienced in the fax marketing industry insist that you are guaranteed at least one view per fax whereas a direct mail piece often is thrown away unopened.
Fax quality – many of today’s fax machines are able to receive and print readable faxes at 200 dpi. Your important news is received by your target audience in good reader quality.
Choose the timing – fax broadcasting can be scheduled to transmit at any time of day or night, and scheduled days, weeks, even months in advance. Your message, sent at the most receptive point of the day, can increase viewer reading and positive response.
Personalization – broadcast vendors can personalize documents utilizing merge functions and select data fields of your choosing to customize each document as it is faxed.
Tracked results – each fax can be tracked so you know which faxes successfully transmitted and which bounced back or were otherwise not delivered.
Retry–many fax units can be programmed to retry faxes up to three times when they have reached busy signals; vendors may also provide this service and forward reports on transmittal results.
Ready, set – blast
With the proper fax equipment and software, you can be transmitting fax blasts in no time.
Prepare a master fax list of recipients. This may be done through purchased software or through outsource vendor assistance. You may also create sub-lists that focus on specific target audiences. Industry-specific fax lists may be rented or purchased, too.
Set up your broadcast fax options including time of transmittal, recipient fax numbers, and retry attempts. Fax blasting options are often part of the “Additional” or “Advanced” functions menu.
After you have completed the fax broadcast setup, scan the document(s) to be faxed. The document will be stored in the machine’s memory and not transmitted until the predetermined time.
Most broadcast-capable fax machines can generate reports following fax transmittal. These reports show the total number of transmissions attempted, and the number of faxes that could not be successfully completed (disabled fax lines, wrong fax numbers, or busy/offline faxes).
Fax advertising can be a powerful adjunct to your marketing campaign. So when you need to issue press releases, product information, announce special promotions, or issue invitations to trade shows and other special events, remember to fax blast!
