Fax sent to email, email sent to fax

When my daughter complained recently about the prohibitive cost of news media advertising, we had a discussion about the ways in which she could sell her range of body products (hand creams, lip balms etc). I explained to her that huge firms like K Mart wouldn’t spend millions of dollars annually for advertising if it wasn’t necessary. But every week, a K Mart catalogue arrives in our mail box. Every week, like clockwork, ads appear on television for K Mart specials … there are always specials.

All of us in business, whatever our size, need to have an effective, efficient advertising strategy. If you can afford an all bells and whistles television advert and run it in prime time like K Mart, that’s great. Most of us however, can’t afford that type of advertising and have to find alternatives that are cheap, but still bring home the bacon.

A few years ago email looked like being a cure-all for those of us without huge budgets. Unfortunately, spammers killed the golden goose; it is now only effective for selling to those who have agreed to receive our messages. And even then, there’s no guarantee that the messages we send will not be deleted by overactive spam filters long before they reach their intended destination. Adding to our misery is the anti-spam legislation in the US, AUS and various other countries that makes the task of legitimate marketers unnecessarily difficult when it comes to email marketing.

Fortunately, the “Spam Act 2003″, at least in Australia doesn’t outlaw sending commercial fax messages*. So suddenly, the fax has fallen back into favour because it has several additional advantages:

1. It’s cheap. Not as cheap as email and some pay-for-click advertising, but much cheaper than advertising in news media.
2. You can target specific markets
3. You can send as many pages as you like (but don’t irritate recipients)
4. It’s quick and simple
5. You don’t need a fax machine
6. While it’s true recipients can discard faxes, most arrive and at least have a chance of being read
7. You don’t have brochures left over when a product or price changes

There are many service providers out there in cyberspace who provide a comprehensive faxing service. I pay my provider up front and can do a broadcast message to as many fax numbers as I please by clicking one button … Send! When the broadcast has finished I receive an email message telling me how many were successful and unsuccessful and the cost for the transmissions. It beats hell out of doing it manually. The last
transmission I sent involved 58 destinations that cost me $10.44 AU or $0.18 per A4 page. Of the 58 sent, all arrived.

Here’s how I run my campaigns.

First I decide on a strategy eg, the first part of my current strategy targets real estate agents across the Australian continent to whom I’m selling a marketing package. I look up real estate firms using the Google search engine and almost without exception, each agency is listed with phone and fax numbers. I use a great little program called Web Data Extractor to extract the fax numbers from each of the addresses. It takes a couple of minutes to collect them and save them in a data file. When I import the data file into the list management section of my fax service provider, I’m ready to broadcast.

Automatically extracting fax numbers in Australia, unlike extracting URLs is not illegal.

After the broadcast, sales and queries flow in up to a week or so later. So far, sales have far exceeded the expense for faxing and I’ve just completed faxing to real estate agencies in one Australian State. There are still thousands more to go in the remaining five States and two Territories.

My sales message consists of a standard A4 page that I created and saved as an Adobe PDF file.

It is worth noting that many target markets do not have their fax numbers displayed on the Internet. This being the case, do a little research as you design your strategy to determine whether getting fax numbers will be problematical. If so, find another target market. Once you’ve found one with fax numbers, the rest is fairly easy, provided your products or services fit their range of needs.

Another benefit I receive from the fax provider I use is a free fax number whereby people can fax me and the fax arrives as an email. This suits me perfectly as I only print those faxes for which I need a hardcopy. The rest I file in a relevant folder on my hard drive.

You should now be thinking about some opportunities to use broadcast faxing in your business. If you’re in doubt, spend a few bucks to give faxing a test run. If it works as well for you as it does me, I’m sure you’ll take to it like a duck to
water.

Here’s to many successful fax campaigns.

* - You need to check out the spam laws in your own country before embarking on a fax advertising campaign

Published June 2005. Copyright Robin Henry 2005.

Robin Henry is an educator, human resources specialist and Internet marketer whose firm, Desert Wave Enterprises, helps individuals and businesses improve their performance by using smart processes, smart technology and personal development. He has a number of tertiary qualifications including a Master of Education degree majoring in education technology and online learning. He lives at Alice Springs In Central Australia. Visit Desert Wave Enterprises

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In the business of marketing and advertising, it used to be that companies that wanted to get the word out quickly to key customers on a new development would rely on email with follow-up phone calls. But with the new technologies available in fax broadcasting, fax advertising has taken over as the advertising medium of choice when it comes to contacting your customers at the speed of light.

Fax Advertising Puts Your Message in Their Hands

A perfect example of how fax advertising hits your target customers immediately with your critical marketing communications is the use of fax broadcasting in the travel industry. With public transportation, time is of the essence. Thousands of travelers depart every hour all over the world, and things can change in a heartbeat. Anything that can speed things up in the travel business can save companies millions, and keep valuable customers from heading over to the competition for their travel.

Fax advertising has proven to be the perfect tool for handling the lightning-speed requirements of the travel and transportation industry when they need to get their advertising in their customers’ hands at a moments notice. For example, one cruise line has 10 cruise ships that set sail about 14,500 times per year. With those kinds of numbers, unsold berths on each ship can add up to tons of lost sales throughout the course of a year, and it can be almost impossible to make potential customers aware of the empty berths at the last minute when a ship needs to take off.

Fax advertising to the rescue! That same cruise line has begun using a highly sophisticated fax advertising system which allows them to identify those travel agents that have been making reservations for customers most recently. The line is able to blast last- minute fax broadcasts to those travel agents, offering discounts if someone want to purchase a last- minute ticket for the empty berths right before a ship sets sail. The fax advertising has resulted in a huge increase in sales as a result, despite the last minute time crunch.

The same applies for the airline industry, where the timing of flight arrivals and departures is tight and quick communication is a must. One small, upstart airline was innovative enough to employ fax advertising to win business away from the competition. When a large competitor airline had to temporarily stop operations due to a strike, the small upstart went into action with a fax broadcasting campaign, quickly notifying travel agents of its excess seat capacity in certain areas and its ability to accommodate passengers left out in the cold by the strike. Even though the strike was over in a week, it was still enough time for this innovative air carrier to sell seats to lots of people who couldn’t delay their travel plans for the strike, thanks to the speed of fax broadcasting.

You may be in a business where time is of the essence. Maybe you have excess capacity that has gone wasted because you just couldn’t offer it to customers due to time constraints. Or perhaps there have been times when your own competitors have dropped the ball, but you couldn’t take advantage of the situation quickly enough to use it to your advantage. If you find your business in these types of situations, fax advertising may be your perfect solution. If you’re interested, test the water. Hire a fax advertising services firm and do a few trial runs. If your sales take off as a result, you can expand your fax advertising instantaneously with a simple mouse-click. Who knows; like the travel industry, you may find your sales taking off and heading for the clouds.

Chris Bradley is V.P. of 3 Cent Fax Broadcast.com, where they help business save money and increase profits with their do it all fax service, where they do all the work and you can concentrate on your business. To learn more about their money and time saving service by clicking here … fax broadcasting.

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Fax broadcasting, also called fax blasting, is a highly effective form of advertising if executed correctly. Fax broadcasting allows a company to instantly deliver targeted marketing messages to a large audience for an incredibly low price.

Fax broadcasting is a way to get real, physical promotional messages into the hands of your target audience at a cost of about 96% less than sending information through the mail. Blasts of up to 1000 faxes, complete with statistics, can cost as low as $40 with price breaks on larger quantities.

The two most critical factors in ensuring a successful fax broadcasting campaign are the accuracy of the fax mailing list and the quality of the marketing message. Below you’ll find some tips and ideas to maximize the return on investment of your fax broadcasting campaign.

Define the recipient’s specific action

Too often people send out marketing messages hoping that customers will react in a way that benefits the company. Before you even start creating your message, ask yourself: What precise action do I want a recipient to take after reading my message? Will they call a number for more information? Fill out a form and fax back to receive a special free report or bulletin? Or perhaps file the fax in a specific folder in their filing cabinet for future reference?

Include a call to action

Don’t just hope that recipients will infer the action you want them to take. Make sure to include your specific call to action on the page. A call to action might be: “To receive this free special offer, log on to www.website.com within the next 24 hours and order online.” By first determining the specific action your customers will take, then creating your marketing message around it, you are more likely to get the reaction that you are anticipating.

Designing the content

A fax broadcast should be eye catching and encourage the recipient to pick it up and read it after just a glance. Include different sized fonts to accomplish different goals. Use large fonts for brief bursts of relevant yet intriguing text to catch the reader’s attention. Provide a brief follow up to your large text in medium sized font. Add some details in smaller text for those who are interested and want to read more. Give the prospective client enough information to pique their interest then encourage them to seek you out for more information. This not only stops you from crowding your fax broadcast with text, but also engages the prospect.

Fax Broadcast layout and design

While art and design are highly subjective, there are a few basic rules of thumb to stick to. Give the page adequate margins. Think of the white space as a design element to give shape to the other elements on your page, not just blank space to fill up. Choose a professional image or illustration that doesn’t include a lot of dark areas and will look great in black and white. Unless you’re a graphic designer, do a search for professional stock images to find illustrations and photos at low prices. iStockPhoto.com offers more than half a million professional images for just $1 per image.

Test your Message

Before sending your fax out to thousands of people, get the opinions of a few people who aren’t completely familiar with your business. The goal isn’t to find out if they like your promotional flyer, but to test whether or not it delivers the intended message. Make a list of 3-5 very specific questions to ask your test audience such as: “What exactly does this company do?” “What problem does this company’s product or service solve?” or “What action will I take after reading this offer?” Continue testing until you get the desired results and you’ll improve the chances that your target customers will have the same reaction.

Find or Create a Targeted Fax Mailing List

The accuracy and quality of the mailing list for your fax broadcast will ultimately determine if all of your hard work will pay off. To accomplish this you can purchase a fax mailing list, create your own custom list by gathering info from company websites, or hire someone to collect the information for you. A quality fax broadcasting service will offer statistics to let you know how many were delivered successfully so that you can fine tune your mailing list.

Fax broadcasting can be an extremely effective marketing tool, especially for small businesses on a budget that need to make a big impact quickly. While everyone else is concentrating their efforts on email marketing, you can deliver a hardcopy right into the hands of your target customer. Unlike email, someone is sure to look at it and not just instantly toss it away. By designing your fax broadcast effectively, you can easily expand your reach and grow your business.

Author is a writer for Unix USA which specializes in fax broadcasting and generating sales leads. For additional information about these services you can visit

http://www.unixusa.net.

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