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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.

If you are just starting a business you may find it hard to come up with new clients and customers. This is probably one of the hardest things to accomplish and can also be one of the more expensive areas of a new business. Advertising the services or goods that you offer is mainly difficult because you need the right people to see the advertising you are putting out there. If you throw up a billboard, but no one that is interested drives by, you just blew a few hundred dollars. So what can you do? I would suggest taking a look at fax broadcasting. Fax broadcasting is a great way to take your business straight to the people that need to see it.

Fax broadcasting is often done by an outside company and you can search your area to find one that best meets your particular needs. These companies will take an ad that you’ve created or help you come up with a design and artwork for an ad, and then help you distribute it to whatever area you would like it fax it to. These “areas” are not limited to geographical areas either. Of course, you could send it to a particular zip code or area code if you so choose, but you may also send it to particular industries. So if you are opening a new sandwich shop, you can send it to everyone in the area. But if you are opening something a little more exclusive, like a computer software company, you can extend the distance of the broadcast, but limit it to only those companies that you think would be able to use your service. Fax machines changed the way people communicated and now there are very few companies and industries that haven’t taken advantage of the speed and convenience of the fax machine. Fax broadcasting just takes that idea one step further.

The mass faxes that fax broadcasting creates will get far more “eye time” than an email and are better received than a telemarketer. Companies around the country are constantly looking for new, cheaper or better services and goods. While they may not always show it, any way that they can do the same thing for a little cheaper, or do it better for the same price they will take it. Telemarketers and emails just seem to clutter up their life, but a well created fax ad could change their mind. You see, they don’t have to open an email or pick up a phone, but they have no choice but to at least pick up a fax. Someone will touch every single fax when you use fax broadcasting and if you did it right, each person that touches it will be at least somewhat interested in your new company.

So stop procrastinating and find a fax broadcasting company in your area, or simply search the web for a company that you can work with over the Internet. Your business can’t wait and the results will be instant. Do a little research on fax broadcasting and you will see that for the money and time it will take you, nothing can compare.

Fax broadcasting has several benefits. And with an increasing amount of providers appearing in the industry coupled with new breakthroughs in the technology used – more and more businesses are using the fax to communicate their marketing message

Some of the major plus points about fax broadcasting are –

Potentially Huge Savings for Your Business

Once a company out-sources fax distribution, it can save lot of revenue as now it doesn’t need to waste money in buying paper or stationary to print or envelopes to address, or boxes to carry to the post office (the bare minimum pre-requisites for traditional mails).

The business can also do away with the labor traditionally needed for a mass mailing.

The business doesn’t need to invest huge sums in buying high quality fax machines; instead they can pass on the work to broadcasters who own such high value machines.

With a severe competition amongst fax broadcasting/blasting vendors, companies can at times get send fax for a fee as low as 20 cents per fax. And perhaps much, much lower if you look around.

Improved Fax Quality

As most of the fax machines are capable of receiving and printing readable faxes at 200 dpi, the quality of the fax transmission is largely determined by the sending machine. The vendors who provide services in this area can easily afford such expensive high resolution machines. Thus your fax blast comes through to the receiver in good quality.

The vendors specializing in broadcasting and blasting can help the businesses to broadcast the documents any time of the day (or night). They can also be scheduled days, weeks, or months in advance.

There are vendors who can personalize the documents for each transmission by merging an unlimited number of fields of data onto each document transmission as they fax it out. Thus your messages can be personalized.

Immediate Sales Increase

Fax broadcasting gets results as the message gets noticed instantly, especially if it is broadcasted at the right time of the day when people are most receptive. Schedules can be maintained to broadcast it at the right moment.

Most of the vendors maintain mailing lists of people who are related to a particular business and seeking information from these fax broadcasters helps you in targeting the right audience.

A List Of The Document Types that can be broadcasted:

Press releases and newsletters

Product and pricing Updates

Trade Shows and Event Reminders

Special Promotions

Invitations

Daily Price Lists and Rate Sheets

Direct Marketing

Investor Relations Information

Communication with customer base

Offsite Emergency Communication

Inventory information

Account status

Interoffice bulletins

Delivery forms

Reliable Delivery

One can easily track the delivery of each fax online and can know about the ones that bounced back or weren’t delivered.

A customized confirmation can be sent back to the organization about each fax which was successfully delivered and also the reason why certain faxes were not able to reach their destination.

Vendors normally retry each fax up to 3 times if the recipient number was busy.

The turnaround response is quite less and this saves a lot of valuable effort and time.

Archive logs can be maintained to record every incoming and outgoing fax.

Fax blasting/broadcasting is an excellent method for marketing your business. There are many advantages in terms of cost and time savings. The best part is that it is very easy to try and assess for your business.

The Original Act

In the year 1991, Congress enacted the Telephone Consumer Protection Act or TCPA to keep a check on the increasing number of telephone marketing calls, which can easily be termed as unsolicited. The act restricts the making of promotional calls and the use of automatic telephone dialing systems and pre-recorded voice messages.

The Act defines an “unsolicited advertisement” as “any material publicizing the business availability or quality of any property, goods, or services which is transmitted to any person without that individual’s prior express request or permission, in writing or otherwise.”

Extending The Act To Cover Fax Broadcasting

Later, this Act was extended to fax advertising. It was decided to restrict the use of the fax machines to distribute unsolicited advertisements. Specifically, it forbids the use of “any device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone fax machine.” The act is applicable to only those messages that constitute “unsolicited advertisements.” The legal prohibition applies to such announcements sent both to residential and business fax numbers.

Exemption under Established Business Relationship

In 2005, the above Act was amended by the Junk Fax Prevention Act. The new Act now permits the sending of unsolicited fax advertisements to individuals and businesses with which the sender has an established business relationship (EBR).

An EBR implies formation of a prior or existing relationship between a person or entity and a business or residential subscriber, by a voluntary two-way communication. This relationship can be made with or without an exchange of payment, and allows a person or entity to promote its products and services to a business or residential subscriber on the basis of an enquiry, request, purchase or deal.

EBR is supposed to be seized as soon as either party decides to terminate it. Specifically, a fax advertisement may be sent to an EBR client if the correspondent also:

• Obtains the fax number directly from the recipient, either through, an application etc. or from the recipient’s own directory, advertisement etc. unless the recipient has documented on such materials that it does not accept unsolicited advertisements at the listed fax number.

• Obtains the fax number from phone books and other sources of information compiled by third parties – here the correspondent must take appropriate steps to verify that the receiver had agreed to have the number listed in that source of information.

Opt out Provisions

It is mandatory for all fax messages to have a specified notice and contact details on the fax that allow addressees to “opt-out” of future faxes from the sender. The message should be on the first page, be loud and clear and mention the process of opting out. In case the sender fails to comply with the opt-out request within 30 days, legal sanctions can be initiated against the sender.

Netting the Fax Broadcasters

The person or business on whose behalf a fax is sent is liable for a violation of these rules even if they did not physically send the fax themselves. A fax broadcaster may also be accountable for violations of the rules if it gets rigorously involved in the sender’s fax messages, such as providing the fax numbers to which a message is sent or distributing a repository of fax numbers. They are expected (and at times required) to make representations about the legality of faxing to those numbers and advising a customer about how to abide by the rules.

With the increasing popularity and necessity of fax broadcasting, people are looking forward to outsource this work. Instead of compiling a list of addressees and faxing them individually, they prefer to go for specialized broadcasters who reduce the effort and cost involved. Few of the most prominent vendors in this field are -

One Touch Global Services – A Microsoft Certified Partner, the company specializes in integrating and managing the entire lifecycle of paper and electronic documents. The lowest available rates are 4¢ per page. It provides the facility to broadcast at any hour of the day and schedules can be prepared even months in advance. Their fax server can send faxes to thousands of numbers within seconds. They also provide a status report on all the faxes sent and in case a fax bounces back, it is tried three more times before declaring the number as unreachable.

AirCom USA – Although the company has a 30 year old history, yet it has come of ages since 1995 when it started providing enhanced telecommunication services, including fax broadcasting. By allowing both instantaneous and spontaneous distributions, it personalizes the faxes so as to improve client’s returns. The company has a no obligation subscription of $8.95 per month. But then, one needs to pay for fax air time at the rate of 10 cents per minute. This usually comes down to an average of 3 to 7 cents per page.

Promo Fax – This is a UK based company, which has a long list of clients who would like to repeat their business with them. This is because results started pouring in soon after their faxes were sent out. In case of Ministry of Paintball, 740 registrations from around 45 companies were received within 48 hours of using Promo Fax’s services to send over 12,000 faxes. The company also provides consultation on your fax and target audience, there by letting you know how much response one can expect. The company doesn’t charges anything extra for faxes sent during the daytime and keeps coming with promotions and discounts to further strengthen its client base.

Faxts Telysis – With a 10 year experience, the company offers fax broadcasting, web-fax, web based broadcast fax, and send/receive faxing through email at wholesale prices. The company has a website where clients can create their accounts and schedule their runs. They can even start/stop outgoing faxes and make changes to their distribution lists. This helps in providing extra security to the client documents and distribution lists. They maintain an accurate and up-to-date list of fax receiving machines and then club them according to their zip or area codes, industry types, size of companies, etc. This way, even if the client is not having the complete list of fax numbers, they can provide the same.

Although, the number of available vendors has increased many a folds in recent times, it is always a better option to go for a vendor who can understand your requirements and then provide a service that suits your business. So it is always recommended to study the market and the players and then make a wise and sound decision.

If you own a business in Australia, or anywhere for that matter, advertising is probably a big part of your budget. With all of the options of billboards, emails, newsletters, newspapers, magazines and tons more, it is easy to see where that money gets spent. But the question you need to ask yourself is: Are the people I need to be reading this ad, reading it? It’s an important question because if they aren’t, you may need to rethink your advertising strategy and consider the fax broadcasting Australia can offer. With it being a much small country, and continent for that matter, fax broadcasting Australia as a whole becomes much easier. That means that you can contact any one the in entire country with a fax machine and let them know about your sale, your service or your products.

Better responses than mail and email, cheaper than billboards and magazines and faster and easier than telemarketing are just some of the benefits of fax broadcasting. Australia in particular has several companies that will actually handle your fax broadcast for you. When you are fax broadcasting Australia they will help you select the regions and industry types that you want to include. They will also give you advice on design and artwork for your particular ad. These services may come with a charge, but with money that you will be saving over other forms of advertisement, it is a small price to pay.

Fax broadcasting Australia can be done for several different reasons and can be done several different ways. Many times companies will uses fax broadcasting to announce a big sale that they are having or a new product that has just become available. This type of information may not be relevant to the general public in your particular industry, which is why fax broadcasting has become so popular. You are no longer talking to the general public, you are speaking to only the areas and industries you think will benefit most and will benefit you most. Aside from the announcement of a sale or product fax broadcasting Australia can be done to keep customers up to date on what is going on. This type of customer service and customer connection will keep people coming back to your business time and time again. These newsletters help them know what is happening in your business and allow you to share information that might be helpful to them. This type of fax broadcasting will also keep you in the forefront of your customers’ minds.

There are obviously some drawbacks to fax broadcasting Australia, and one of those would include busy lines and outdated fax numbers. Most fax broadcasting companies have eliminated problems however. Be sure you ask the company you will be using if they will charge you for unsuccessful fax attempts. Most companies will not. So if you send a fax to a number that is no long in service, that number should be taken off of your total bill. This is also the case for busy signals. While many companies will try a number multiple times before giving up on, if they do give up on, you shouldn’t be charged. As for a review of your job when they finish and be sure that you are only paying for the numbers that received your fax. This year, don’t put all of your money into newspaper ads that get buried in the fifth page, take a look into fax broadcasting Australia and get your business going today.

What is Fax Broadcasting?

As the name suggests, fax broadcasting is distributing a fax or list of faxes out to a large group of contacts in one go.

It is also at times referred as ‘fax blasting’ and ‘bulk faxing’.

It is an increasingly popular low-cost way to reach out to thousands of businesses who can either be located in one’s local community or spread across the globe.

Fax broadcasting has some advantages over other communication channels – like letters and, in the past decade, emails. For example, e-mails can get deleted and letters can get thrown out un-opened, whereas but broadcasted faxes are tending to get read. Business owners tend to ‘jump-up’ to read faxes.

Fax broadcasting can also be used as a complementary communication channel to reach people that do not readily respond to emails or direct mail.

Why Go For Fax Broadcasting?

Compared to traditional direct mailing, fax broadcasting, or faxing a personalized document to everyone, is significantly faster, easier and frequently much less expensive. Businesses are not required to print document or buy paper, there’s no envelopes to address, or boxes to carry to the post office.

You can do away with the labour traditionally needed for a mass mailing.

One doesn’t need to tie up his/her own fax machine or waste time fiddling with it.

Faxes can be sent to one or more recipient lists and deliveries can be tracked in real time.

Almost all fax machines used today are capable of receiving and printing readable faxes at 200 dots per inch (dpi), the quality of the fax transmission is largely determined by the sending machine. So sending through customized vendors drastically improves the quality of the document being distributed.

Who Can Gain From Fax Broadcasting?

Several businesses, who offer a service to sell to other businesses, often look at fax marketing to increase their lead generation. This technology helps them to send high priority communications to many people – customers, vendors, and other contacts, at the same time. Following documents are most commonly distributed using this technology –

• Press releases

• Newsletters

• Product Updates

• Pricing Updates

• Event Reminders

• Special Promotions

• Invitations

• Daily Rate Sheets

Market Players in Fax Broadcasting

At the moment there are several Internet Fax providers who offer competitive rates in this trade. Many vendors offer this service, especially to businesses or organizations that have to send a document to a large group of recipients. Such a big pool of vendors helps a business in getting the best competitive rate for this service. Also, with growing interest in this field, there are new innovations being patented every year.

Limitations of Fax Broadcasting

In order to stop spamming, there are several laws in place. You may need to check the laws regarding faxing in your area.

As a general rule, you should have a prior contact or business relationship established before sending information.

In some countries there are significant penalties for unsolicited faxes that advertise goods or services. As per the law, faxes should be sent only when one needs a high priority communications channel, and the information needs to be seen by the intended recipient, even if not initially.

In a Nut-Shell

Traditional method of sending a fax is a time consuming process and that’s why the technology got lagged behind, but with improved facility of sending a customized, high quality fax to over 1,000 destinations in one go, has given a new twist to the tale. More and more companies are out-sourcing this work and every year new players are joining in to intense the already competitive fax broadcasting market.

If you’re in business and you’re selling to customers that have fax machines, try fax broadcasting as one of your marketing methods.