Keeping Yourself Safe During A Fax Blast
It is unfortunate, but understandable that many states these days are starting to place laws against unsolicited faxing. This means that if you are planning a fax blast, you need to be careful. You don’t want something small, like trying to advertise a sale, end up putting you in trouble with the law, or with a bunch of fines and fees hitting your pocketbook. This is why it is always best to plan and prepare for a fax blast.
In case you are unfamiliar with the term, a fax blast is simply a mass fax that you, or a marketing company, send out to a huge number of clients, customers or businesses. Normally a fax blast would be used for some kind a newsletter, notice of a sale or some other form of advertising.
The first thing that you would want to do when organizing a fax blast is to gather up a list of the all the clients and fax number that you have. If you don’t have many, you may need to hold off and start to collect a couple hundred more. If it is simply because you don’t have a fax number for each client you may want to call each customer and let them know you are updating your database and see if you can get a fax number from them that way. If there is really no way you can get the numbers before your fax blast, you may need to rent a list from your local broker.
Once you have your list, make your flier or ad. You will need to make sure that you add either a fax or phone number that each client may call after the fax blast to be removed from your faxing list. Normally most companies will not mind being updated on new products or sales that you are offering, but they need to have that option. Another way of doing this is to ask each customer when they come into your place of business. Again, most customers will consent to receiving notifications of sales or simply newsletter of new products and information. This is simply a way to ensure that you are not going receive any customer complaints when your fax blast heads out. This is especially important when you are planning on making it a regular occurrence. Things like newsletters, monthly sales, or frequent product updates are great ideas for a fax blast, but should always come with customer approval first. If you are only planning on sending one fax per year or something like that, it becomes slightly less important.
Once you have sent you ad to the marketing company and you have set the date for your fax blast, you just have sit and wait. Normally you will get responses to your faxes relatively quickly. Once the fax blast as finished, normally the marketing company will let you know, you should ask for a report of how the fax blast went. This report should include all of the number that they sent the fax to and how many of them never went through. This serves two purposes for you. First, you can make sure that the marketing company didn’t charge you for the faxes that never went through. And second, it will show you the numbers that are no longer active, so you can erase them from your customer fax file.
As long as you are careful and plan well a fax blast can be the advertising spark your company needed. A fax blast will reach far and wide to keep your in touch with your customers and attract new clients.
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