After all these years, the fax machine remains one of the favored technologies for exchanging important documents between businesses. It allows you to send updated documents without the need to rush back to the office to print them. While most people think of it as a tool for sending and receiving documents, it can be used for other business purposes as well, including advertising and marketing.
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Fax Marketing: What Is It?
Fax marketing, also known as blast fax, refers to a marketing strategy that involves sending promotional materials via a fax machine.
Thanks to technology, businesses can streamline fax marketing to be more efficient. Fax services and software let them to create documents and send these promotional materials to numerous fax numbers easily and quickly.
With email inboxes being flooded with marketing and promotional emails every day, the fax machine in most businesses is neglected and empty, so why not take advantage of this ‘old school’ medium? Fax marketing has a high open rate since people need to remove the page from the fax machine. Plus, it can set your business apart from your competitors.
Once you’ve decided to use fax marketing for your company, all you have to do is a simple ‘fax services near me’ search on Google to find the best providers in the area.
6 Tips To Implement A Fax Marketing Campaign
Take note of these best practices to help improve your chances of success.
Consider the Laws
In most jurisdictions, it’s illegal to send an unsolicited fax to an individual or an organization. To avoid this, you need to find ways of getting prospects and customers to opt in your fax marketing updates and promotion. Opting in can be done through the use of your blogs, website, live chat, or email campaign.
Ditch Cover Sheets
When planning your fax marketing campaign, you need to think about how much time a recipient has to read your materials. If you’re sending it to an organization, there’s a chance that faxes will be received just after or before yours.
So, you need to keep your message short and get it out as straightforwardly as possible. This means you need to ditch the cover sheet. The more pages your fax marketing material has, the lower the chances the prospect or customer will read it entirely.
Plus, if they’re using traditional fax machines, each print means more ink and paper used by your reader, which could be costly and bothersome to them.
Therefore, always make it short and concise.
Make Your Point ‘Above the Fold’
Derived from newspaper terminology, ‘above the fold’ is the main article of the paper and can be easily viewed without opening the paper. This spot is crucial to any marketing strategy, but it’s even more important with faxing.
This is because the ‘above the fold’ spot is where the eye naturally falls and where you can quickly grasp your prospect’s attention. Thus, the core of your marketing message should be in this section of the document. What you say in this spot may be the only thing that a prospect reads, so make it count!
Add An Opt-Out Line
Like with emails, having an opt-out option is a requirement. While it’s painful to see people opting out from your contact list, it’s actually more beneficial than you think.
That said, providing an opt-out option allows you to clean your contact list. Prospects who don’t engage with your content are not valuable to you. There’s no reason to force someone to stay on your contact list if they don’t find your offers helpful at all. Besides, it prevents customer frustration, which can damage your reputation.
You can add clear and conspicuous opt-out options on the first page. Provide them with a website, a phone number, a fax number, or an email address where they can send a request not to send future unsolicited marketing and advertisements to their fax machine.
In general, opt-out requests should be honored 30 days after or sooner.
Design For The Fax
Images that may look clean, sharp, and rich on your computer screen may not turn out that way when they arrive at your prospect’s fax machine. With the diversity of fax machines, you have little control over how your fax will look on the other side.
So, you need to keep your design simple. Any image that you use should look clean and readable in black and white format without diluting the core message. Moreover, make sure to avoid complex images or graphics.
Test, Test, Test
Before sending your message to your prospect, make sure to test it first. And keep away from sending the document to a standard printer since it often has better print quality than a fax machine. Send it to an actual fax machine to get an idea of what your marketing material looks like when your prospect receives it. This way, you can correct any mistakes before your prospect sees it.
Takeaway
Using the fax machine as a modern marketing tool will ensure that your message reaches your target market instantly without being subjected to the ‘delete’ button. With the above tips, you can get your fax marketing campaigns right to promote your brand, increase lead conversion, and ultimately boost revenues.
