April 1997
Fax is an Incredibly Powerful Sales and Marketing Tool
Faxes work. Most of your customers now have a fax machine or a PC that can receive faxes. Fax has become a new customer pleasing / complaint handling / customer selling / customer
F ax is one of today's most powerful --and underused -- sales and marketing tools. Here are 14 reasons why it's so powerful and 14 tips to make it more so.
1. It's targeted. You hit only those people you want. No waste, as in mass advertising.
Tip: Your list is key. You can't buy a decent list. You must develop it. Do not underestimate how much time and money the care and feeding of a fax mailing list takes. As your list grows, the care and feeding of it becomes a full-time job. Fax numbers change more often than phone numbers. Area codes have been changing even more.
2. It's graphical. Though only black and white, you can and should be very creative with the message you send.
Tip: Formats are critical. You can look like you sell diamonds. You can look like you sell takeout Chinese food. Get a format that looks like what you're selling. Then keep it.
3. It's versatile. You can mass blast it. You can send faxes when your customers call and ask a question. "How do I fix my washing machine?" Send them a fax of the machine's exploded view.
You can pinpoint faxes to all your tall customers. "Guess what just arrived this week? Finally, tall jackets from Nike." You can send Cents-Off coupons to celebrate the end of Winter, or the beginning of Spring.
Tip: If you're to target tall customers, your customer database should a field that shows "tall," "short" etc.
4. You can send fun, useful information. Your customers will actually look forward to your faxes. Yes, it's possible. You have to put some time and effort into the writing.
Tip: Sprinkle your offers to sell with free advice and free information -- even if it's not directly related to what you sell. How to save money on airlines and hotels works.
5. It's timely. You can send prospects a fax that says, "Bring this fax to our store today and save 10%." And they will come. I've done it.
Tip: Use Cents-Off Coupons to reward your regular customers. "This week, Customer Only Sale."
6. It's loving. You can send loving notes to your customers: "Thanks for your order." "We've been missing you." "Your car will be ready at 3:00 PM this afternoon." "Thanks for shopping with us.
Tip: Ask your customers -- business and personal -- for their fax numbers. It's amazing how many homes now have fax machines. Faxes sent to these machines get read more than faxes sent to the office.
7. It's cheap. You can send a page of heavy graphics anywhere in the country for under a dime -- even during the middle of the business day. It's even cheaper at night. "First class" mail costs $2 to $5 a letter -- depending on how efficient you are at labeling, folding, attaching stamps, etc.
Tip: Give up on first class mail. It's too slow, You can't predict when it will arrive. Thus you can't make time-based offers, etc. You can with fax.
8. You can mailmerge faxes. You'll read a fax with your name in it. You'll junk one without. "Mailmerge" means putting the recipient's name through the fax. It doesn't just mean putting it on the cover. Any fax software can put the recipient's name on the cover. Only new fax software can sprinkle your name through the fax. But this software is the most powerful marketing tool.
Tip: Don't send cover sheets. They waste paper. Put the person's name on the fax.
9. Fax boards have improved enormously. There are two types of fax boards. Those you buy for $100 a line at the local store. Those that cost $400 a line.
Call the first consumer boards. The second industrial strength boards. If you're doing serious "fax as a marketing tool," you need the industrial strength boards from companies like GammaLink and Brooktrout.
There are a thousand and one reasons these boards work better. The bottom line: They'll put more of your faxes through in less time. They'll pay themselves off in less than a couple of days of mass faxing.
Tip: Group 3 is today's international fax "standard." It's probably the loosest telecom standard. Not all fax machines talk to all other fax machines. That's another reason you need an industrial grade fax board. They've been tested with zillions of fax machines, domestic and overseas. They talk to more.
10. Fax boards now do voice and interactive voice response. That means you can be clever in the way you program a fax-back machine. Using the touchtone keypad on their fax machine, they can call your fax-back machine up and request the information they need.
Tip: Use the IVR part of your fax-back creatively. For our special of the week, press 5. To leave a message for one of our people to call you in the morning, press 2. To get your name removed from our fax list, press 6 and "leave your name and fax number. We won't send you a fax confirming your deletion. Trust us."
Remember, fax-back machines are great marketing tools -- but only if you publicize the number. Put your fax-back machine on an 800 number. Paying for 800 lines is a lot cheaper than paying for live humans.
11. Your big customers might love their own fax machine. I know of several companies who have given some of their largest cutomers
"private" fax machines and paid for the phone line. It's a neat way of loving your customers just a little more.
Tip: Don't buy them a junky fax machine with slimy paper. Buy them a decent machine. Industrial strength fax machines have big pluses. They print on plain paper. Their paper doesn't jam. Their faxes look better. They work more reliably. Some have neat features, like scanning your faxes into memory before they dial. This lets you take your faxes to a meeting, while the thing dials up and sends what's in its memory.
12. Technical ad-vances continue in fax equipment -- though the standards remain constant. The original Group 3 fax standard allowed for 9,600 bps. Later we got a 50% faster speed -- 14,400 bps. Now some fax machines run at 33.6 kbps.
Tip: Cheap fax machines run at 9,600 bps. More expensive ones run at 14,400 bps. Most fax/modems (even the cheap ones) will run at 14,400 bps. Your fax "conversation" occurs at the maximum speed both your machines can talk at.
Any speed above 14,400 kbps is proprietary. This means only like machines can talk to each other. Panasonic has a fax machine that will talk 33,600 bps -- but only to another identical machine.
If you have offices with a lot of intra-office fax traffic, you may want to consider these high-speed fax machines.
If you have offices with a lot of fax traffic, you may want to consider Group 4 fax machines. They are 100% digital.
Attach to one B channel of an ISDN BRI line and transmit at 64,000 bps -- at least four and a half times faster than a Group 3 machine.
13. For PC users running under Windows 95, faxing software has become much broader. It's more than just a mechanism for sending and receiving faxes. Windows 95 added two new features: If you receive or send a "fax" to another Win95 machine, that "fax" is not a fax. It's a message, which contains an e-mail, a spreadsheet, a word processing document and/or a fax.
This means, for the first time, your "fax" is an editable document. You can work on it on your PC, add stuff to it and send it back. It's the end of the dead, uneditable fax.
I've used this feature to receive huge PowerPoint presentations from afar. It couldn't be simpler. I plug in a phone line. I start Outlook. The program comes with Microsoft's Office 97. That's it.
When the phone next rings my PC answers it and accepts any incoming "fax" another Win95 PC sends me. The only negative is that it's slow. It runs at 14,000 bps. In contrast, my fax/modem's modem will run at 33,600 bps (when it finds a good phone line -- but mostly it's 24,000 - 26,000bps).
Microsoft also added a second feature. This makes every Win95 PC equipped with a fax/modem and attached to a normal analog phone line a rudimentary "fax on demand" machine. People can call your machine and request faxes of materials on your machine.
14. Faxing from your LAN-connected PC works just great these days. Everybody in your company who deals with customers can send out a confirmation letter, sales brochure, special of the day sheet, instructions on how to get your store, etc, by simply pushing one button.
It's a million percent better than faxing it from a modem inside your PC. There are many reasons for this. The main one is that it's enormously faster. Hit your "Send" button, your fax goes to the fax server. As far as you're concerned, it's gone. You can do something else -- like talking to another customer.
Your fax server will still have to dial up and send it. But it's better to tie that machine up, instead of yours. Your fax will also have an industrial grade fax board. So it will work a lot faster and better.
Tip: You can also receive faxes over your network. Give out one corporate fax number. Have a fax server with multiple lines answering the phone.
With technologies like ANI (Automatic Number Identification) , Caller ID and CSI -- Called Subscriber Identification (the number the distant fax machine sends to identify itself) -- you can do neat tricks with the routing of incoming faxes.
You could have a particular customer's faxes go directly to their sales representative. If you know that certain customers are going to ask for a specific document, you could have the system automatically fax it back to them.
In short, fax has just started down the marketing path. Discover it NOW before your competition does.
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