The Complete Guide to Fax Marketing

Businesses are constantly looking for innovative methods that hook potential customers’ interest in their products and services. One often overlooked tactic is mass fax marketing, which can effectively engage potential customers and unlock new audiences.

Fax advertising and marketing remain highly relevant in the digital age, enabling organizations to stand out among modern tactics. This article will explore the benefits of fax broadcast marketing and how businesses can maximize successful campaigns.

What Is Fax Marketing?

Fax marketing involves promoting products and services to audiences via fax technology. The practice emerged in the 1980s when fax machines became a staple of offices worldwide. Companies would send marketing and promotional materials, such as brochures, coupons, flyers and special offers, to customers’ fax machines. 

Modern fax marketing takes this approach to a new level, using online fax technology to send mass fax marketing communications to multiple recipients. Online fax servers can handle vast volumes of outgoing faxes, enabling companies to easily send marketing campaigns to wider audiences.

5 Key Benefits of Fax Marketing

Fax marketing provides businesses with many advantages, from cost-effective fax advertising to enhanced brand visibility and relationship-building. The benefits of fax marketing include:

Cost-Effective Approach 

Marketing campaigns can quickly spiral out of control and cost businesses vast amounts to launch and maintain. A fax marketing campaign allows companies to keep costs down while ensuring they reach more people. Creating a fax advertising campaign may require investment in copy and graphics, but offers significant cost benefits on similar approaches like pay-per-click and print advertising. 

Establishing Customer Relationships

Fax marketing provides a direct approach that enables businesses to establish personal relationships with customers in ways that other forms of marketing can’t. Existing customers may appreciate directly receiving marketing material and adverts that are timely and relevant. The approach can establish customer trust, helping organizations to sell more products and maintain long-lasting relationships.

Increased Visibility

Fax marketing can be highly effective in helping consumers to view ads and absorb companies’ messages. Online marketing approaches like social and email campaigns can struggle due to ad fatigue. But direct fax broadcast marketing offers a different approach that can cut through the noise and enhance customers’ perception of a brand and its products and services.

Customer Targeting

Fax marketing provides companies with solutions that help them quickly reach wider audiences. They can launch marketing or advertising campaigns that target small businesses in a particular area, people operating in specific industries or large international companies. Fax campaigns can also be quickly submitted to a user’s global contacts simultaneously, providing options to tailor promotional efforts to different people.

Fax Marketing vs. Email Marketing

Email marketing has been a popular business and consumer outreach tool since the early days of the Internet in the 1990s and has similarities and differences from fax marketing. Email and fax marketing enable companies to share promotional materials with multiple recipients, including current and prospective customers. However, fax marketing provides recipients with physical copies of a company’s ads and marketing materials, while emails are virtual but can be printed. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing continues to be a popular tool for businesses of all sizes worldwide. The approach has proven beneficial for promoting business solutions, e-commerce products, entertainment and events, online consultation and much more. Email campaigns can also become expensive, so it’s often best suited to companies with sizable marketing budgets. Despite its widespread use, email marketing may not be effective when targeting fax-reliant organizations. 

Fax Marketing 

Companies operating in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, legal, manufacturing, and real estate, rely on fax technology. So, fax marketing may be preferred by organizations targeting potential B2B customers in these sectors. That said, traditional fax marketing may not be the best approach for companies looking to market to consumers, given that most people no longer have a fax machine. 

5 Best Practices for Successful Fax Marketing Campaigns

Fax marketers can maximize the potential success of their campaigns by following best practices that help them communicate a clear message and reach their target audiences. A few recommended strategies for mass fax marketing include:

Utilize the Whole Page

Unlike social and email marketing, designing a compelling fax message relies on utilizing the entire page. Avoid leaving blank spaces or margins on your faxed marketing and use a font size that’s clear and easy to read for your recipients.

Use Appropriate Designs

The success of any marketing campaign relies on considering the user’s experience. For example, you wouldn’t send an email campaign with fonts that a recipient couldn’t read or broken links that didn’t lead to your products. Similarly, when creating a fax marketing campaign, you need to use designs that are appropriate to fax machines. For example, a printed fax message may not produce a high-quality image, so try to use fax-friendly designs that are easy to read.

Test Your Fax Messages

The hard work you put into a fax marketing campaign will be wasted if your message doesn’t reach the target audience or isn’t readable by recipients. It’s therefore critical to test your fax advertising campaigns by sending messages to different types of fax machines to check factors like font size and image quality. Another option is to send test messages to small audience samples to monitor their reaction and modify your future approach.

Customize Your Approach

Fax marketing is highly customizable, enabling you to tailor specific messages to certain segments of your target audience. For example, if you’re targeting customers who recently purchased from you, send them messages that aim to upsell them on similar products and services. Or, if you send faxes to people who have shown an interest in particular products, you can craft personalized, relevant messages that help build loyalty and trust.

Update Contact Lists

There’s little point in designing and sending fax marketing campaigns, only for your contact list to be inaccurate and outdated. Your sent messages will go unread, the campaign will be a waste of time and money, and you could run into legal issues relating to anti-spam laws. So it’s vital to maintain accurate fax lists and regularly verify the accuracy of your fax numbers.

Industries That Benefit The Most From Fax Marketing

Fax marketing is especially beneficial for organizations operating in highly regulated industries that rely on fax machines for their daily activities. Sectors that remain valuable targets for fax broadcast marketing include:

Financial Services

Financial institutions work with a wide range of sensitive and confidential information, so they remain heavily reliant on fax technology. As a result, fax marketing is useful for financial professionals who want to share promotional material that helps them generate leads and drive revenue for their banking, lending, and investment firms. For example, fax marketing can be a lucrative option for firms to share details about new financial services, enabling their customers to grow their assets and investment portfolios.

Healthcare

Healthcare organizations remain heavily reliant on fax messaging, enabling healthcare practitioners to securely share sensitive information and images. This reliance on faxing makes healthcare providers a good target for fax marketing. Additionally, healthcare companies, such as dentists, doctor practices and physicians, can achieve success by sharing information about insurance plans, medical services and discounts on treatment plans via fax marketing.

Insurance

Like financial services, companies operating in the insurance sector work with highly sensitive information and rely on fax messaging to share critical data. Insurance providers can use fax marketing to successfully share their latest offers and provide prospective customers with additional information on their insurance policies. This approach can be successful for independent advisors and global insurance providers.

Legal

The legal industry is bound by strict rules and regulations relating to data privacy and retention. So legal professionals rely on fax messaging to share agreements and contracts with authorities, clients and colleagues. Legal firms can also use fax marketing to promote their services securely, build trust among their client base, and grow their organizations. 

Manufacturing

Many manufacturing firms use fax technology to securely share project agreements, contracts and scope changes with their clients, legal firms and government authorities. Using fax marketing allows manufacturers to share information about their latest products or project successes with clients and prospective customers.

Real Estate

Real estate firms use fax technology to quickly and securely share housing agreements and mortgage contracts with government agencies, homeowners, other realtors and solicitors. Realtors can also use fax marketing to promote their latest listings, circulate open house opportunities and share updates on property prices. This can be a highly effective approach for establishing trust with prospective clients receptive to fax messages.

Understanding Fax Marketing Compliance and Laws

Before going ahead and sharing your fax campaigns with all your contacts, it’s vital to understand the compliance laws and regulations that apply in different countries. Before sending fax advertising to contacts, research the specific rules that apply to the country they are located in. Fax marketing compliance and laws include:

Canada

Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation protects its citizens from receiving electronic spam and threats. That said, the legislation doesn’t consider fax messages and numbers electronic formats, so you may not have to ask for a recipient’s consent before sending fax advertising. However, fax marketing via online fax will come under the remit of the legislation.

European Union

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enhances citizens’ control and rights around their personal information. Under GDPR, companies must be explicit about collecting, storing, and using personal data for marketing purposes, including asking for permission to collect it.

United Kingdom

The UK’s Electronic Communications and Privacy Regulations heavily restrict companies from sending unsolicited electronic marketing. The regulations carry strict sanctions around illegal marketing to individuals.

United States

The US Federal Communications Commission introduced legislation to regulate and restrict fax messaging in 2005. The FCC Rules for Junk Faxes prevent sending advertising materials via fax without the recipient’s consent. 

Maximize Your Fax Marketing Potential with eFax

eFax is an online faxing service that simplifies sending and receiving fax communication. The solution enables companies to securely fax advertising and promotional material without relying on expensive, inefficient physical fax machines. eFax offers a wide range of benefits, including: 

Saving Costs

Physical fax machines can be costly to purchase and maintain, as businesses must pay for fixed telephone lines, ongoing maintenance and paper, ink and toner. eFax removes all these costs, as well as providing free storage and toll-free numbers.

Simple Faxing

eFax enables employees to send fax messages at any time and wherever they are. The eFax app is easy to download, create an account and send faxes directly from the app. eFax accounts can also be integrated with email providers, social media services, collaboration tools and cloud storage solutions to maximize productivity.

Regulatory Compliance

Increasingly stringent data privacy regulations make it crucial to implement robust auditing and reporting processes. eFax brings your fax marketing approach in line with legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the GDPR.

Secure Faxing

eFax provides anytime access to archived faxes via a web portal secured by AES 256-bit encryption and Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption. Users can easily track and audit their fax usage and compile reports based on specific clients, employees or fax numbers.