Broadcast Faxing Yield Results
By: T.J. Tedesco
For: High Volume Printing
Published: June, 2000

Have your costly investments in self-promotional brochures, collateral pieces and trade ads yielded disappointing results?  Are you sure that broadcast faxing should be avoided because it’s only “junk?”  Think again.  Properly used, broadcast faxing is a complementary weapon in a powerful marketing arsenal.

Five years ago, had you told me I would one day write a column espousing the virtues of broadcast faxing, I’d have told you to check into a padded room.  Then, I thought fax blasters were the pariahs of the marketing community.  Today, I know better.  Let’s examine the pros and cons of broadcast faxing and take the Naysayers head on. 

What a world printers live in.  Success is neither easy nor guaranteed because many buyers think of printing as a commodity.  What do we do?  We attempt to brand our companies by producing and distributing beautiful “show-me” brochures, often paying little attention to informational content.  Image is everything, or so the incorrect logic goes.

Instead, offer real information, but break it up into digestible, bite-sized pieces.  Limit the scope of each contact to one key idea and choose appropriate delivery vehicles.  Newsletters are an option, but many are overly ambitious and die forgotten deaths shortly after volume one, issue two.  Postcards sort of work, but suffer from severe space limitations.  Posting information on Web sites is certainly popular, but you need to nurture the folks back home, not in Kuala Lumpur.  Now, are you ready to hear about the benefits of broadcast faxing?

It’s The Information, Stupid

Due to image degradation during the transmission process, broadcast faxes should be designed with content, not pretty pictures, in mind.  In this day of glitz, sizzle and over-hype, useful information in a one-color format is downright refreshing.  You’ve heard the objection to lots of words before: Print buyers don’t care how it gets done, as long as it does get done.  OK, there is some truth to this, but printing is not a commodity, regardless of its perception.  Good print buyers rely on their vendors to steer them around cost, time and quality landmines.

With your broadcast faxes, differentiate your company and compete on expertise.  Demystify the prepress, pressroom and post press processes.  Provide tips about working with designers, trade binderies, trade finishers and mail shops.  Offer tricks and traps without worrying about giving away the shop.  Somebody will educate the key business influencers in your marketplace; it might as well be you.  Once print buyers think of you as a knowledge leader, guess who’ll get the first call?

Some Benefits of Broadcast Faxing

Print Quality Doesn’t Matter.  It’s not uncommon for printers to agonize for weeks, months and even years about self-promotional printing – as well they should.  The printed piece is a tangible “show-me” piece, representing the very soul of a company.  Here’s the dilemma: Lousy brochures disqualify printers from consideration for obvious reasons.  Great brochures fail to excite because most printers have them.  Sounds like a lot of risk for little upside gain, doesn’t it?  Informational broadcast faxing is an entirely different vehicle.  Since useful “information” is still scarce, print buyers are favorably impressed by appropriate technical content, regardless of facsimile image quality.

Speed.  Broadcast faxing is fast.  Effective communications can be designed and delivered to the marketplace within hours.  By comparison, think of how long it takes to produce beautiful brochures.  Since the stakes are so high with collateral self-promotional pieces, most printers agonize over the concept, design, photography, copy, proofs, revisions, printing, binding and mailing.  All you need for a broadcast fax is a good idea, reasonable layout skills and a database of current fax numbers.  As long as the content is good, the fax will be good.

Cost.  Compared to printed collateral pieces, broadcast faxing is a moneysaving bargain.  One thousand six-color multi-page brochures can easily cost $10,000 or more to produce and distribute.  One thousand one-page broadcast faxes should cost less than $100.  Will your $10,000 mailing achieve a 100-times better response than a timely fax?  I doubt it.

Traditional Complaints

I know all the complaints about broadcast faxing: it’s invasive, illegal, unwanted and uses other companies’ resources.  Let’s take these objections one at a time. 

Invasive:  Broadcast faxing is no more invasive than any other type of marketing communication.  TV, radio, magazine and billboard advertising is just as unsolicited.  So is direct mail, telemarketing, e-mail, and door-to-door solicitation by Girl Scouts.  Don’t confuse invasiveness with resource issues – they’re not the same.

Illegal:  To the best of my knowledge, broadcast faxing is completely legal, just like broadcast e-mail.  (Earlier this year, a US judge reaffirmed the legality of broadcast e-mail.)  However, you may needlessly irritate people if you don’t:

• Properly identify yourself

• Provide a working return fax number

•  Give instructions for “opting-out” of future faxes

• Immediately comply with all opt-out requests.

Unwanted:  Like any other type of marketing vehicle, poorly targeted, information-light, self-aggrandizing communications often are unwanted.  Choose your broadcast fax recipients carefully.  Stick with useful information to dramatically increase the odds that your faxes will be wanted and appreciated.

Uses Other Companies’ Resources.  A broadcast fax does use a sheet of paper, a little toner and occupy a telephone line for a few seconds.  Guilty as charged.  But other advertising methods use recipients’ resources too; consider direct mail.  How much time does it take recipient companies to sort, distribute, open and read direct mail?  Even if the mail is thrown straight into the circular file, you still incur all the expense of getting it to the intended recipient’s desk in the first place.  This effort surely costs more than a single sheet of paper and a few dots of toner, doesn’t it?  What about telephone time?  Calls from salespeople tie up phone lines too.  Print ads?  It takes time to read them.  Sales visits?  How much does it cost you to have your people see sales representatives?  If your printing company generates $90,000 per employee, the cost of an hour-long sales call is $45 ($90,000 ¸ 40 hours per week ¸ 50 weeks per year x 1 hour).  The bottom line is this: All business-to-business communications involve an investment of some sort on the part of the recipient.  Broadcast faxing isn’t substantially different.

Some Dos and Don’ts

• Don’t send more than one fax per machine.  If you’re trying to reach several buyers who share a fax, add a routing list.

• Limit your fax length to one page.

• Include instructions as to how people can extricate themselves from the list, giving as many options as possible (i.e., toll-free phone number, fax number, e-mail address, etc.).

• Use good design.  Readers’ eyes travel along a Z-pattern.  Put your main ideas and call to action somewhere along the Z.

• Immediately comply with all “remove from list” requests.  Failing do so after the first request is rude and unnecessary.  Instruct your employees who answer the phone and speak with customers how to comply with such requests.

• Verify your targeted fax numbers frequently.  In growing areas, pay particular attention to area code changes.

• Show the intended fax to the people on your customer frontlines before you send it.  Prepare your receptionists, CSRs and estimators for the inevitable “please remove me from your list requests.”

• Don’t send broadcast faxes over the weekend or on Monday mornings because they are more prone to getting lost in the shuffle.

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Broadcast faxing has a lot going for it.  Paradoxically, broadcast faxing’s greatest weakness – poor image reproduction and lack of color – is its greatest strength.  The time to develop and send effective communications is incredibly short.  Of course there’s a time and a place for beautifully printed collateral pieces.  Just supplement them with information-laden broadcast faxes … and watch your sales grow.

T.J. Tedesco is a “hands-on” marketing, sales, coaching and training consultant to the post press industry. He is the author of Binding, Finishing & Mailing: The Final Word, and Win Top-of-Mind Positioning, both published by GATFPress and available at Amazon.com. T.J. can be reached at (301) 294-9900 or tj@growsales.com.