Fax Marketing
What is fax marketing?
Fax marketing generally means advertising a business or reaching out to your customers by sending faxes. But the term means different things to different people. Some fax marketing practices are perfectly legitimate, and others are illegal. A legitimate fax marketing practice might include sending a fax newsletter to people who are your regular customers, telling them about new products or special deals. As long as your customers have opted into receiving this information from you, this can be a great way to keep in contact with customers and clients.
The fax marketing umbrella, however, also covers the practice of sending “junk faxes” — that is, faxing advertisements to people or companies that you’ve never dealt with before, who don’t know who you are, and who probably don’t want to receive your message in their fax machine. Sending bulk faxes in this way is deceptively simple: you can buy a list of tens of thousands of fax numbers, then hire a company to send your message or advertisement to those companies, all for just a few hundred dollars. However, sending bulk faxes in this way is illegal and is likely to get you sued. Also, it’s rude. After all, you’re tying up other companies’ phone lines and using their fax paper to get your message across — a message they haven’t agreed to receive.
But there’s nothing wrong with using fax marketing to keep in contact with companies and contacts that you have an existing relationship with. A fax broadcasting service like Protus can help you do this easily and inexpensively.
If you’re not sure where your faxing plans fall in the spectrum of fax marketing, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the laws regarding sending bulk faxes. Also, be sure to give the people that you send faxes to a very easy way to opt out should they not want to receive your fax marketing.
Do you have a question about faxing? Send us your fax question.
