There's a small population of extremely vocal marketers that have proclaimed that the Great Era of the Fax has jumped the shark.
That's absolutely ridiculous because any marketer worth their salt knows that any marketing strategy must be comprehensive, universal and flexible. Marketing strategies need to encompass several different modes of communication in order to get their message to the maximum amount of people.
Nixing one tactic because of the perception that it's dying is akin to those skeptical marketers who scoffed at the idea of emailing customers directly.
Here are 12 reasons why fax marketing is far from dead and why you should be using it.
1. Everyone has faxing capabilities either through old school, paper-based machines or digitally.
2. Creating fax marketing content actually forces you to become a better writer. Why? Some marketers see a huge expanse of paper and assume they can take up as much space as they need to get their message across. In fact, because you have essentially limitless space (compared to, say, SMS) you need to hone your writing skills and pare down your language.
3. With faxing, design schemes are limitless. Unlike web-based applications, faxing isn't limited to type of fonts (think websites) or type of graphics (think downloading speed and SEO issues).
4. Since fax marketing is highly regulated, every single subscriber wants to hear from you because they chose to.
5. Faxing stands out against other online marketing strategies for its clean and simple presentation.
6. For fax subscribers that receive your faxes digitally (on their computer), usually the fax comes through as a PDF. This is absolutely fantastic. Unlike emails, PDFs are universally read by any type of computer or operating system, which makes forwarding your great deal to others simple and easy.
7. Inexpensive to produce and send, compared to slightly more costly marketing strategies like email or SMS.
8. Designing a fax is a great exercise for your junior graphic designers to flex their creative muscles.
9. Use your fax marketing subscribers as a testing ground for any off-the-wall, brand-spankin' new or controversial promotional campaign. Why? Chances are your fax subscribers are very small, compared to your email or text lists.
10. Faxing is easy for customers to understand – there isn't any clicking, scrolling or downloading needed. All of the information is on a single, readable page.
11. Designing a sleek fax forces you to reexamine how "hard-copy" friendly your promotions, logos and photographs actually are. Many designs look fantastic on a screen but look terrible on paper.
12. Faxing doesn't prevent online conversions; faxing encourages them. How? If the majority of your subscribers view your fax as a PDF, you can embed links to your online life including social media and your website. So now that you know why you should be using fax marketing for your business, why not sign up for SimplyCast's easy-to-use fax service. You can upload a list, create your message and be sending faster than changing the toner on your fax machine.
