NEW BIZ Advice - Fax Marketing

glenrichkid

Hi All, newish to boards and what a welth of info and advice contained here. Hopefully all you in the now can advise me on fax marketing, do you have any experience here, does it work, would you say people would give an incoming fax a second glance or bin it?

--amadeus--

Hi

A fair part of my job is to advise and train start ups and new busines people. I also run my own company and have done for almost 5 years now.

I have to say that fax marketing is second only to carrier pigeons in terms of lack of effect. It is comparitivly expensive (compared to e-mail) and much less cost effective than an phone call to the same company. Depending on your target market you'll probably be faxing the wrong people anyway (unless you're selling to receptionists, who won't have purchase auth. often anyway). I know one company spent an entire year going through the golden pages, phoning and asking for fax numbers and tehn fax marketing them.

They didn't make a single sale through that route.

So my advise is to avoid it!!

EKRIUQ

I absolutely hate "FAX MARKETING" it justs wastes the ribbon on my fax and my paper and any copmay that has faxed me I have always rung them up to stop faxing and deffinately makes sure I won't deal with these companys in the future because most of the offers are rubbish anyway.

Just a waste of time

ircoha

check out the rules for 'cold call' faxing: u can easily get your rear end in the wringer as it is a regulated activity, akin to spam but is much more traceable

glenrichkid

hi folks

thanks for the advice, i reckon i'll be hitting the phones so,

I've searched the other threads but can't seem to find any solid advice for generating interest or just getting my services/company on the radar..

any thoughts, on a shoe string type thing?

Trojan

Hey, I'm in the same boat, but certainly not looking at faxing!

Tell us, what is the type of business you're in? That'll make a big difference. My business is B2B so it's not as easy as B2C in getting the message out.

If I were you, and I am, I'd be going to networking meetings, trade shows, industry events.

If you don't have business cards, get them sorted right now.
PM me if you're interested in business card design and advice.

Savman

Fax Marketing is generally considered a nuisance to businesses. You are wasting the company's paper most of the time and it's highly unlikely you will reach your intended target. Anytime I've seen "special offers" come in from Dell or whoever, they usually get put straight into the shredder.

Think twice

antoinolachtnai

I would start off by figuring out

- how much a customer is worth

and from that,

- how much you are willing to spend to acquire a customer.

After that you can think about whether it is better to send a lot of untargeted messages at low unit cost, but low response rate (for example, fax marketing), or more targeted, more expensive messages, with a higher response rate (for example, door-to-door sales).

Important thing is to try to step back and put a value on the various possibilities, rather than dismissing any particular option out-of-hand.

(Although I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of fax marketing myself.)