The Internet Fax: an Advertising Strategy for the Computer Repair Business

The trouble with marketing your business by email ...it is extremely low cost and easy to administer. Therefore, you will experience loads of opposition ...and your message gets diluted.

Today, you can rely on the fax as a practical marketing alternative. Consider what happens when a useful fax pops out of the machine at a customer site.

Yes, a lot do go in the rubbish, but some get read, photocopied, pinned up on notice boards and some even filed away for further reference.

The real secret to any direct marketing method is to first obtain permission. "How on earth do you get permission to send advertising?"

What you need is a good excuse to contact potential new and existing customers. One way excellent way of achieving this ...is to offer good quality information ...for free. With the mail out you can include your advertising.

A one page fax is a brilliant way to deliver a monthly constant contact newsletter with your promotional advertising. Here at this site we have a superb monthly IT newsletter you can use to promote your business.

"How do you go about getting permission to send faxes," I hear you say? If you have the necessary equipment, the job becomes easy. So what is the drill?

With existing customers there is no problems as you can ask them in the normal run of business. When you are next on the job ask them if you can keep them up to date with the latest money saving developments in the IT world.

By keeping in touch with your existing customers you make sure your business is always remembered.

The best way to contact new customers is to ring them. "Oh no, telemarketing, I can't do that," I hear you say! ...If you have high quality information, the job becomes a breeze.

It would go something like this when phoning, "We produce a monthly IT newsletter that goes out to businesses in the city/town. Can I send you a free trial, please?" By using this method, you can quickly build a customer list.

One of the questions you will be asked regularly is, "What is the newsletter about." A standard answer would be, " This months issue is all about [include a business benefit from the newsletter]"

Make sure you keep a log of when you placed the phone call in case you get accused of sending unsolicited faxes.

In fact, when you are in a confident frame of mind, working from dawn to dusk you can obtain 100 fax numbers in a day. Do-it-yourself, broadcast faxing through the Internet with a local provider costs only a few cents per page.

In using the Internet fax you have a powerful direct marketing strategy for a computer repair business. In quiet periods, by picking up the phone and adding new customers to your database, you are assured of an ever expanding business.

Marketing by fax though the Internet has made it easy for the small business owner. Now there is no need to use a dedicated computer to churn out faxes and tie up phone lines. Faxes now can be sent out in bulk through the Internet.

There are a bewildering number of service providers offering deals. Some of them require you to send faxes by email. Others allow faxing via web access, the same way you would access a Hotmail account.

One convenient method offered, is faxing directly from your computer using your existing software, such as Outlook. Another approach is to use special fax software on your computer.

If you use the email option, your faxes are sent as an attachment. Your outward mail is converted at the service provider and sent down the phone line as a normal fax.

To find a suitable Internet fax provider, go to www.faxbeep.com Here you will find the “Internet Fax Service Buyers Guide” which has useful discussions and reviews. There are many different services from different countries examined.

Internet faxing has many advantages and will eventually make the conventional fax obsolete. For business it is the ultimate document handler that solves the problem of tying-up phone lines as well as a personal portable system enabling you to send and receive faxes from any location.

What Pitfalls to Avoid When Setting-Up Internet Faxing

In doing a search on the Internet to find a suitable provider of Internet faxing, you will find a huge selection. The problem in this industry there is a high company failure rate. How do you find a satisfactory provider?

One thing to be aware of is, how you are charged for the service? Are you charged by the minute or page? The time it takes to transmit to a fax machine, varies enormously with the limitation being at the recipient end. If you are sending a page with graphics or is text intensive, it could take much longer.

For example sending our in house Business Computing newsletter to a conventional fax device takes only a minute and a half with a quick fax but it can take over five minutes by slow fax.

If the service is offered to you at a per page rate it may be a better way to pay. The service providers often quote thirty seconds transmission time for the average page, which is stretching the truth.