Page 218 - 101 Ways to Market Your Business

ANOTHER 20 MARKETING IDEAS

103 Make up a specific fax brochure

I often get faxes sent to my office that I can barely read.
Someone has grabbed a copy of their company brochure
and whizzed it through the fax machine in anticipation of
me spending thousands of dollars with their company. I
normally spend about five minutes trying to decipher a
mass of text and pictures that mean absolutely nothing
before the fax gets thrown into the recycled paper pile. As
far as I am concerned it is a complete waste of time for
me and the person who sent the fax and, in all honesty, I
resent their business for blocking my fax machine and
wasting my paper.

If you are serious about faxing people as a promotional
tool, make up a specific flyer or letter that is designed to
be faxed. To create a successful fax flyer, there are a few
criteria you need to follow:

• Give it a big, catchy heading. Faxes are like any adver-
tising—if you haven’t got the reader’s attention within
a few seconds you are wasting your time.

• Don’t try and fax pictures—they rarely come through
clearly.

• Leave lots of white space in the fax.
• Make sure that type size is large enough to be read

easily (I often get great faxes from companies but I can’t
read their contact numbers, so even if I wanted to buy
their products, I couldn’t).

The main point to this section is that if you are going
to use the fax machine as a source of generating new
business (which I highly recommend), take the time to
design a flyer specifically for that purpose. Once you have
made a ‘fax brochure’, send it to a few friends and get them
to tell you if it works.

Another point worth mentioning are the companies
that send you a fax with a dirty great line through the

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