As the name suggests, fax broadcasting is distributing a fax or list of faxes out to a large group of contacts in one go.

It is also at times referred as ‘fax blasting' and ‘bulk faxing'.

It is an increasingly popular low-cost way to reach out to thousands of businesses who can either be located in one's local community or spread across the globe.

Fax broadcasting has some advantages over other communication channels – like letters and, in the past decade, emails. For example, e-mails can get deleted and letters can get thrown out un-opened, whereas but broadcasted faxes are tending to get read. Business owners tend to ‘jump-up' to read faxes.

Fax broadcasting can also be used as a complementary communication channel to reach people that do not readily respond to emails or direct mail.

Why Go For Fax Broadcasting?

Compared to traditional direct mailing, fax broadcasting, or faxing a personalized document to everyone, is significantly faster, easier and frequently much less expensive. Businesses are not required to print document or buy paper, there's no envelopes to address, or boxes to carry to the post office.

You can do away with the labour traditionally needed for a mass mailing.

One doesn't need to tie up his/her own fax machine or waste time fiddling with it.

Faxes can be sent to one or more recipient lists and deliveries can be tracked in real time.

Almost all fax machines used today are capable of receiving and printing readable faxes at 200 dots per inch (dpi), the quality of the fax transmission is largely determined by the sending machine. So sending through customized vendors drastically improves the quality of the document being distributed.

Who Can Gain From Fax Broadcasting?

Several businesses, who offer a service to sell to other businesses, often look at fax marketing to increase their lead generation. This technology helps them to send high priority communications to many people - customers, vendors, and other contacts, at the same time. Following documents are most commonly distributed using this technology –

• Press releases

• Newsletters

• Product Updates

• Pricing Updates

• Event Reminders

• Special Promotions

• Invitations

• Daily Rate Sheets

Market Players in Fax Broadcasting

At the moment there are several Internet Fax providers who offer competitive rates in this trade. Many vendors offer this service, especially to businesses or organizations that have to send a document to a large group of recipients. Such a big pool of vendors helps a business in getting the best competitive rate for this service. Also, with growing interest in this field, there are new innovations being patented every year.

Limitations of Fax Broadcasting

In order to stop spamming, there are several laws in place. You may need to check the laws regarding faxing in your area.

As a general rule, you should have a prior contact or business relationship established before sending information.

In some countries there are significant penalties for unsolicited faxes that advertise goods or services. As per the law, faxes should be sent only when one needs a high priority communications channel, and the information needs to be seen by the intended recipient, even if not initially.

In a Nut-Shell

Traditional method of sending a fax is a time consuming process and that's why the technology got lagged behind, but with improved facility of sending a customized, high quality fax to over 1,000 destinations in one go, has given a new twist to the tale. More and more companies are out-sourcing this work and every year new players are joining in to intense the already competitive fax broadcasting market.

If you're in business and you're selling to customers that have fax machines, try fax broadcasting as one of your marketing methods.