Stopping your fax marketing being annoying and perceived as SPAM

UK direct marketers often see fax marketing as a dead medium which has been replaced by email promotions. However, many B2B marketers in industries as diverse as car leasing, event organising, publishing and manufacturing integrate fax broadcasts into strategies with a considerable amount of success. But how do they ensure their fax broadcasts do not annoy their contacts and are not perceived as SPAM?

Bad fax marketing is not purely an annoyance. Through distracting employees and using up valuable ink cartridges within fax machines, silicon.com recently reported that badly targeted fax marketing is predicted to be costing SMEs over £500 a year dealing with unwanted communications.

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) publishes regulations for the use of fax marketing. Conforming to these guidelines is key. Breaking them can lead to prosecution- up to August 2005, there have been reports that the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) had “successfully” enforced regulations against 13 fax marketers, although the details of their exact punishments are not in the public domain.

Communicating with fax marketing to non opt-outs

To avoid being annoying, UK fax marketers must not broadcast their fax communications to people who have opt-ed out previously either by the FPS Suppression list or their own in house database:

In house suppression files for fax marketing

You must operate and maintain an in-house suppression file which lists of recipients are de-duped against to remove those who have indicated that they do not wish your company to communicate with them via fax.

Fax Preference Service

The FPS (Fax Preference Service) is a UK only list administered by the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) of all the people who have contacted the DMA and requested that they are never sent fax promotions again. If you communicate to anyone who was added to the FPS list over 28 days ago, then you are breaking the regulations.

Getting the message right in your fax broadcasts

The DMA also publish rules for what your message must contain:

• Contact Details: the name of the advertiser and a freephone number and/or address where the advertiser can be contacted at no cost must be prominently displayed on each page of any fax marketing broadcast.

• Offers: All promotions selling off the page must comply with Distance Selling Regulations (more information can be found in this report by the DTI ), but in summary you must provide a cooling off period.

Ensuring call to actions are compliant in fax promotions

The call to action is the key action you want the recipient to do as a result of being sent your fax broadcast:

• Order Forms: all order forms sent by fax must include the advertisers full address, legal address, company registration details, postal address (PO box addresses are not sufficient), email address and terrestrial telephone numbers

• Premium rate numbers: if appropriate, you must let the recipient know that the contact number is a premium rate number before encouraging them to call it, and you must encourage them to obtain permission from the bill payer before dialing.

Further to these regulations, good direct marketing practices are the key to reducing annoyance:

“The right offer, to the right people at the right time”

The right offer

Promoting the correct products by fax marketing: ensure your products or services are suited to being promoted through the fax channel. Complicated propositions which cannot be explained easily on one side of A4 are not suited to fax marketing

The right people

Targeting your fax prospects: segment your databases to select the contacts who are mostly likely to respond to your offer

The right time

Frequency of fax broadcasts: do not bombard your database with frequent fax promotions. ‘Wearing out’ your database through over-use will increase opt-out rates and reduce responsiveness

Laying out your message and designing your fax promotion to communicate your message quickly and effectively is key- for guidelines on how to do this, please see our Effective Design and layout for Fax Marketing article

Combining good marketing principles with compliant marketing processes will ensure that your fax marketing will not be labeled as SPAM.

References:

UK stops 13 fax marketers - but no spammers

SMEs counting the cost of low-tech spam

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