Sunday, April 1, 2007
Fax Software. Popular Types for your needs.
As part of any home office or business, a fax machine is an essential piece of equipment (you know it). When it comes to composing a fax, sometimes we need help in producing a quality cover sheet or in knowing where to type specific information. That’s where fax software comes in. In an effort to make your faxing needs easier, software manufacturers have created various types of programs for making your faxes everything (even you dont need it)from professional to humorous or somewhere in between, .
When purchasing fax software, make sure to carefully read the PC requirements noted on the outside packaging (its a pity, if your computer cant manage hard fax soft). You will need to be familiar with your computer’s configuration so that you can correctly choose a software program that will be compatible with your computer. In order for your computer to accommodate new fax software, it may need to have a specific processor type (i.e., Pentium, Celeron, etc.) and speed, available memory, etc.
If you find the best fax software, insert the cd-rom and install the program. Following that, you will be able to create professional faxes by typing your information into a few preformatted fields.
If you do not have an actual fax machine, but still want to enjoy the convenience of sending and receiving faxes, there are a many computer programs that offer this service exclusively via the internet. One such service is eFax, which provides both a free and paid service to members. For a free service, members are assigned a random fax number for receiving faxes. For a fee, they can also upgrade to a local customized number for their area. In addition, some plans offer the ability to send faxes via a special fax software program offered directly from eFax.
One of the many benefits of signing up with a service similar to eFax is the convenience of having faxes delivered directly into your e-mail box. Without the use of an actual fax machine, this is the only way to receive faxed documents. To the user’s benefit, documents received via e-mail are available for both viewing and/or printing. With the use of an actual fax machine, on the other hand, toner and paper are both used and often wasted if the fax is unwanted.
When it comes to purchasing fax software, you can either buy it on a cd-rom or download it from the network. Whichever you choose, make sure that it will suit all of your business and personal correspondence needs.
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Generating Sales Leads Through Fax Broadcasting
Fax broadcasting, also called fax blasting, is a highly effective form of advertising if executed correctly. Fax broadcasting allows a company to instantly deliver targeted marketing messages to a large audience for an incredibly low price.
Fax broadcasting is a way to get real, physical promotional messages into the hands of your target audience at a cost of about 96% less than sending information through the mail. Blasts of up to 1000 faxes, complete with statistics, can cost as low as $40 with price breaks on larger quantities.
The two most critical factors in ensuring a successful fax broadcasting campaign are the accuracy of the fax mailing list and the quality of the marketing message. Below you’ll find some tips and ideas to maximize the return on investment of your fax broadcasting campaign.
Define the recipient’s specific action
Too often people send out marketing messages hoping that customers will react in a way that benefits the company. Before you even start creating your message, ask yourself: What precise action do I want a recipient to take after reading my message? Will they call a number for more information? Fill out a form and fax back to receive a special free report or bulletin? Or perhaps file the fax in a specific folder in their filing cabinet for future reference?
Include a call to action
Don’t just hope that recipients will infer the action you want them to take. Make sure to include your specific call to action on the page. A call to action might be: “To receive this free special offer, log on to www.website.com within the next 24 hours and order online.” By first determining the specific action your customers will take, then creating your marketing message around it, you are more likely to get the reaction that you are anticipating.
Designing the content
A fax broadcast should be eye catching and encourage the recipient to pick it up and read it after just a glance. Include different sized fonts to accomplish different goals. Use large fonts for brief bursts of relevant yet intriguing text to catch the reader’s attention. Provide a brief follow up to your large text in medium sized font. Add some details in smaller text for those who are interested and want to read more. Give the prospective client enough information to pique their interest then encourage them to seek you out for more information. This not only stops you from crowding your fax broadcast with text, but also engages the prospect.
Fax Broadcast layout and design
While art and design are highly subjective, there are a few basic rules of thumb to stick to. Give the page adequate margins. Think of the white space as a design element to give shape to the other elements on your page, not just blank space to fill up. Choose a professional image or illustration that doesn’t include a lot of dark areas and will look great in black and white. Unless you’re a graphic designer, do a search for professional stock images to find illustrations and photos at low prices. iStockPhoto.com offers more than half a million professional images for just $1 per image.
Test your Message
Before sending your fax out to thousands of people, get the opinions of a few people who aren’t completely familiar with your business. The goal isn’t to find out if they like your promotional flyer, but to test whether or not it delivers the intended message. Make a list of 3-5 very specific questions to ask your test audience such as: “What exactly does this company do?” “What problem does this company’s product or service solve?” or “What action will I take after reading this offer?” Continue testing until you get the desired results and you’ll improve the chances that your target customers will have the same reaction.
Find or Create a Targeted Fax Mailing List
The accuracy and quality of the mailing list for your fax broadcast will ultimately determine if all of your hard work will pay off. To accomplish this you can purchase a fax mailing list, create your own custom list by gathering info from company websites, or hire someone to collect the information for you. A quality fax broadcasting service will offer statistics to let you know how many were delivered successfully so that you can fine tune your mailing list.
Fax broadcasting can be an extremely effective marketing tool, especially for small businesses on a budget that need to make a big impact quickly. While everyone else is concentrating their efforts on email marketing, you can deliver a hardcopy right into the hands of your target customer. Unlike email, someone is sure to look at it and not just instantly toss it away. By designing your fax broadcast effectively, you can easily expand your reach and grow your business.
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Advantages of Fax Broadcasting
Fax broadcasting has several benefits. And with an increasing amount of providers appearing in the industry coupled with new breakthroughs in the technology used - more and more businesses are using the fax to communicate their marketing message, this art
Fax broadcasting has several benefits. And with an increasing amount of providers appearing in the industry coupled with new breakthroughs in the technology used - more and more businesses are using the fax to communicate their marketing message
Some of the major plus points about fax broadcasting are –
Potentially Huge Savings for Your Business
Once a company out-sources fax distribution, it can save lot of revenue as now it doesn’t need to waste money in buying paper or stationary to print or envelopes to address, or boxes to carry to the post office (the bare minimum pre-requisites for traditional mails).
The business can also do away with the labor traditionally needed for a mass mailing.
The business doesn’t need to invest huge sums in buying high quality fax machines; instead they can pass on the work to broadcasters who own such high value machines.
With a severe competition amongst fax broadcasting/blasting vendors, companies can at times get send fax for a fee as low as 20 cents per fax. And perhaps much, much lower if you look around.
Improved Fax Quality
As most of the fax machines are capable of receiving and printing readable faxes at 200 dpi, the quality of the fax transmission is largely determined by the sending machine. The vendors who provide services in this area can easily afford such expensive high resolution machines. Thus your fax blast comes through to the receiver in good quality.
The vendors specializing in broadcasting and blasting can help the businesses to broadcast the documents any time of the day (or night). They can also be scheduled days, weeks, or months in advance.
There are vendors who can personalize the documents for each transmission by merging an unlimited number of fields of data onto each document transmission as they fax it out. Thus your messages can be personalized.
Immediate Sales Increase
Fax broadcasting gets results as the message gets noticed instantly, especially if it is broadcasted at the right time of the day when people are most receptive. Schedules can be maintained to broadcast it at the right moment.
Most of the vendors maintain mailing lists of people who are related to a particular business and seeking information from these fax broadcasters helps you in targeting the right audience.
A List Of The Document Types that can be broadcasted:
- Press releases and newsletters
- Product and pricing Updates
- Trade Shows and Event Reminders
- Special Promotions
- Invitations
- Daily Price Lists and Rate Sheets
- Direct Marketing
- Investor Relations Information
- Communication with customer base
- Offsite Emergency Communication
- Inventory information
- Account status
- Interoffice bulletins
- Delivery forms
Reliable Delivery
One can easily track the delivery of each fax online and can know about the ones that bounced back or weren’t delivered.
A customized confirmation can be sent back to the organization about each fax which was successfully delivered and also the reason why certain faxes were not able to reach their destination.
Vendors normally retry each fax up to 3 times if the recipient number was busy.
The turnaround response is quite less and this saves a lot of valuable effort and time.
Archive logs can be maintained to record every incoming and outgoing fax.
Fax blasting/broadcasting is an excellent method for marketing your business. There are many advantages in terms of cost and time savings. The best part is that it is very easy to try and assess for your business.
Internet Fax – Once There Were Fax Machines
Till now, you had to own a special machine – a fax machine, which was only made to send and receive faxes. Now using internet fax or as some call it email faxing, you need no special device for faxes – You can send and receive faxes via your email.
In fact, think of all the things you needed to maintain and pay for to be able to send and receive faxes: A special fax line, paper, ink cartridges etc. Using internet fax, you need nothing but an internet connection.
Another great advantage of using internet fax is its’ transparency. All your business partners will keep sending you faxes to a fax number. In fact, you can choose a toll free number as your virtual fax number.
The biggest advantage of internet faxing is the ability to manage your time more efficiently. I remember my secretary wandering between her office and the fax machine half a dozen times for a single fax receiving. Not any more, now she receives my faxes through the email service wasting no time. She manages to do more tasks now when running around for faxes have stopped.
More than that, you can check if new faxes have been received from anywhere in the world using the internet fax service. You just have to log on to your web mail service and check for new mails. You will save a lot of precious time by responding a lot faster to any new fax you get. Recently, I have begun reading new faxes using my wireless PDA. I can’t believe that a year ago I still used the big fax machine with all its’ disadvantages.
By: Paton Jackson
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A Quick Look At Internet Fax Services
Here is a quick look at internet fax services. Internet fax services are a way of sending fax messages over the web, just like an email. It does this without the aid of any fax machines. And more importantly, web faxing is cheap, fast and easy to use, and hence is a big money and time saver.
First, let us see how online fax services work. Once a customer subscribes to an internet fax service, the service provider assigns him/her a unique fax number. This is the address to which other people are supposed to send in their faxes. The subscriber can receive fax messages in the form of an email, for which he/she may have to create an email account with the service provider domain. To an extent, this is quite similar to the normal electronic mail.
In order to send a fax message, what the user has to do is to type the message in the text space of the electronic mail, and press the send button, the mail being addressed to the recipient in the form ‘fax number@service provider’s name’. The sent message then goes to the network based server of the service provider, where it is converted into a suitable file format before eventually forwarding it to the recipient’s mail box or fax machine, whichever is applicable. The latter one is called e-fax, which is a new technology and is a bit more costly as it requires some additional software and hardware component installations.
Some of the online fax service providers offer the services for free, while some others charge a definite fee. If it is a free service, the facilities will be limited, and most companies make such a free offer to entice customers to subscribe for a meaty deal later on. But, even if the fax service is for a fee, still the amount is nominal in many counts, especially given the flexibility and scope of this facility. Further, one does not need any costly equipment to use internet faxing. One can manage to send web faxes with a PC and a fast internet connection.
To sum it up, email faxing is an intermediate technology that bridges the gap between traditional fax machines and web-based communication. It eliminates the complexity and operation cost of the bulkier fax machines meanwhile embracing the quickness, flexibility and low cost aspects of web communication. After all, this is what an average customer wants from technology! Good Luck!
By: Oliver Turner -
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‘why Fax Thru E Mail?’
Fax Thru Email™ lets you send and receive faxes anywhere*, anytime, from any computer — all you need is an Internet connection and email. Say goodbye to the hassle and expense of a fax machine and discover a more affordable and flexible alternative.
Your Web-based manager lets you view and manage your Fax Thru Email history, including sent and received faxes, account information, help, and billing details. Plus, it's all done securely — your incoming, outgoing, and personal information remains completely confidential.
Receive faxes from anywhere in the world, send faxes anywhere in North America and Canada, up to 30MB in size, from any email program. Create and customize your own cover sheet. Fax files from your computer or your Online File Folder account. Receive email confirmations so you know your fax went through. View your Fax History to see a record of all incoming and outgoing faxes. Fax to your hotel's fax on the road to print documents.
These are the outgoing file types that Fax Thru Email supports. You can send these file types using Fax Thru Email.
Word Processing - DOC - Microsoft Word Documents, RTF - Rich Text Format, TXT - Plain Text.
Graphics - GIF - CompuServe Graphics Interchange Format, JPG, JPEG - Joint Photography Experts Group, TIFF - Tagged Image File Format.
Other - PDF - Adobe Portable Document Format, HTML - Hypertext Markup Language, XLS - Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets, Incoming fax/s messages are in PDF files.
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How To Fax Documents Using Windows Xp
It would be awesome if we all had our own fax machine.We could fax our resume to that new employer to be reviewed right away.Or we may want to receive that fax from our landlord so we can move into that apartment tomorrow.
Having a fax machine in your home could save you time in completing such tasks as getting a new job.Now what if you can fax documents without having to cough up big bucks to purchase a fax machine.
If you have a computer with Windows XP, internet access, and a printer, you already have a fax machine.One of the optional components in your WinXP software package is the Fax Services Component.This package allow you to send and receive faxes through your computer using regular dial-up internet access.
To use this Fax Service you will need 3.7megabytes of free hard drive space,a dial-up modem and your WinXP Install CD. Since the transmission is sent through your phone line,a cable modem will not work.
The first thing you must do to use the Fax Service is to install it on your PC.This service is not installed when Windows XP was first installed.Perform the following steps to install this software.
Insert your installation CD in your CD or DVD drive and the welcome to Microsoft Windows XP will open.If it doesn't open, open My Computer and double-click the CD or DVD drive.Click install Optional Windows Components.
A menu will open that lists all optional Windows XP components.Now click the box in front of Fax Services and then click next.Watch the installation status bar and once its installed click the finish button and exit.You will need to restart your PC to finish the process.
You can now configure the Fax Console by adding your contact information,the modem you will use, and where you want the system to save a copy of each fax.
To open the application,click on Start,choose All Programs, Accessories,Communications,Fax, the Fax Console, and click next once it opens.You can now type in the Sender information.
The next step in setting up the Console is to enter your TSD or Transmitting Subscriber Identification data.This allow the recipient's computer to identify your computer as the sender of the Fax.The TSD contains your Fax number or your fax number and name.
You're getting closer to finishing the Console.The CSID is next to be added.Your CSID is your Called Subscriber Identification and it can be the same data that's in the TSD.When you receive a Fax,your CSID will appear on the sender's confirmation page.
Now you must choose the routing options for the Faxes you receive.You may want the Faxes saved and printed, or just save.You now choose the printer you want the Fax to be printed on and this will be your default printer.
Click next to reach the last Console Configuration step. Here you verify the data you entered.A Configuration summary will appear for you to verify.Once you are satisfied that all information is correct,click finish.
After setting up the Fax Console and completed the Configuration setup,you're computer is now ready to send and receive Faxes just as any Fax Machine would.The Console pops open automatically and looks similar to the Outlook Express Console.
Now select the device to sending and receiving Faxes.The modem will appear in the drop-down menu.All you need to do is highlight it and check both send and receive.Here is how you receive Faxes using Windows XP.
There are two options to receiving a Fax,Manual and auto answer.Checking the auto mode allows the computer to answer the phone when a Fax is received.To receive a Fax automatically,leave the modem and the computer on and the PC will save received Faxes in the inbox of the Fax Console.
If you have one phone line to use for your fax and voice calls,its good to receive your Faxes manually.You will need to be at your computer to receive a fax.When the phone rings,you will not know if its a voice or fax call until you answer it.
A way around this is to call the sender of the fax and ask them to call ahead to inform you the fax is on its way.Then you can hang up, connect your modem to the phone line and wait.When the call comes through,a dialog box appears and will allow you to receive the Fax.
To send a fax you can use the print option to Fax documents from any Windows application.Open the document from any Windows program such as MSWord ,select the printer, and click okay.
The Fax Wizard will now take you by the hand and help you create a cover page and sending your Fax.After this is done, enter your recipient's data.When entering their Fax number,type it in a format such as +1 (123) 456-7890.
The Fax Console is linked to your Outlook Express Address Book where recipients names can be stored there.Your recipient's name will appear in the Recipient Information Window.
You can now format the cover page by choosing ready made templates or create your own.And now you can schedule when your Fax can be sent.To send it now,just click Now.Or you set a time in advance but be sure to leave the modem and computer on when the time comes.
Click next where you can preview the cover page and Fax preview.If all is well,click finish and the Fax Monitor will appear and show you the status of your Fax.You will see a saved copy of your Fax if you did not send it now.
By following these steps, you can send a Fax from any Windows application.Such application include Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Excel.You can use a scanner with the Fax Service to made it more versatile.Go over to their web site at www.support.microsoft.com to learn how to use a scanner with the Fax Service.
If you're considering using the Fax Service to send faxes, its a great time while rewading this article to grab your WinXP CD,install the software and get going.There will be a lot more help in the software and you'll see just how easy it is to fax with Windows XP.
By: Otis Cooper
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