 |
Lessons From A Month of Fax Blasting - 1/2
|
Reprinted with permission
from Computer Telephony
February 1997
We blasted over 150,000 one-page faxes
to encourage our friends to come to Computer Telephony Expo '97.
Fax blasting really works. Nice. Blasting into the ether is disconcerting.
The first reply is tasty. Many of you responded within minutes.
It's testimony somebody out there saw your electrons. Fax blasting
is not trivial. Here are some things we learned with our Copia FaxFacts
software and Brooktrout boards (see last month for the Big Writeup).
by Harry, Aaron, and Freddie
Faxes fail for two basic reasons:
1) the number is bad; or
2) there is a software/hardware problem.
The first problem is more common than the second. If
you have good software (we do, Copia International's (Wheaton,
IL -- 800-689-8898) FaxFacts), it should tell you which of these
two problems caused the failure.
If you have bad numbers, someone must find out why
and correct them. This usually means calling. It means going to
your original database to find the voice numbers. That means being
able to search your database by fax number. Set up an index so you
can.
Fixing bad fax numbers is not trivial. You will need
full-time people. If your fax list is big, you will need a mother
of an army.
Once you've corrected the fax numbers, you can resend
the fax by creating a new blast list or by changing the numbers
in the failed fax report. Copia gives you both options, others don't.
The caring and feeding of bad fax number lists is more
expensive than the cost of the phone lines to send the faxes. Practice
clean data entry. Teach it to your data enterers. How do you get
the list of bad numbers? Copia stores detailed information about
every call in a database file. Run a query and a report on the file.
Bingo, you have your list of bad calls.
If you have hardware/software problems that prevent
faxes from going through, you need the tools to diagnose and correct
them quickly and easily. The combination of Copia software and Brooktrout
hardware in our system provides lots of information about a fax
call.
The second big problem with bad fax numbers is a bad
phone line. We ran our fax blaster behind a PBX with a T-1 an limited
trunks. If you blast during the day, you'll pay more and hit more
fast busies. Start at night, when it's cheaper and less busy.
Watch out for dumb stuff. In the beginning we got many
failed faxes. Freddie found one of the RJ-11 cables that should
carry two phone lines (i.e. four conductors) only had two wires
in it.
All silver satin flat ribbon cables look alike. But
aren't. Thank you, Freddie.
Good phone lines. Make sure all your phone lines are
good. One by boring one. We thought we had bad numbers, but we had
a bad line that stopped hundreds of faxes getting through. Luckily,
Brooktrout's fax boards come with diagnostic software that allowed
us to test lines. Once we tested the lines, we found the bad one.
Intermittent stuff is the worst.
Test before blasting. Send four sample faxes before
you blast your list of thousands: 1) to yourself; 2) locally; 3)
long distance; and 4) internationally. With the first, you see if
the fax looks good and something dumb isn't happening -- like the
signature line (and nothing else) on the second and blank page.
With the next three you make sure your fax blaster
is handling all the possible types of numbers at the top of every
fax blast list so they're ready to send as soon as you have your
document ready.
Harry is obsessive about fine-honing the look of faxes.
He'll spend half an hour fiddling with one page. He thinks faxes
are as important as magazine covers. He says, "You get attention
in the first two seconds. Or you get circular filed."
Harry believes cover sheets are totally stupid. They
just waste trees, paper, staples, and time. If a fax has a name
on it, it will get delivered.
You must use pure black and white images/logos/photos,
etc. Otherwise your faxes will go out with strange dots in the white
space around your logos. No one knows why.
If you try to fax color, all colors fold to black!
The first rule here is to proof to fax. Set your windows default
printer to the fax driver so that the windows word processor knows
that the printer resolution is 200 dots per inch. You can see how
color is really coming out.
|
Top