Smart companies have been using fax broadcast marketing for decades. A fax broadcast is one of the only business communication formats that enables B2B marketers to immediately communicate a marketing message and confirm immediate delivery. Since most businesses use e-mail broadcast marketing it’s important to compare the two in one very important category, open rates.
Fax Broadcast open rates = 90%
This is a fairly simple concept when it comes to fax broadcast marketing. In many cases a device in the office actually audibly rings then prints out an opened marketing message. For fax users with a fax to e-mail service the user gets a notification and then opens the attachment, but since they receive important fax messages from multiple senders the e-mail is passed through spam filters and delivered to the fax recipient unfiltered. This fax broadcast process enables companies to communicate to customers with open rates well above 90%.
E-mail Broadcast open rates = 22%
MailChimp is one of the most widely used e-mail broadcast service providers. MailChimp sends billions of e-mails per month for about 15 million customers worldwide, so needless to say they have a lot of data. According to that data they published a report on open rates. Here are the findings (src).
| Company Size | Open Rate | Click Rate | Soft Rate | Hard Rate | Abuse Rate | Unsub Rate |
| 1 to 10 | 21.53% | 2.84% | 0.56% | 0.43% | 0.02% | 0.30% |
| 11 to 25 | 20.62% | 2.43% | 0.57% | 0.45% | 0.02% | 0.30% |
| 26 to 50 | 21.40% | 2.74% | 0.39% | 0.30% | 0.01% | 0.17% |
| 50+ | 22.83% | 2.75% | 0.55% | 0.50% | 0.02% | 0.20% |
You will see an average open rate of only 21.59%. That means 78% of the potential customersyou are trying to send a marketing message to don’t even open the e-mail! Imagine all that hard work and time spent crafting the e-mail, making sure the links work, making sure the message is mobile platform compatible only to find that 78% of recipients won’t even open your e-mail. That’s frustrating!
Here’s an idea. Try a Fax Broadcast in addition to your e-mail broadcast. You can even use the fax message to tease your e-mail to try to get that open rate up a few percentage points.
See you at the fax machine.
