As you probably know there are many restrictions on telemarketers and as you may not know there are lots of exemptions for instance if you have done previous business with the company calling you in the last six months they are still allowed to call you. What is great about this is that if you own a business you may still be able to call recent customers and ask them if they would like to buy more products or services from your company.
This is good for two reasons; one, there are now fewer telemarketers than before so there is less competition and two, since there is less competition the consumers being called are not as grumpy when you call them and ask them if they like to buy more. You might be surprised how an old customer can become a new customer again with a simple phone call. And there may have been a problem and if you ask them if there was a problem you will get vital feedback. You may even turn a complaint into a positive.
Do not negate the possibility of doing a little telemarketing on some of your customers who may not be current customers, because there could have been a simple misunderstanding, which you can now repair. Perhaps you have the customers fax number and this is another way to write them a note and send it to them.
If you have current customers who are not as frequent as you wish they were perhaps you can ask them if they would like to be added to your list for blast faxing of specials that you may be offering. If they say yes then you should use faxing as a way to communicate with them and it works great as long as you don't abuse the privilege. Please consider all this in 2006.

"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is an online writer in retirement.

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Keeping Yourself Safe During a Fax Blast

It is unfortunate, but understandable that many states these days are starting to place laws against unsolicited faxing. This means that if you are planning a fax blast, you need to be careful. You don't want something small, like trying to advertise a sale, end up putting you in trouble with the law, or with a bunch of fines and fees hitting your pocketbook. This is why it is always best to plan and prepare for a fax blast.

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, a fax blast is simply a mass fax that you, or a marketing company, send out to a huge number of clients, customers or businesses. Normally a fax blast would be used for some kind a newsletter, notice of a sale or some other form of advertising.

The first thing that you would want to do when organizing a fax blast is to gather up a list of the all the clients and fax number that you have. If you don't have many, you may need to hold off and start to collect a couple hundred more. If it is simply because you don't have a fax number for each client you may want to call each customer and let them know you are updating your database and see if you can get a fax number from them that way. If there is really no way you can get the numbers before your fax blast, you may need to rent a list from your local broker.

Once you have your list, make your flier or ad. You will need to make sure that you add either a fax or phone number that each client may call after the fax blast to be removed from your faxing list. Normally most companies will not mind being updated on new products or sales that you are offering, but they need to have that option. Another way of doing this is to ask each customer when they come into your place of business. Again, most customers will consent to receiving notifications of sales or simply newsletter of new products and information. This is simply a way to ensure that you are not going receive any customer complaints when your fax blast heads out. This is especially important when you are planning on making it a regular occurrence. Things like newsletters, monthly sales, or frequent product updates are great ideas for a fax blast, but should always come with customer approval first. If you are only planning on sending one fax per year or something like that, it becomes slightly less important.

Once you have sent you ad to the marketing company and you have set the date for your fax blast, you just have sit and wait. Normally you will get responses to your faxes relatively quickly. Once the fax blast as finished, normally the marketing company will let you know, you should ask for a report of how the fax blast went. This report should include all of the number that they sent the fax to and how many of them never went through. This serves two purposes for you. First, you can make sure that the marketing company didn't charge you for the faxes that never went through. And second, it will show you the numbers that are no longer active, so you can erase them from your customer fax file.

As long as you are careful and plan well a fax blast can be the advertising spark your company needed. A fax blast will reach far and wide to keep your in touch with your customers and attract new clients.

OzFax are spacialists in Fax Broadcasting and Fax Marketing in Australia & New Zealand. Choose from our fax broadcast database of around 1.7 million business fax contacts. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dave_Kris