Promoting business cost effectively with Winfax Pro

Promoting business cost effectively with Winfax Pro

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Obviously, a small or new business would not have the financial power to buy space in newspapers to place their ads, or airtime on radio or TV stations to place commercials. However, without promotion campaigns, how can they make their products or services known to prospective customers? Not to worry, though. Computer technologies (what else?) provide cheaper ways to make other people aware of products or services they offer. Not only SOHOs (small offices, home offices), big businesses should also look at more cost-effective alternatives to promote their products and services with the help of PCs and great software.

Recently, a client launched a business -- well, she couldn't be exactly categorized as a small business since what she was starting up was an upscale bar at a star-rated hotel. She asked me to help set up her PC and modem so that it would automatically fax a promotional flyer to the people on her mailing list. I agreed to do it, as long as she had a legitimate copy of Winfax Pro. And that was the first time I met with the real prowess of Winfax Pro 4.0. It was a rewarding experience, indeed.

Features

Winfax Pro is powerful fax software that has won award after award over a long period. The entire computer industry recognizes it as the most sophisticated fax software for the Windows environment. At least until today, that is.

Of course, as a fax software Winfax Pro will enable you to send a fax using your PC and your modem -- and therefore without your printer and fax machine. It will also enable you to receive incoming faxes and store them on your hard disk. You can schedule the events, i.e., when your faxes should be transmitted so that you can keep your phone bill down. You can set up Winfax so that it automatically lets you know if a fax comes in by playing a sound file that you can choose yourself.

Winfax Pro also has modules that let you create phonebooks, design your cover pages, scan and automatically recognize your incoming faxes with a built-in OCR and save it in popular file formats, such as Ami Pro, WordPerfect, WordStar, and, of course, ASCII. A file in these formats do not gobble up as much as storage space as a fax image file does. To send out faxes, you can also scan printed documents from within Winfax Pro if you have a scanner attached to your PC.

You can attach documents created in any Windows-application, such as Winword or Ami Pro, to your fax, so that your recipient -- as long as he's also running Winfax Pro on his end -- can receive a copy of the file in exactly the same format for the same application. These files will be transmitted in the binary format, though. So, for instance, I can fax my research report that I did in WordPerfect 6.0 and my colleague will receive the file that he can immediately load into his own WordPerfect 6.0.

For SOHOs, Winfax Pro's most welcomed feature is perhaps its ability to send faxes to multiple recipients without requiring attendance. It's the cost-efficient way of sending out faxed flyers. What we need to do is prepare the list of the recipients, prepare the pages to be faxed, set the time of operation, and leave the PC and the modem on until the job is completed. Then you can look at the Send Log to see which of your intended recipients failed to receive the fax.

We can also set the program to repeat transmission attempt as many times as we wish, so that it will automatically redial the number each time it fails to transmit the fax.

We can create a new list by entering all the names we want to include in it and save it under the name that we give. Or, if we already have a database of names and fax numbers, we can just import it into Winfax Pro's phonebook.

If we have more than one hundred names in the phonebook, Winfax Pro requires us to distribute them into groups before adding them to the list of recipients for every fax job.

Winfax Pro comes with a gaggle of pre-designed cover pages. Chances are you'll find just what you need to spice up your communication from its collection of cover pages.

Choose the time

If you use Winfax Pro to fax out your promotion flyer, you should set the fax to start sending the fax at 5 p.m. at the earliest and to stop at 8 a.m., so that you can be sure the telephone line will be free during office hours. Besides, based on PT Telkom's policy, the phone charge is lower during this time -- one pulse lasts three minutes, while during peak hours (9 a.m. to 3 p.m.) one pulse lasts only two minutes.

In my experience, a fax with one full page of graphics normally takes between 3 minutes 10 seconds to over 9 minutes to transmit. The long transmission time occurs when the fax transmission speed can only reach 4800 BPS, perhaps because the phone line condition is bad or because the fax equipment on the other end is an old one. Based on this, we can calculate that each fax will cost us at least two pulses, or Rp 220 for a full page of graphics and standard resolution. Text pages take less time to fax, about 2 minutes per page, and will cost you Rp 110 to transmit during off-peak hours (3 p.m. to 9 p.m.). Based on these figures, you can easily calculate how much your fax promotion campaign will cost.

If you need to scan a graphics artwork to be faxed, make sure that the resolution of the scanned image matches the fax capability, which is 200 by 200 for the "Fine" resolution or 200 by 100 for the "Standard" resolution. You can also import graphics files in popular format such as .PCX, .TIF, and .BMP.

New versions

I have learned that scanning artwork with black and white half tone yields a sufficiently clear and crisp fax although transmitted in the standard resolution. Interestingly, the fax viewer also has tools to touch up and clean up bitmap graphics, namely a brush and an eraser.

The version I looked at is the stand-alone Winfax Pro 4.0. Delrina, a company that I mentioned when I reviewed notify! paging software, also had a network version that allows us to send and retrieve faxes through a networked fax/modem.

Winfax Pro 4.0 is also sold in a bundle called Communication Suite 2.1. The package contains, besides the formidable fax software, a communication program called Wincomm Pro. However, this extra is not as spectacular as the fax core.

If you don't have a scanner but you have to scan printed documents to be faxed, Delrina also sells Winfax Scanner. The space-saving scanner, made by Fujitsu, connects to your PC through its parallel port, and you connect your printer to another parallel port on the scanner.

Now, to satisfy the users' insatiable hunger for Windows 95 software, Delrina has already launched Winfax Pro 7.0. New to this version is the capability to fax grayscale, which we couldn't do with earlier versions. In addition, as it is a 32-bit software running in Win 95 environment, it is fully multitasking. Unlike its predecessors, it will keep on sending faxes in the background without slowing down your PC and regularly stopping you in your work.

One thing to remember, though. When you fax your flyer to somebody, you'll be using up his fax paper, which he has to buy. So, it's extremely important to select your recipients carefully to make sure the information in your flyer is useful to him. Besides, never send out faxes that are not socially and ethically acceptable. Please.