FAXING ON THE INTERNET PAYS OFF BIG!

EKHO SMS Pays for itself in one good day!

Ingenious EKHO SMS Mailing Manager provides a VERY efficient marketing contact tool!

Very Clever Mover screen allows user to easily select what criteria to use for the e-mail, labels, envelopes or faxing.

JAN. 12/2000 by Elton Hammond, Manager of The EKHO Institute

• In Late December I was approached by an Internet Fax Services company, EFSC, an International Internet Faxing service, to try out their new service, risk free ....... free of charge for a 2 month period!!  They were extremely generous, offering a $2,000.00 credit on our new account to try them out.  They have just changed their rates to a flat $0.20 per page for North America, so this works out to a fantastic 10,000 pages to be used up!  After installing their free, easy to use software in December, we decided to modify the EKHO School Management System to produce the necessary text-based, fax phone list file for their fax broadcast service.  My past experience doing this with Winfax Pro fax broadcasts were extremely poor with a lot of lost time, crashes and tying up a computer and phone line for DAYS!

• After some brief and successful testing I went for a "real test drive" with a very small selective data base of about 1300 local fax numbers, on Jan. 11/2000 and had the following very positive experience.

  • Producing a simple 1 page flyer to promote our training courses and web site took only about 5 minutes in Microsoft Word.

  • Producing the simple Fax Phone Number Text file to attach to the document and sending off by e-mail took only seconds in EKHO's School Management System. 

  • Importing the Fax numbers into the EFSC software also took only a few trouble free seconds.

  • The fax broadcast was completed by EFSC in just a few hours compared to days in the past with Winfax!

  • We quickly found out which fax numbers were expired with their very clear return report and customer faxbacks.

  • We can now update our student data base to reflect expired and changed fax numbers.

  • We picked up some new names passed on by thoughtful colleagues for future e-mailings.

  • All of these new students used EKHO's web page to check our current schedule, prices, course outlines and to register themselves in, requiring no time from our staff at all!!  All of these are posted to our web site from automatically generated HTML files by the EKHO SMS software.

  • EKHO's staff effort at the end was to produce the automatic invoices and support documents with EKHO SMS taking another 10 minutes to get into the envelope, fax a confirmation copy and send a confirming e-mail.

  • Traditionally we would have taken a phone call, noted addresses, mailed out a catalogue and waited days to weeks for them to choose from the catalogue what class to take.

  • NOW for the REAL Benefit!  We picked up over $6,500 in new business today from this effort that took only about 17 minutes of our time at the absolute maximum and had no direct cash outlay!  Great return for a very small effort and I expect the following days will bring even more for this same fax broadcast, based on past marketing campaigns!!

   

• The exact same selective broadcast service can be done with totally free e-mail using EKHO's School Management System Software, Mail Manager feature.  The reason we did not use e-mail broadcasting for this particular instance was to reach all the customers for whom we don't have an e-mail address.  We have been collecting e-mail addresses now for about 15 months and are finding in excess of 95% of new students and callers now have e-mail addresses.  This will, and is, making the future and present situation; VERY, VERY efficient for us!

If you have any questions about our EKHO SMS software, marketing efforts or the Internet Fax service, feel free to contact Elton Hammond at The EKHO Institute by phone (613) 822-6935 or e-mail.