Fax ad companies hanging on as ‘underdog’ in digital era

Sam Ayoub knows a thing or two about making money in an unlikely place.

He has been convincing companies for the last 24 years to drop cash on a marketing medium from a previous era: fax advertising.

Ayoub and his InFax business operate seven offices across Canada that fire off more than 60 million faxes a year for clients advertising everything from events and financing services to travel packages and education seminars.

He knows his firm and others like it are “the underdog.”

Their missives sometimes spit out of machines that are covered with a thick layer of dust in a digital era where reaching a wide audience can now be done with a few clicks and amplified even further via email and social media.

Still, Ayoub believes his business is surviving due to his ability to deliver messages right to the heart of offices and avoiding the main trouble of online advertising: the human tendency to scroll past it.

“The perception is getting higher that fax broadcasting is irrelevant,” Ayoub admitted. “Clients have tried many marketing tools in order to get some returns. They always come back to fax broadcast because the returns are still there.”

InFax’s website shows it charges 30 cents a page when a customer is sending 200 to 400 faxes, but the rate drops as low as two cents a page for clients sending 100,000 faxes or more.

By contrast, you can run campaigns on Facebook and Twitter for as little as a few dollars, though reaching a larger or more targeted audience can be more expensive.

The strength of the content and the frequency with which someone encounters it determines the effectiveness of an ad, though it can be hard to track results because of the absence of clicks and analytics.

However, Ayoub suspects clients are still finding returns because he has customers who pour considerable money into a campaign every week or month.

David Soberman, a University of Toronto marketing professor, said direct mail and traditional media advertising have been hit hard by the digital era, but fax marketers have suffered mainly because reliance on fax machines has dwindled at offices outside the health care and legal professions.