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GIVE YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGNS A NEW CHANCE WITH HQ RESOLUTION ONLINE FAXING

Direct marketing might overlook faxing because of the prejudice that fax image quality is not good enough for reaching the target audience. This is an assessment that Popfax is ready to challenge. If one picks the right design for the message’s image, uses the Popfax image processing algorithm to transform it into black and white, and Popfax’s high quality professional faxing equipment, the result can reach an astonishing quality. The proof is in the image...

As many Christmas wishes received via online fax during the Popfax winter contest have shown, faxes sent by Popfax can reach astonishing quality. Faxing can therefore be an excellent means of direct marketing for information based on fine quality images.

A frequent prejudice is that fax image quality is not good enough for direct marketing campaigns. Popfax demonstrates that faxing is not only still alive in companies, not only one of the few direct marketing media that manages a rate of almost 100% read messages, but also that faxing (properly used within the Popfax environment) is the proper media for sending your high quality campaign images.

Digital document content can vary from plain text to image-only, and everything in between. Popfax provides its customers with the possibility to choose the most appropriate fax conversion depending on the content. When sending faxes, customers can choose between two document conversion modes:

"Black & white thresholding": This option is more adapted to text content, so that the readability of the text is improved.

"Grey and colors dithering": This document conversion algorithm renders colors and greyscale via black and white dot patterns with different densities, retaining the look and feel of colors and gray zones for pictures and logos, but at the price of reduced text readability.

As these two options are exclusive of each other, the overall fax content design might have to be be optimized for either one or the other of the conversion algorithms

Fax is a negotiated protocol, so quality in terms of image resolution depends on the capabilities of the sender’s and of the receiver’s equipment: the initial discussion between the two fax machines picks the highest resolution within the set of mutual capabilities. From this perspective, Popfax fax servers provide the highest level of standards and compatibility with all types of receiving fax machines.

By default, Popfax sends in fine resolution. Fine mode fax is 204 x 196 dpi.

If the receiver has the same resolution available, they will receive the fax in fine resolution. If the receiver can only receive in low/normal resolution, then they will receive their fax in low/normal resolution.

For text messages we recommend our clients to use the "Black & White thresholding" method, which is the default option. However, for the needs of a specific campaign you might need to fax a detailed photo or image. In this case, use "Grey & Colors dithering", but expect the fax to take longer to transmit than average. To lower the sending time, try to optimize your content to keep the image weight (after conversion) below 50KB. An estimated transmission time is given at conversion in the accounts of Popfax Faxmailers.

Below is a real example of fax conversion using "Grey and colors dithering" sent via the Popfax web interface.

Original colored image:

The resulting fax document:

Nearly 100% of companies are equipped with fax machines, which makes fax mailing a universal B2B direct marketing resource, and potentially the most efficient! About 98 % of faxes received are read, as there are no (or very few) anti-spam filters. You can use fax mailings to broadcast information to your existing clients (newsletters, launches of new features, surveys, etc.) or to search for new potential clients (by running a seasonal promotion, for example).

So, do not give up on fax marketing because of incorrect information. Have a look at Popfax fax mailing offers and tools, and launch your Valentine or Easter campaigns.

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Popfax tutorials: now even more!

8 tutorials were collected by Popfax in their latest publication. Here are couple of them:

How to setup your fax cover page

In your Popfax account access the "Account management" page;

Review and edit the cover page fields that are filled by default with the information you have inserted in the "Customer details" section;

Insert your cover page Header logo in place of the default Popfax.com logo;

Save custom changes;

You can insert a cover page on your fax by checking the box "Insert cover page" while adding files to be sent by fax from the web interface or send a fax email to [email protected].

How to send a fax online from your web browser

Access www.popfax.com from any Internet Browser on your computer.

Login to your Popfax account.

Click on the "Send a fax" section from the "My account" area.

Select destination fax numbers from your Contact book or type in the destination numbers in the international format.

Select documents to fax (you can send up to 3 documents at once).

Select the quality of your fax: black and white thresholding (with improved readability) or grey and colors dithering (to render grey zones of pictures and logos). Optionally you can add a Cover Page or/and send as a Registered Fax.

Click on the "Preview / Send" button, wait a fiew seconds until your document is converted.

After you review, select "I agree to send the fax" and send the fax.

You will receive notifications for each fax delivery. The fax history can be tracked from your online account.

How to use the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature in your faxes

Enable the OCR feature in your Popfax.com account settings and select its language.

Download and open a fax from your Popfax Inbox.

All your inbound faxes in PDF format are converted from image to text format, and the related keywords are inserted into the "keywords" field of your PDF document's properties.

You can easily search any fax stored on your PC by related keywords.

The OCR feature identifies all the textual content of a fax (which is actually an image file) and converts it to selectable text. Therefore, fax content can be easily copied, pasted and reused. The OCR feature works for all languages (18) in use in the countries where Popfax is present.

The rest of tutorials on fax mail can be seen on Popfax official site or seen on Youtube - http://www.youtube.com/user/Popfaxcom?feature=watch

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Be the fist to check lasets Popfax updates!

Recently increased capacity of Popfax system was finally announced by the faxing provider. The upgrade was full: all parts of Popfax system were improved in order to receive the best quality.

Today Popfax announced that in a couple of days, at the beginning of October, it plans a full system upgrade to cope with the growth of its customer base, which numbers increased to more than 50,000 individual and corporate users. Popfax.com is a leading global provider of internet fax services. It allows end-users to send and receive internet fax using the web interface, an e-mail client or other productivity fax tools. Popfax.com is an online solution for both individual professionals (SMEs and SoHos) and for corporate customers who meet their communication needs by our outsourced solutions. Benefit from a 24/7 highly redundant internet fax service. For this there will be more than doubled Computer power, Memory and Data Storage capacity in order to palpably improve the quality, reliability and speed of the fax service in the future. The Popfax service was built as a highly redundant system. The hardware supporting every function is duplicated at least once, and the core services platform is hosted in two different places, belonging to two different infrastructure providers (no common energy, no common IP transit, etc.). This high availability results in high Quality of Service (QoS) commitments for corporate clients. Nevertheless, Popfax has informed its clients that they could experience short outages of a few minutes (when servers are restarted and swapped) and, more likely, delays or slow-downs in service delivery while the server capacity is temporarily removed, in order to be upgraded. On this subject the founder of the company, Vladimir Popesco, said: "Our customers deserve reliable and fully functional fax services. This is the reason we pay so much attention to scaling up to meet customer demand, and in constantly improving our system redundancy, security and ergonomics" Popfax recommended that customers with forthcoming mass fax operations plan them outside of this maintenance window whenever possible. As soon as this upgrade is completed, fax processing speed will be substantially increased, fax conversion will be at least 10 times faster and Popfax customers will have faster access to their data. It is hoped that this measure will help increasing business to business fax communication at least by 30%. Source: http://www.popfax.com/news

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Faxing from mobile phone

Turn your mobile phone in a faxing machine

As I’m often in need to send a fax when I’m out of home, I like that Popfax has a mobile app. Saw a new article on their site)

Life is becoming more and more mobile: In 2013 a smartphone can be almost a PC. Thanks to mobile technology, the fax machine is also going mobile, allowing users to fax documents anytime and anywhere.

If you need to do faxing from your mobile phone, you can install the Popcompanion app from iTunes, Google Play or Blackberry Marketplace.

Now you can take pictures with the smartphone’s built-in camera and fax them at once. In other words, your mobile device becomes a real fax machine: scan the pages of a document one after the other with your smartphone’s camera and send the resulting assembled document to your fax correspondent.

The integrated image processor in Popcompanion adjusts the photo and converts it into a faxable black & white document. As soon as you have taken a picture, you can rotate it 90 degrees, adjust the page size by dragging the document margins and approve it for sending. After you review the conversion to black & white, you can add as many photographed pages as you need. Popcompanion will interpret it as a single fax document with multiple pages. Faxes are sent immediately.

In addition to this unique scan to fax feature, Popcompanion is another window into your Popfax account, with a user-friendly interface in several languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, etc) which allows you:

To view your sent/received faxes, SMS, voice mails.

To manage your contacts and groups of contacts.

To use the Popfax contacts or your device contacts to send faxes, SMS, etc.

Popcompanion also offers a customizable cover page that can be attached to your documents to give them a more professional feel.

To use this app, you need to subscribe to the Popfax fax service, which offers a Free Fax Trial allowing you to send up to 4 fax pages and to receive an unlimited number of faxes. After that, you can choose from different faxing offers (which provide even more features than the mobile application: registered fax, personalized fax sending, fax mailing offers, fax number portability, corporate fax offers, etc.).

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Online Fax Evolution: from Web Fax to Fax Cloud

In 21st century Fax messaging entered on a new stage of development, capturing the advanced Internet technologies.

When Internet became quite popular, a new option called Internet fax or Web fax appeared. This allowed users to send fax without any special devices such as fax machines. Faxing kept its core, but its appearance changed and its effectiveness had increased. Online fax messages appeared to be:

·         faster as Internet is faster that a phone line connected to a fax machine;

·         cheaper as there’s no need in things like ink, paper, fax machine, additional phone line. Due to the same reasons, online fax is –

·         good for environment;

·         accessible in any place where Internet can be found;

·         available for mobile devices such as smart phones and tabs;

·         secure as messages end up in user’s mail box and are not kept in fax machine out-tray.

Initially there was used a special software allowing user to send fax from his computer. Lately there appeared a possibility to receive faxes on a web mail, and online faxing became even more popular. Fax to email and email to fax could be easily used with default mail clients and therefore became very conscious.

Actually the largest companies on the planet, like Google and Microsoft, are leveraging the cloud to offer the most advanced mobile applications and various cloud services. All these moments drive hundreds of businesses into the cloud, and imply the need of cloud faxing solutions. The cloud faxing is the future of IP faxing. Demand created supply, and in a short time the mobile faxing was implemented. Today anyone could install a simple cloud application to his smartphone and receive fax anywhere and anytime.

Different companies appeared to provide online faxing services, such as Popfax. Now, the online faxing services are really at a very high level, and the users can choose among different offers the most suitable tariffs and a packs to obtain maximum benefit.