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Customer project

Fax Communication Reimagined:
From Legacy Process to Personalised 1:1 Communication
with Marketing Automation

The solution modernises a historically grown fax process and simultaneously uses it as a bridge into digital communication.
Email-to-fax, reporting, list cleansing, landing pages and targeted channel migration transform an inflexible dispatch channel into a controllable transformation lever for better data quality, lower costs and more future-proof customer communication.

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Business Activity

The company is a specialist wholesaler for plumbing, heating and building services technology with 58 locations, primarily in south-west Germany and the eastern federal states. With over 150 years of experience, it supports skilled tradespeople, planners and property developers with a broad product range, personal consultancy and strong logistics. With more than 85,000 stocked items and around 1,980 employees, it ranks among the leading providers in the HVAC wholesale sector.

“With the new solution we were able to significantly professionalise a very labour-intensive and opaque fax process. Particularly valuable for us is the fact that we can now trace deliveries, cleanse data more precisely and at the same time successfully migrate many customers to the email channel. This saves us effort and costs and makes our communication as a whole considerably more future-proof.”

Head of Marketing

The Project in Detail

Application

For the company, a system for modernising fax communication was implemented on the basis of an email marketing solution. The aim was to technically simplify a historically grown, manual and barely measurable fax process, make it more transparent, and progressively evolve it towards digital email communication.

The solution operates on two levels: on the one hand, an email-to-fax gateway was introduced through which fax messages can be created and sent directly from the familiar editor of the email marketing solution. On the other hand, fax communication was used strategically to actively migrate existing customers to the email channel. In this way, not only was an existing communication channel made more efficient, but the foundation for a sustainable channel migration was laid at the same time.

Starting point

The original fax process was associated with considerable manual effort. Campaigns and product information were manually composed as faxes and sent via a mail-merge-style function. This not only tied up staff time but also blocked the computer in use for extended periods. At the same time, there was no reporting whatsoever, making it impossible to determine whether faxes had been delivered successfully or had gone unanswered.

Added to this was the fact that, while fax continued to be used functionally in customers' day-to-day operations, the overall process was inefficient and difficult to control by today's standards: trade businesses would print incoming offers, display them at the counter, record orders by hand and then fax them back. For the company, this meant high dispatch volumes, low transparency and virtually no scope for data-driven optimisation.

This was particularly evident in the sheer scale of fax communication: at times the dispatch volume reached up to 50,000 faxes per week. It was therefore clear that not only a technical improvement to the existing process was required, but also a strategic reduction of the channel itself.

Solution

An email-to-fax solution was implemented in which fax messages are no longer created separately but are instead composed directly as emails in the familiar editor. This email is sent to a special destination address of the service provider, which automatically converts the content into a print-optimised document and then delivers it as a fax.

A key functional detail is the visual assistance in the editor: a red line already indicates during composition at which point a page break will occur for the recipient. This allows the subsequent fax layout to be editorially controlled with far greater precision. The solution is complemented by the service provider's dashboard with detailed reporting on delivery and error patterns. Delivery failures and fax bounces are made visible, so that faulty or outdated recipient data can be targeted for cleansing and dispatch costs can be better controlled.

In parallel, the company launched a targeted fax migration campaign in January 2025. Via QR codes, recipients were directed to a landing page with a form to switch from fax to email communication. In this way, the technical solution was directly linked to an active migration strategy.

  • Email-to-fax gateway with editor integration
  • Visual page-break marker in the editor
  • Reporting dashboard for delivery, errors and bounces
  • Cleansing of faulty and outdated fax numbers
  • QR-code-based migration campaign to the email channel
  • Landing page and form for permission capture
Benefits

With the new solution the company was able to significantly professionalise a historically labour-intensive fax process while simultaneously laying the foundation for its drastic reduction. Instead of manual fax creation, lack of transparency and high dispatch volumes, a considerably more efficient, controllable and modern communication process is now available.

  • Significantly reduced manual effort in creating and sending fax campaigns
  • No more blocked workstations due to long-running fax batch processes
  • Clear transparency over delivery, errors and undeliverable recipients
  • Better data quality through cleansing of faulty fax numbers
  • Better cost control in fax dispatch
  • Successful migration of part of the communication to the email channel
  • Use of landing pages and forms as an instrument of channel migration
  • More future-proof customer communication with a higher degree of digitalisation
Business Impact

The setup described above delivers the following operational and economic improvements for the company:

0%Reduction in fax volume during peak periods – from previously 50,000 faxes per week
0-0%Less manual effort in creating and sending fax-based campaigns
0Faxes in the last dispatch after the migration campaign – compared to up to 50,000 per week previously
Further benefits
Effectively near-complete replacement of regular mass fax dispatches
Elimination of technical blockages caused by long-running fax batch processes
Significantly lower wastage and dispatch costs through bounce transparency and list cleansing
Full reporting capability for a previously barely measurable communication channel
Better exploitation of digital follow-up potential through landing page, form and email-based communication

Particularly telling is the development of the dispatch volume: whereas up to 50,000 faxes per week were sent at times previously, after the migration campaign launched only a single, smaller fax dispatch of 2,700 items went out. This shows that not merely a process was optimised, but a cost-intensive communication channel was strategically wound down.

Strategic Value

With this solution the company has not only modernised an inefficient legacy process, but has taken an important step towards digital customer communication. The combination of email-to-fax, reporting, forms and targeted channel migration demonstrates how even traditional communication channels can be systematically transformed without abruptly disrupting existing customer processes.

The particular strategic value lies in the fact that the fax channel was not optimised in isolation, but used as a bridge technology to gradually migrate customers to more efficient digital forms of communication. In this way, an inflexible dispatch process was transformed into a controllable transformation lever for better data quality, lower costs and more future-proof communication.

Business Impact

The setup described above delivers the following operational and economic improvements for the company:

0%Reduction in fax volume during peak periods – from previously 50,000 faxes per week
0-0%Less manual effort in creating and sending fax-based campaigns
0Faxes in the last dispatch after the migration campaign – compared to up to 50,000 per week previously
Further benefits
Effectively near-complete replacement of regular mass fax dispatches
Elimination of technical blockages caused by long-running fax batch processes
Significantly lower wastage and dispatch costs through bounce transparency and list cleansing
Full reporting capability for a previously barely measurable communication channel
Better exploitation of digital follow-up potential through landing page, form and email-based communication

Particularly telling is the development of the dispatch volume: whereas up to 50,000 faxes per week were sent at times previously, after the migration campaign launched only a single, smaller fax dispatch of 2,700 items went out. This shows that not merely a process was optimised, but a cost-intensive communication channel was strategically wound down.

Strategic Value

With this solution the company has not only modernised an inefficient legacy process, but has taken an important step towards digital customer communication. The combination of email-to-fax, reporting, forms and targeted channel migration demonstrates how even traditional communication channels can be systematically transformed without abruptly disrupting existing customer processes.

The particular strategic value lies in the fact that the fax channel was not optimised in isolation, but used as a bridge technology to gradually migrate customers to more efficient digital forms of communication. In this way, an inflexible dispatch process was transformed into a controllable transformation lever for better data quality, lower costs and more future-proof communication.