Handles contacts, e-mails, press releases, more

Behind every successful product sold on the Internet, there is a certain amount of marketing. It can be as simple as good word-of-mouth, but the word has to start somewhere -- and getting a product or service to the attention of market influencers can be difficult. Excel Software offers a path to automating some or all of the most common Internet marketing activities with MarketBuddy v3, just released for Mac and Windows. The program handles contacts, e-mail lists, press releases, trial software distribution and business forms, and v3 adds support for up to 600,000 records.

Contact records benefit from the new version, not only supporting many more records but also gaining the ability to manage large groups of contacts, as well as building and cleaning e-mail distribution lists. It also now supports multiple users and data files. Contacts can be configured with custom fields, checkboxes and radio buttons, as well as be combined with form creation or printing features. Contacts can be assigned to any number of groups for easy targeting of select market segments.

The program can gather contact data from e-mail parsing, or collected from automated web forms or imported from any spreadsheet or database. MarketBuddy can also simplify the process of posting press releases to various sites, uploading trialware, publishing white papers and updating product directories. The software uses "ClickField" technology to transfer data values into the appropriate entry fields on web pages, dramatically reducing the amount of typing needed.

MarketBuddy runs on any version of Mac OS X (10.1 or higher) on both PPC and Intel Macs, or Windows machines running Windows XP or higher. The program costs $195 for the standard edition and $395 for the pro edition (which features custom forms, ClickField collections, web form creation and multiple databases). A free trial download can be obtained from the website, and site licenses are available as well.

by MacNN Staff