Business Sales & Marketing

It is very rare that I come across a product that actually saves me money, but this is exactly what Data Ferret does. Most products make me more productive, but having used this for the last few months, I have calculated to have saved my company around �

It is very rare that I come across a product that actually saves me money, but this is exactly what Data Ferret does. Most products make me more productive, but having used this for the last few months, I have calculated to have saved my company around �5000 so far. This is because I have been looking to buy lists of companies for my target market (I sell software for advertising management for publishers), and my total bill for each mailing was going to be around �2k - but I could only use the data once, which was a real rip off. Half the data was out of date anyway so I was pouring money down the drain.

Since I started using Data Ferret, my marketing budget has been slashed by about 90%. It is so easy to use and almost weekly a new version is being released with extra goodies which are free. The latest version now allows me to do automated searches where I just set up details of the categories I want to search for and the locations that I need to look in, and it goes off and does the rest - very cool! It also has a built in customer relation module which allows you to clean the data and add more information to it as well as a nifty de duplicator to remove companies who have slightly different names but at the same address. Abbreviations such as Rd, St, Ave etc are all automatically converted to their correct names and it is even intelligent enough to be able to split address lines where the website simply puts the whole address on one line!

One very nice feature is that it is now available as an add-on to my own program, so my customers can search for marketing data and the results go straight into my own application. Not only is this facility free to me, but it also allows me to earn commission by adding it to my app!

They have also built in an affiliation program. I have already covered the cost of the program, which is very cheap for what it does in the first place!

I also like the fact that I can contact the developers directly. When I first started using Data Ferret, there was a problem with it communicating with it's server through my router. Their head developer came out to my site and we got it sorted and they didn't even charge for it as they said it highlighted a problem which they have now resolved. Now that is what I call service!

New websites are being added all the time. I currently use the UK yellow pages Yell.com, but I will soon need to use the USA and Canadian versions which are now available.

I would certainly recommend this program to anyone who needs to dramatically cut the cost of their marketing budget.