eMerge. The Dragon. Together these two Macintosh applications may sound like a forgotten Bruce Lee classic, but in fact they've teamed up to fight quite a different battle, the struggle for customer loyalty on the World Wide Web.
The Dragon
The Dragon 5.0, from Waves in Motion, is the latest version of their FileMaker Pro solution that lets anyone create, publish, and tabulate simple or sophisticated online surveys. In addition to being great Web-traffic generators, online surveys can provide any business with a simple barometer of their customers' concerns and opinions, and the information they need to make their important decisions.
eMerge
eMerge 1.6 is the new version of the e-mail application from Galleon Software that lets you create an e-mail form letter, customize it automatically for everyone on your mailing list, and send it directly to their Internet mail servers. Product announcements. Passwords. Invoices. eMerge sends its messages directly to each customer, one at a time, personally and privately.
The Dragon lets you publish your survey on the Web or restrict it to people with the appropriate user IDs and passwords, and eMerge is just the thing to distribute these codes and invite these selected customers to participate. Or announce your survey with an eMerge press release and follow up personally with the people who respond.
Galleon Software and Waves in Motion are at Macworld Expo next week, demonstrating the power of this new desktop marketing bundle to pull in the customers and to keep the ones you already have. Pay them a visit at Booth 378 and check out their other e-commerce tools including the new oAzium plug-in which builds fast, online credit card authorization into your existing FileMaker Pro transaction systems.
You may even find your fortune, cookie.