iContact – Email Marketing Reviews

iContact Review - 9/8/2010 09:52 AM

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iContact Review - Silver

Website: http://www.icontact.com
Year Founded: 2002
Location: North Carolina

Phone Support : Yes
Email Support : Yes
Live Chat : Yes

Overall User rating -
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Summary:

iContact provides so many great features at a great price. They have plenty of features that sets them apart from the rest of the Email Marketing crowd.

Highlights:

The main thing that sets iContact apart from all other vendors is how many features they provide for the user all at a great price. The service starts at only $9.95 per month for lists of up to 500 subscribers. This cost varies with the number of contacts, going up to $699 per month for 100,000 subscribers.

The user has the opportunity to create surveys and auto-responders, as well as use their RSS feeds at no additional charge.

Survey results can be viewed in real-time with response graphs. This encourages two-way communication between you and your customers, and can be very beneficial in getting important feedback.

The auto-responder sends out automatic messages at pre-determined intervals. The user can pre-schedule the messages and the auto-responder helps to send the series of message over time. The auto-responder is great for staying in touch with your clients and keeping your brand in their minds.

iContact also provides the user with an effective Spam Checker. The Spam Check which will help you check all emails for spam before sending your campaign. It will scan emails subject lines and content to determine the likelihood that the messages will end up in clients' junk boxes. This saves the user time and money, while making creating the optimal likelihood that emails that are sent out will be emails that are also viewed.

Some other great tools offered by iContact include segmenting your subscriber list according to the demographic parameters that the user chooses. For example, if the user wanted to send an email to those on their list between the ages of 25 and 35, the system will help separate these people from an existing list and send a personalized campaign to them. The user also has the option to manage and filter their list of subscribers on all sorts of criteria, including 13 standard fields, and any other custom fields you wish to segment by.

iContact also offers a larger variety template selection. They have over 300 HTML email templates made available to the user.

The user will be able to effectively monitor and have reports on the campaigns sent out with easy to read tables and charts. The data can easily be exported into other forms, and will help track the effectiveness of the campaigns. Their provide extra information in the form of conversion rates and read receipts.

Apart from the general knowledgebase, iContact includes video tutorials, live webinars and an extensive selection of articles and additional resources like a company blog and newsletter. Live support is available over the phone, through email, and even over live chat.

Something that no other company does (although many have this product currently in development) is text based SMS marketing. This will allow the user to send text messages to their user’s, A great additional way to keep up brand awareness.

iContact offers a generous affiliate program with up to $300 for each referral to the service, or 25% of the referrals' monthly subscription fees for as long as they use the program.

Criticism:

iContact has so many fantastic features, and few points of criticism:

iContact’s pages are slow to load. This can be frustrating for users.
They don’t offer much in the way of image storage and hosting. iContact supports only 1/2 mb (500kb) for online image storage.
iContact receives a higher than normal critical reviews from their customers. By searching for customer feedback one is inundated with negative feedback.
Although the Support community is a great concept it appears to be more of a "content blog" where people can post content on various topics completely unrelated to email marketing. Seems more suited to help iContact gain traction in search results.
As a free trial iContact offers VERY little. The free trial lasts paltry 15-days. Plus they only allow you to send to 50 email addresses. This is no-where near to what their competitors offer.

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Recent Customer Comments

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I found this product really good and simple to use..
-- Trevor Lancaster , Vancouver

Real good for everything I needed to do..
-- Morgan Lester , Memphis

easy to use, does the job well..
-- Bradly Morgans , Pittsburgh

Love it!..
-- Stephanie Madison , San Francisco

I found this tool exceptionally helpful..
-- Amy Tannen , New York

iContact Review