Easiest & Most comprehensive Mail Marketing tool
iContact’s main to goal is to incorporate sophisticated features into a simple, easy to use and affordable package. Although many programs attempt to achieve this balance, iContact does so incredibly well.
Great User Interface
iContact is able to do this because of their great user interface, which allows new email marketers hit the ground running with basic features, but also makes it simple for the more experienced to access the features they need. Either way, iContact has created an awesome product, which is why over 50,000 customers currently use iContact.
Basic Features You’ll Love
iContact makes it easy for new email marketers to get in the game quickly:
- Inexpensive: just under $10/month to start!
- Over 300 professionally designed email templates make your emails look professional
- Schedule your messages to be distributed in the future to help save time
- Their system automatically makes sure your emails won’t be flagged as SPAM, so your users will always get your emails.
- Track what your subscribers do with your emails, so you know how well your newsletters are being received.
- Event RSVP tracking
- Distribute surveys easily
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Advanced Features You’ll Love
Professional email marketers also get everything they need to manage their bulk email lists:
- Quickly segment your email list to customize which subscriber types get certain emails
- Set-up autoresponders to help automate your email campaigns
- iContact maintains a detailed history of subscriber actions to help you customize your campaigns
- Design and upload your own email templates
- Unlimited number of email lists
Downside: iContact’s Support Hours
The only downside to iContact is the hours they are available to call. Support is not 24×7, but from 8am to 8pm EST. However, their support staff is very helpful, and many times you will find that it’s actually easier to use their online knowledge base, which has video demonstrations and step-by-step instructions to help you with everything you need.
iContact Pricing
With iContact’s pricing, you only pay for the amount of emails you are going to send, which means that you can start off with an inexpensive plan and pay more only when you know that your newsletter is successful. Plus, iContact is one of the most affordable email marketing providers available.
| Contacts | Monthly |
|---|---|
| 250 | $9.95 |
| 500 | $14.00 |
| 1000 | $19.00 |
| 2500 | $29.00 |
| 5000 | $47.00 |
| 10000 | $74.00 |
| 15000 | $109.00 |
| 25000 | $149.00 |
| 35000 | $239.00 |
| 50000 | $379.00 |
| 75000 | $529.00 |
| 100000 | $699.00 |
Is It Right For You?
Because of its features and ease of use, iContact is best for both new email marketers just getting started as well as advanced email marketers who have years of experience. However, if you are a Fortune 500 company or have an extremely large email list (over 100,000 subscribers), iContact probably isn’t right for you.
Basically, iContact has everything you will need to run successful email marketing campaigns.
Bwahaha, slowest, not user friendly, lying, expensive Email marketer I ever used.
Fool some other people mate. Obviuosly you have no clue about email marketing.
Just my 2 cents.
Thanks for your comment. My experience from writing my own software to using email software like iContact is a vast difference. I’m not entirely sure as why you’re saying they’re slow as a mail release of 23000+ people usually finishes in a few minutes. The only issues I’ve ever had with them is if I import a big list of emails which they require proof of consent that I could add it (had to make 1 or 2 changes to the website opt-in which I worked on)
That and I’ve never had issues with my emails being blocked at all, whereas with 1 other provider (and including my own software) was easily blacklisted without a seconds notice. I guess your experience with using this is quite different from mine, I’ve been working through them since 2008 and recommended these to my clients who are much happier now that their subscriber base is actually getting the email marketing they do send out. And if I’m not mistaken (and this is also my 2cents) the most important thing for any email marketing venture is that the email eventually lands up in the users’ in-box not so?
So yes, I’d love it for you to actually show me proof of how slow, not user friendly, lying (?) and expensive they are compared to other software which would most likely get you blacklisted quite quickly or can’t guarantee email delivery at all…
I have to agree. Icontact is not the best Email Marketing solution out there.
I have been with many Email Marketing Providers. Have been blacklisted left, center and right, even with Icontact. Thats not the point though.
There are many local providers offering better rates.
When it comes to delivery, they all talk rubbish. Sure, I can send out plain text emails and my delivery rate is almost a 100%, but if it comes to html, most servers block those emails due to content (soft bounce).
I would only recommend Icontact when sending 2k or less per month. There are by far more advanced systems than Incontact. The last provider I signed up with promised me a send through rate of 60k mails per hour. They kept their promise. Also, their price is far below Icontacts price.
For eg. Local prices for 1k mails range from R69-R99
10k mails range from R269-R339
100k mails range from R1140-R2499 and so on.
Thanks for the comment. I send through HTML based emails regularly with iContact, and as I mentioned, to 23000+ per week (I have 4-6 mail shots that go out per month with that user base)
Using their spam checking tool I can immediately see what SpamAssassin (the most widely used spam blocker) would say in terms of points, I usually get successful mail shots with a rating as high as 2.5
I can’t remember ever having to deal with queries about not receiving the mails or having one of the mail servers blacklisted (which I check often) so I’m not sure what type of emails you send out to get an entire server blacklisted.
I follow the rules so I add text only content with my HTML based stuff. I make sure 60% of the content is text and not just images (which would get you blocked quite quickly with anyone, not just iContact’s service) and I frequently use the Spam Check tool to make sure the messages will go through. The response per mailshot I have is around 30%, with bounces being about 1-5%.
Of course, locally speaking, it’s not the ideal solution as people are always looking for “cheaper” solutions, and I won’t say that it’s not as fast (or even faster) as IContact, but most of them don’t care to follow (and impose) the law when it comes to unsolicited mail like iContact and doesn’t offer me the 100% assurance that their email server won’t be blacklisted because of someone else being an idiot. Take Web Africa for example, their server being blacklisted by Yahoo!. So much for reliability
Thank you for your opinion! It’s always good to share this kind of thing and if you do have any alternatives that you feel works great, feel free to post the URL’s! It’s not like more information/options ever killed anyone before