How To Choose The Best Email Marketing Solution

A Comparison Of The Top Three Email Marketing Solutions: AWeber, iContact, Constant Contact

Part Three: iContact Review

In part two, you learned about the various features AWeber provides. In part three of this series, you will find out about iContact.

iContact was founded in 2003 in North Carolina. They are the largest email marketing solutions provider. They have 600,000 customers.

How do the features of iContact rate?

Deliverability-Related Features

iContact states that it has greater than a 99% deliverability rate. They do not give an exact number, but this is sufficiently close to full delivery.

Like AWeber, iContact claims to maintain good relationships with all major ISPs. They carefully review outgoing emails to ensure their servers are not delivering spam. They will notify you your email has a good chance of being flagged by spam filters.

iContact maintains a no tolerance spam policy. Accounts will be immediately terminated for sending unsolicited email messages.

Analytics And Tracking

iContact has robust tracking features. Basic reporting consists of e-mail open rates, click through’s, successful delivery and bounce rates, and number of un-subscribes.

This basic data can be viewed over a period of time using simple graphing functions. You can then see how each list is growing and compare the effectiveness of your email messages.

Basic list segmentation is also available. You can use one of the 13 standard fields to sort your lists, and collect custom data to further refine your searches.

While this feature is nice, many of the standard fields are not very useful for segmenting your list. For example, first name, last name, and business name will usually return only one entry. The custom fields are dependent upon collecting this information from the subscribers. They may be more reluctant to sign up for your email list if they need to provide too much personal data.

Customer Support

iContact’s customer support is very good. Phone, e-mail, and live chat support is available 14 hours a day on weekdays. Their representatives are friendly and helpful and are quick to answer any questions you may have.

Unfortunately, live customer support is not available on weekends. If you have any questions or problems on weekends, you may need to wait or more two days to get answers.

iContact’s online help system is excellent. They have a good collection of information pertaining to all common problems that their customers have faced. A fair amount of more advanced material is also available.

They conduct two different live basic webinars, and have recorded a couple more on intermediate topics. Titles include iContact 101, Deliverability 101, Introduction to Social Tools, and Optimizing Your E-Mail Marketing. There is also a selection of video tutorials, but they are very short and very basic.

Additional Features

Perhaps the best available bonus feature is MessageBuilder. This is iContact’s proprietary e-mail message creation tool. You can easily integrate your message with one of their available HTML templates. You can drag-and-drop and switch elements around to various locations very easily. In this way, you can get the layout to look just how you want it.

Like AWeber, iContact has a large number of HTML message templates available. The designs are good. Some of them lack punch, but you can find some pretty nice templates.

Conclusion

iContact is a viable alternative to AWeber. You can depend upon their deliverability. Customer support is very good. The only problem is that live support is not available on weekends. There MessageBuilder is a fine extra feature.

They have increased their efforts recently and are working very hard to try to win the e-mail marketing services battle.

Visit iContact.com

Continue on to part four where we will discuss the features of Constant Contact.