How To Choose The Best Email Marketing Solution

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

Part Five: Head-To-Head Comparison

Now you have seen each of the top three email marketing services rated individually. In this fifth and final article of the series, you will now see them compared head-to-head.

AWeber and Constant Contact were founded in 1998, and iContact is the relative newcomer, being founded in 2003.

Constant Contact and iContact boast more customers than AWeber. This is mainly because until recently, both of those services were significantly cheaper than AWeber for larger subscriber bases. Both of these companies have increased their prices, and now all three services are very similarly priced for any sized email list.

How will this head-to-head comparison be rated? For each of the four primary categories, a numerical rating from 1 to 10 will be assigned. 10 represents the best quality. The composite rating will be most heavily weighted towards deliverability. Tracking, customer support, and additional features will be approximately equal weights.

Deliverability-Related Feature

AWeber – 10
iContact – 10
Constant Contact – 5

AWeber and iContact receive top marks here at over 99% deliverability rate. Constant Contact’s 97% deliverability rate means that three times the e-mails don’t get delivered. Over a sample size of 10,000 sent e-mails, this can easily equate to six to eight more lost sales– substantially more if the subscribers have purchased from you in the past.

Analytics And Tracking

AWeber – 10
iContact – 8
Constant Contact – 6

Again, Constant Contact lags far behind the other two services. While it provides all necessary basic functions for analytics and tracking, it does not have nearly the advanced capability of the other two.

AWeber beats out iContact for two reasons. First, its email campaign segmentation features are more comprehensive. You can conduct searches on a much broader range of criteria. Using these searches, it’s much easier to target e-mails to specific groups.

However, the largest advantage AWeber has in this category is due to its goal tracking function. The ability to see how many subscribers are dropping out of your sales funnel at each point gives you incredible power to improve every element of your funnel. This is the only tool available anywhere that allows you to view your entire sales funnel in this way.

Customer Support

AWeber – 10
iContact – 9
Constant Contact – 7

iContact loses to AWeber by a very slim margin. The defining difference is that AWeber live support is readily available on weekends. If you require live support from iContact, you will need to wait for Monday.

Constant Contact does not have bad customer service. The other two companies just seem more refined and knowledgeable. The online support is not as comprehensive, with the exception of the webinars.

Additional Features

AWeber – 10
iContact – 9
Constant Contact – 5

Both AWeber and iContact have some nice HTML templates.

iContact has its MessageBuilder, and it integrates nicely with its HTML templates.

Likewise, AWeber’s web form generator works nicely with its professional HTML templates and can save you a lot of time. AWeber’s form generator is a bit easier to work with, making AWeber the winner of this category, as well.

AWeber and iContact also have various other features that make for an overall more pleasant experience, but none of those features are game-changers.

Constant Contact does not compete well in the additional feature category, as their business seems to focus only on the basics.

Conclusion

AWeber – 10
iContact – 9
Constant Contact – 6

AWeber received the top rating in each category, but iContact followed very closely. Constant Contact, however, did not merely live up to the other two companies.

Because all of these services are similar in price in every instance, AWeber and iContact should be the two Internet marketing services that you consider. Though AWeber was rated slightly higher, individual preferences may lead you to prefer iContact. Both companies offer exceptionally good products.

Visit AWeber.com | Read AWeber Review
Visit iContact.com | Read iContact Review
Visit ConstantContact.com | Read Constant Contact Review

Go back to the begin (part 1 – Overview: How To Choose The Best Email Marketing Solution)