iContact Reviewer's Comments
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iContact's goal is to offer, simple and easy-to-use, yet powerful email marketing software for modern growing businesses.
Achieving our highest honor, the “TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award,” iContact blows the competition out of the water with intuitive and elegant campaign creation, strong reporting functions and a few extras including an online community. Additionally, iContact provides a central dashboard, or homepage, that summarizes all of your activity conveniently in one place.
iContact will create an email campaign in three easy steps. Some unique features include the option to create surveys and an autoresponder, so your customers will never feel neglected. Overall, iContact is the best in the business; however, we would like to see them take their reporting features above and beyond by including conversion tracking and integrate with Google Analytics.
iContact Screenshots. Click to Enlarge
Feature Set:
Two features that stand out with iContact email marketing are the survey and the auto-responder features. These sections help you create your own surveys, so you can better serve your customers, and the auto response feature will automatically send an email response to emails received.
We particularly liked the SPAM test feature. Before sending your campaign iContact will scan your email’s subject line and content to determine the likelihood your messages will end up in your client’s junk boxes.
iContact also allows you to establish aliases and send emails based on established demographics or filters. For example, if you just want to send an email to those on your list between the ages of 25 and 35 you can separate these people from your list and send a campaign without establishing an additional list for 25 to 35-year-olds.
Ease of Use:
Setting up this service is a cinch. All tabs are located clearly at the top of the screen. Just select your section and iContact’s small setup wizards will hold your hand through each step of the process.
And after you sign up for an account, iContact sent a follow up email with a tutorial about setting up lists.
Email Campaign Creation:
Creating an email campaign is simple with Contact's four-step process. First, select the "Create" tab. Then choose how you want to create your email or survey. Use a web page, HTML type, plain text or create an email from a pre-made template. The whole process is user-friendly and you can preview your message after it is completed.
Additionally, iContact included the largest list and best selection of templates we reviewed. With more than 300 template options you are guaranteed to have a professional looking email message even if you are completely unfamiliar with HTML code.
iContact will also let you create an email from an existing website on any server. You can customize the page by inserting images, hyperlinks, tables, lines and other basic formatting features.
Although iContact included one of the best email creation sections we reviewed they only included .5 MB (500 KB) of image hosting. This should be sufficient for a few logos and stock photographs, but .5 MB of space is used very quickly.
Campaign Reporting:
All the reporting features in iContact are conveniently located under the “Tracking” tab and the summary of your emails is on the “welcome” button for quick access. iContact will report click-throughs and sent, forwarded, bounced, delivered and unsubscribed emails.
The service doesn't offer reports on conversions or email replies. Nor does it display complaints from customers or the, instead iContact automatically removes that contact from your list.
Help/Support:
iContact has some of the best and most comprehensive help options we reviewed. 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 online community.
Summary:
Overall, iContact is an excellent email marketing service. If you're interested in creating simple and effective email campaign with surveys, autoresponders and more this is the service for you. In addition, there are tons of additional help features to get you campaign off to a great start.
©2008 TopTenREVIEWS, Inc.
