With over 100k small companies utilising it, including NASA, Habitat for Humanity, and the Tennis Channel. Also, iContact was around before 2003 and is among the longest-running email marketing platforms accessible today. It includes features for small companies new to email marketing, such as a drag-and-drop email editor, as well as strong internet marketing capabilities, such as landing sites.
iContact was among the top email marketing platforms for generating marketing emails at the time of introduction. But how does it stand up today?
There are two main iContact plans: Free and Professional. The Free plan is free for businesses having fewer than 500 contacts, while the Professional plan starts at $23/month. The Free plan provides features including a drag-and-drop email designer, email assistance, and the option to deliver up to 2,000 emails every month without requiring a credit card.
In the most basic setup, the Professional plan adds capabilities and allows up to 1,500 contacts. This higher-level service includes limitless monthly sends, marketing automation, limitless landing page building, phone, live chat, and email support. More automation workflows, such as campaigns for client re-engagement and event marketing, are in the Professional plan.
The price of a subscription increases on a sliding scale dependent on the number of members. For example, if you have 5,000 subscribers. The Professional plan costs $65 per month, while the 25,000-contact plan costs $199 per month. If you have more than 50,000 subscribers, you’ll need to get a unique quotation from the firm.
Also worth noting is that iContact comes with a free Kickbox account. This helps to keep a “healthy contact list” so that emails get to the right people. Non-profit groups that meet certain criteria can also get a 20% discount.
iContact feels and looks like a tough business solution in terms of structure and user experience, and it may miss some of the humorous components seen in rival Enterprise offerings. Dashboard, Landing Pages, Automation, Contacts, and File Library are just a few of the tools it offers, and it does an excellent job of presenting them and classifying them by task. Even the trial edition is suitable for email marketing needs, revealing a broad array of automation capabilities on which firms may expand.
The integrations are strong, with Google Analytics available but only on request. For businesses looking to scale their marketing attempts, iContact has CRM-like tools that allow you to leverage email marketing to attract new clients and create processes depending on their activities. If a contact read or forgotten a prior email, for example. This would be noted inside the system and sent to the right person for reaction. All of these replies can be pushed into actionable data. This can only assist email marketers to fine-tune their approach for more effective campaigns.
All you need for registration includes your name, email address, password, as well as the size of your contact list. The trial does not need a credit card, which is convenient because many managers are afraid of the requirement to enter credit card details before making a purchase decision.
Anybody using comparable internet applications will recognize the design and user experience of iContact. The primary features are accessible from the left-hand navigation panel, leaving the dynamic center panel for more complex menus. The first dashboard is very well, with CTA buttons which make it simple to get going. Logging in allows you to see the results of your current campaigns. This includes the most recent 10 emails sent, which are shown on a graph as statistics. It’s useful when trying to see how campaigns are performing. The distinctive Open Clicks, as well as the Click-to-Open rate, will be the highlight data for managers.
You can also combine iContact to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter through the dashboard, schedule posts, and monitor metrics on those social media platforms. Integrations with Instagram, which has grown in popularity over the last several years, can be a huge benefit. Integrations with third-party services such as 123ContactForm, Salesforce, UltraCart, as well as Viewbix can increase iContact’s capabilities. With the iContact application interface, you may even create your personal third-party service (API).
The email deliverability rate of iContact is higher than other email marketing platforms. It’s worth noting that just a small percentage of emails sent through this platform wind up in the spam folder.
Over 1,000 legal stock photos are available to build a distinctive email for maximum effect, and using the drag-and-drop interface to compose an email is simple. If you wish to construct an email from scratch, however, the procedure is more complex.
iContact also provides excellent list management capabilities. Subsets of contact lists may be easily created depending on zip code or when the person was introduced to the database. This platform also readily interfaces with in addition of over 100 applications, including PayPal, Shopify, and Survey Monkey.
Data security is one area where iContact falls short, with only a conventional privacy policy and several phrases noting that iContact is an audit report SAS 70 type-2 legal data center.
The EU-US Privacy Shield Agreement and the Swiss-US Privacy Shield Framework have both selected iContact as compliant. However, the site underwent a dramatic security breach in 2010, when customer email addresses were stolen.
There will be times when consumers fresh to the solution run into challenges they can’t address, no matter how straightforward the dashboard is. Various Enterprise systems lack the white glove assistance typical of more expensive organization solutions, as well as having fewer free support choices or charging a charge for access to a real help desk. Many of the smaller players are increasingly reliant on consumers accessing a base of knowledge of articles or participating with user groups that discuss their problems and solutions. The information source at iContact is helpful and addresses the most frequent queries and potential concerns.
A useful drop-down Help button will offer a connection to Live Chat, Assistance phone, plus email addresses, as well as links to common functions, for further support alternatives. There are additional connections to the Help portal and video lessons.
If you still need assistance, you can use the built-in Help system to look for an item in the knowledge base, watch video tutorials, or listen to video webinars. There is phone help, but it is only available from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday. Although there is a wonderful lengthy stretch, the absence of weekend support remains unfortunate. The same time limit applies to online communication. Your only option on weekends is to write an email and expect that someone responds before Monday.
Keap (Infusionsoft) is a good option for iContact if you have a lot of contacts to manage and find that iContact’s capabilities aren’t quite robust enough for your requirements. Although iContact provides many of the features that a small business needs, Keap (Infusionsoft) allow larger companies to adopt more intricate and robotic workflows, as well as superior list management control than iContact.
Most SMBs should be able to utilize iContact’s simple email marketing as well as an automation tool. However, some portions of it are created especially for newbies. Most customers will be able to create successful emails owing to step-by-step guidance and respect for anti-spam standards. Although support isn’t as extensive as some other choices, a large knowledge base and several contact help desk options assist to keep things running smoothly. However, users will miss being able to import from Gmail. iContact is a worthy competitor in the email marketing sector because of its variety of automation capabilities and thoughtful price structure.
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