iContact

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The Quick Take

With a great reputation and a smart, fun user interface that makes iContact easy to use, this email marketing service is one of the most popular and best-known on the market.  Starting at $9.95 a month it’s also one of the least expensive services we looked at, with a 15-day free trial period to let you check it out.

Key Features

• Mail merge personalization
• More than 300 templates
• Spam test
• Blogs associated with your email campaigns

Details

Background

IntelliContact (or iContact) is a five year old company based in Durham, North Carolina that claims more than 45,000 customers, and is regularly rated as one of the top e-mail marketing services available. Customers range from market leaders like AT&T to small businesses and individuals in many sectors of the economy. It’s known for its great customer support and ease of use, and features a superbly well-designed user interface.

Pricing

With iContact, you pay based on the number of contacts you have. Plans start at $9.95 a month for 250 contacts and go up to $699 a month for 100,000 contacts (with lots of options in between). Their cheapest plan is definitely a good bargain if your mailing list is small. By comparison, Constant Contact’s cheapest plan, at $15 a month, lets you have 500 contacts. 

Non-profits get a 20% discount and high-volume senders are invited to contact the sales department for a quote. You also get a discount for prepaying for a year’s subscription.

Contact Management

There are several ways in which to upload your contacts in iContact, from importing them from a CSV file, to copying and pasting them, to entering them manually.

The segmentation feature in iContact is highly visible on the My Contacts tab, which we liked (it’s more hidden in other services), but is not necessarily easy to use if you’ve never worked with segmentation before. We were able to find an instructional video that told us how to create a segment from our mailing list. In a nutshell, “segmenting” means dividing your lists into smaller, targeted lists based on criteria that you choose. Your segments in iContact will get dynamically updated as additional contacts fit your segment criteria. 

We had a little trouble at first trying to figure out how to move our contacts between different lists. Though we generally like the user interface of iContact, we found that it didn’t give quite enough direction for this particular task. But a quick look into their Knowledge Base and we again found some instructional content that told us exactly what to do.

Campaign Creation

iContact makes it simple for you to create an e-mail campaign while also giving you lots of options. We liked the way these different options are laid out on the Create menu. There is a lot of information here about all the tasks you can perform with your messages and surveys, yet the clean, stylish interface is simple enough that you don’t get overwhelmed.

When you’re ready to create an email, the MessageBuilder tool walks you through the process step-by-step. More advanced users can choose other methods for creating their emails, such as copying and pasting HTML code directly into a form. iContact offers more than 300 templates, and they make it easy to scan the different templates that are available.

iContact also makes it straightforward to create surveys, which are included with your subscription price.  But you’re not given the option to design the survey in any way other than by choosing font and background colors. However, you can choose whether to display the survey on a public web site or to send it only to people on your e-mail lists.

We liked that you are able to specify a blog to which emails you send are automatically posted.  iContact also supports republishing your email campaigns via RSS. However, we discovered that it’s easy to get distracted by the stuff you can do while you’re in the midst of creating a campaign, and lose track of it when you click to other pages. Overall, though, we like the user interface and think that with a little bit of practice and familiarity these types of mishaps won’t happen.

Sending

Overall, sending an email or survey in iContact is relatively easy, but it does take a little practice. There are four main tabs in iContact – My Contacts, Create, Send, and Track – and there is a small learning curve associated with figuring out where you do certain tasks.

When you walk through the process of creating an email with the MessageBuilder, sending an email campaign is straightforward. But, for example, if you decide you want to resend a previous message to a different list, it can get confusing. We kept trying to do it on the Create tab, since there was an option there to resend a message, but you actually do this task on the Send tab. As usual, we found the answer in the helpful video tutorials. 

As for other sending features, the spam test is handy and easy to find, but the results on an email we tested came back in technical language that was hard to decipher. But at least we got the essential information, which was that our test email would probably make it through spam filters to land successfully in our recipients’ inboxes.

We liked that the Send tab prominently featured autoresponders, which are more buried in some services we’ve reviewed (and not even available in others). The process of creating an autoresponder is simple and fast. We also liked that iContact sent us a confirmation email after we sent out a campaign.

Reporting

One thing we liked about iContact’s reporting is that it shows your information in so many different ways. Your important performance statistics are conveyed via an array of pie charts, bar graphs, and tables.

Like the other services we reviewed, iContact has a wide variety of reporting features that help you track your emails and surveys, enabling you to improve their performance over time. You can track how many opens and clicks you’ve gotten, and drill down on these statistics. You can also see where your emails have bounced and export all of your reporting data. Especially handy is the ability to see bounce reporting by domain – for example, if your emails are constantly getting rejected from a specific domain, you could investigate to see why.

Support and Resources

iContact offers phone support weekdays from 5am to 5pm Pacific Time. You can also contact them via online forms and live chat.  Their Knowledge Base is full of information and resources, including video tutorials, articles, and live and recorded Webinars. The video tutorials are clear and easy-to-follow and always had the answers we needed. There is also an email marketing newsletter you can subscribe to, and a blog that offers frequent tips and tricks.

Searching the Knowledge Base, which launches in a new browser window, can be slow to get going – at times, we waited over a minute for the window to open up over a very high speed Internet connection (we also experienced delays launching the discussion forum from the technical support page).  However, once it appears, you can quickly find what you’re looking for there via a web search interface.

iContact also features an online community with fairly active forums that you can search and post questions on. When you create an email campaign, you have the option to save it in the community archives where it will be viewable by everyone in the community—which we thought was a cool feature.

Other Services

iContact offers a few custom services, including custom template creation and a Premium Services team that can provide one-on-one training with iContact software.