You must have read about various newsletter services on the web. Well iContact is a service which recently contacted me and asked me for a review.
It is not only a newsletter service but a survey tool, autoresponder, contact management, email list manager. It can also keep track of rss feeds published and can also publish RSS feeds as emails.
Here are listed some of the features offered by iContact:
- Unlimited Number of lists
- Mail Merge Personlisation
- Over 300 Email Templates
- Scheduled Sending of Mails
- Exclusion List feature
- Bounce Email Handling
- Detailed Subscriber Statistics
- Import Subscribers from any application or database
- Searchable database of Subscribers
- Message Reporting with detail click-through tracking
- Segmentation of list based on reporting results
- Automated messages to subscribers based on how long they subscribed
- Unlimited number of questions for survey tool
- Real time tracking of survey with data and graphs
- 500 KB of Image Hosting Allowed
Well going by the feature list, it seems impressive but only 500 KB of Images ? Images are larger now-days and everybody seems to have broadband. Well for that matter they do allow it to get upgraded upto 2MB but at a price. For bigger enterprises, they have a enterprise based service and if you want a co-branded solution try their authorized agency program.
Now comes to pricing. Well their pricing is totally based on number of subscribers which starts at $9.95/month for 500 subscribers and goes to 699/month for 100,000 subscribers. Check their pricing plan in detail here. A bit expensive I must say. If you don’t like their inbuilt 300 templates, they can make a custom one for you.
To test their service, you can sign up for 15 free day trial which allows you 250 subscribers and all features. Their control panel is very easy to use. I couldn’t test it much since I signed up very earlier and now my account is well past those 15 free days. But still I can check the various menus and by the look of it its pretty user friendly control panel.
As additional resources, they offer free articles about email marketing. Be sure to read them for some extra knowledge. Also included are best practices white-paper and their monthly newsletter related to Email marketing.
They provide customer support via email, phone and live chats. Seems good. Also they have a forum for their members.
Also iContact provides two types of Affiliate programs. One program is via Commission Junction which allows you to earn up-to 5 times the monthly plan fees. For example for $9.95/month plan sale, you will earn $50. Second affiliate program is for existing iContact members who can earn 25% of what their referred members pay for lifetime.
So Final conclusion is that you must try it for 15 days for free, and if you like it, iContact can be a good email marketing service.
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I’ve used iContact in the past. It’s a pretty cool service for sending out newsletters and it works well for the uninitiated who don’t know html from hyper text markup language.
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I’v signed up for the affiliate program, Hope you get some sort of kickback