iContact is great for smaller ventures

10-second breakdown:

Simplified interface, quick setup, and unique concierge services for premier clients; iContact has a lot to offer to small and medium-sized companies.

iContact is used in small (0-50 employees), and medium companies (51-1,000 employees).

The good:

iContact offer some of the best third party integrations we have seen. The dashboard links iContact with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. You can also link to third-party services such as Salesforce, or even build your own with their open API.

They also offer a 30 day free trial for all of their plans so you can be sure you like what you pay for. This is especially helpful since there are no refunds after purchase.

iContact makes their service an even better deal by offering a 15% discount when you purchase an annual contract.

The bad:

Customer support is limited on the weekends with only email available. They do have a searchable help center with knowledge-base articles, video tutorials, and webinars.

Lack of integration with Google Analytics is a major downfall with the service. Enterprise level customers only have access to this.

How it works:

Many companies in the industry focused on smaller businesses offer simplified user interfaces to get you up and running as fast as possible. iContact leads the pack with their intuitive user interface that is easy and straightforward to navigate. At any time, no matter what screen you’re on it will only take a few clicks to get to your next activity for the day. It’s simple but still incredibly powerful, iContact comes with all of the normal features you expect from email services but manages to make even features like reporting feel easy to manage.

Many email marketing applications tack-on social functions at the last minute, or even not at all. iContact bucks the trend and includes a couple of feature rich social media sharing tools. They are built right into the campaign so you can post to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all on one page. Once word gets out, you can track how well it’s going with their social tracking tool. They make it easy to spread the word through social media and hopefully go viral!

What if you don’t have the time or energy to learn the finer points of crafting emails or email titles that get clients to open your mail? No problem, iContact offers a one-of-a-kind service for premier clients, your own personal ‘Strategic Advisor.’ The advisor is an expert at email marketing who’s only job is to help you get the most out of your email campaigns. They research your brand before you meet up, and come to the table with ideas and strategies you can use to captivate your audience. They are trained in all parts of the process from crafting captivating emails to advising when you should follow up with your subscribers with the next offer.

If the premium options interest you but the price tag doesn’t, iContact offers an extensive library of user guides, videos, webinars and more for you to look over on your own time. They go further than just technical support and can even help you improve your marketing game. The collection is massive and it’s searchable through the in-application help menu. Still too busy? That’s what interns are for, right?

Another strength iContact has going for them is the extremely lengthy and diverse list of services they support through integrations. Looking for customer management tools, e-commerce capabilities, or maybe additional analytic reports? No problem, iContact has you covered. The list is far too large to list them all out here, but some of the most popular ones are Magento, 123 Contact Form, LiveChat and SalesForce.

Two things to keep in mind before you decide to commit to iContact, first off there are relatively few file types iContact will accept when you’re trying to import your contacts into their database for the first time. They only accept a few spreadsheet formats, so if you’re moving over from another email services provider you’re out of luck if it’s not in a neat and tidy spreadsheet. Also, their cloud hosted image library is limited to 5MB of space. That’s enough to get your logo and signature in, but if you send content rich emails this is going to be limiting.

Pricing for iContact is similar to the industry, there are a few plans and the price scales depending on the number of subscribers in your email list. There is a free trial, but it’s so limited it’s almost not even worth considering. It’s good for 30 days and does come with all the features, but you can only have up to a hundred contacts and send out a maximum of 400 emails. On the plus side, iContact does offer a 15% discount from the prices listed below if you commit to an annual plan and they offer a discount to all nonprofits.

First up is their ‘Email Marketing’ plan, it starts at $14 per month for 500 subscribers and scales up from there all the way to $117 per month for 15,000 list members. Email Marketing may be the cheapest plan but it still packs in an infinite amount of emails. In addition, you get live customer support, autoresponders, social media sharing, API support and more.

iContact’s second plan is ‘Pro Automation,’ it starts at $99 per month for 500 subscribers and scales up to $249 a month for 15000. It includes everything Email Marketing tempted you with and also includes custom email templates, Google Analytics and A/B testing.

In order to get the pricing for iContact’s ‘Premier’ plan, or if you want more than 15,000 subscribers you have to reach out to a sales associate to discuss your options. The premier plan does come with a lot of useful features if you want the best package available including custom fields and objects, Zapier Integration and premier customer support.

With an astoundingly easy interface and a broad list of features, many of which are under appreciated by the industry at large, iContact offers a premium product that small and medium-sized companies should definitely consider.

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