iContact Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

Almost anyone can send an email, but it takes more power under the hood to create, send, and track the types of targeted emails that drive customer action and generate real sales. iContact is web-based software that everyone from small businesses to large senders can use to manage all aspects of their email marketing programs.

In addition to allowing for the easy creation of email newsletters, RSS feeds, surveys, and auto-responders, iContact helps business users grow and manage contacts, and segment their digital contact lists. Custom fields, mail-merge personalization, and website sign-up forms can all be used to promote a business. iContact is completely scalable, and it boasts an email delivery rate of 99 percent. This is, at least in part, because any contact who unsubscribes from an iContact list, or signs up with an invalid address, is automatically removed.

iContact is a powerful email marketing platform for businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions.. Easy-to-understand technology enables users with all levels of technical skill to create persuasive email messages using templates or HTML. List management tools keep growing email lists in check, while iContact’s Spamcheck tool reviews each message to ensure it reaches its desired destination. Users can gain a better understanding of how their email lists are performing by reviewing their Reports, which iContact generates automatically using the data it collects from ongoing marketing campaigns.

Beyond basic email marketing, iContact also provides a number of advanced solutions for growing businesses. iContact Pro is changing the way small, mid-size, and even large businesses think about marketing automation. iContact Pro users have the ability to schedule triggered messages that are uniquely tailored to each contact. The app offers a drag-and-drop interface. Businesses with high-volume sending needs can take advantage of iContact’s capabilities, easily managing 5 million+ subscribers.

• Experience level: All experience levels
• Industry: All industries, including non-profits and educational institutions
• Business size: Freelancers, small businesses, mid-size businesses, large enterprises
• Departments/roles: Marketing, Sales, Outreach
• Budget/point: Starting at $14 per month

Email Creation

iContact offers a straightforward way for users to design stylish emails without having to know any HTML. The software’s email templates are professional looking and completely modifiable. Templates are all designed in a way that maximizes personal branding.

To design your first email, check out the template selection and choose the option that best meets your needs. You can quickly modify any template to change the layout, color palette, or overall styling. Individual sections, or blocks, each have their own formatting. You can save any message that you design to reuse at a later time, as well.

List Management

It doesn’t matter how nicely a message is designed without a list of subscribers to send it to. iContact provides a robust list management feature with various tools to help users manage their growing subscriber lists.

To keep your list of subscribers organized, make sure to include the correct recipient name and company name for each contact. (This is especially true if you’re collecting email addresses at trade shows or networking events.) iContact will remove duplicates or invalid email addresses for you, and it will give you the option of whether to remove email addresses after the first bounce, or delivery failure notice.

Triggered Emails

With iContact, businesses can schedule automated emails to be delivered over time, rather than all at once. Autoresponders, or triggered emails, help to deepen customer relationships by providing subscribers with more relevant content. The autoresponder feature comes most frequently into play when users want to set up “Welcome” campaigns, abandoned cart emails, or transaction messages.

Autoresponders are most commonly used in “Welcome” campaigns. When someone subscribes to your list, automatically send a message introducing your company. At that point, you can set up a drip campaign to continue sending emails at regular intervals in order to familiarize the new subscriber with your company or your products.

Subscriber Segmentation

Segmentation can make any email list stronger. The more a business knows about its subscribers, the deeper it can go with list segmentation. For example, instead of sending blanket emails to every subscriber, a business could segment its list and send a certain email newsletter only to those customers who had indicated that they were interested in a particular product or service.

Go beyond demographics when segmenting your campaigns. Although iContact gives you the ability to segment by gender or age, you can also use past purchasing behavior to improve the results of your campaigns. Custom entries ensure that your segmentation is unique, based on your company’s goals. For example, with iContact you can segment your lists by general interest, which is useful if you know that a certain subset of your customers are interested in a sport like golf or basketball.

iContact integrates with a number of popular third-party apps and services, including Twitter, WordPress, and Facebook.

In particular, iContact offers native integration with Salesforce. Users can send email messages to Salesforce contacts, after which iContact brings all relevant marketing statistics into the Salesforce platform to determine whether leads are moving in the right direction. iContact for Salesforce is not subscriber-based. Users can immediately send messages to everyone in their databases. Entire teams can leverage the statistics from company email campaigns from the same Salesforce reporting screens.

iContact has an open API that integrates with numerous business applications including analytics, social and commerce functionalities.

iContact offers high-volume email marketing at a price point that is affordable to businesses of all sizes. Email marketing starts at $14 per month, or $11.90 per month with annual prepay. Pro Automation starts at $99 per month, or $84.15 with annual prepay.

• Powerful email marketing solution
• Allows for easy creation of newsletters, RSS feeds, surveys, and autoresponders
• Triggered emails effectively drive sales
• Typical users include freelancers, small businesses, mid-size businesses, and large enterprises
• An API is available for use