iContact Review: How Does iContact Compare?
| Comparisons of Top Email Marketing Sites | |||
Read Our Detailed Product Reviews Below |
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E-mail Newsletter Creation |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Online Survey Creation |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Number of E-mail Templates |
More than 300 |
More than 300 |
103 |
Unlimited E-mail Lists |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Auto-Responder |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Blogging / RSS Feeds |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Image Hosting |
10 images |
5 images |
5 images |
Free Trial |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Minimum Monthly Subscription |
$9.95 |
$15.00 |
$19.00 |
24/7 Customer Service Support |
Monday - Friday 8AM - 8PM ET |
Monday - Friday 9AM - 6:30PM ET |
Monday - Friday 8AM - 8PM ET |
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Product Overview
iContact is a permission-based e-mail marketing software tool that provides businesses and other organizations the ability to publish, send, and track e-mail surveys, newsletters, blogs, auto-responders, and RSS feeds.
What You Get
iContact is offered through various subscription plans that you can avail of. Each subscription plan offers you features such as Message Scheduling, SpamCheckTM, Open and Click-through Tracking, Bounce-back Handling, and Subscription Management. iContact also allows the creation of surveys and an unlimited number of e-mail lists. It has an auto-responder that sends your e-mails at a certain schedule you prefer, an image-hosting feature, RSS feeds, and more than 300 newsletter templates you can choose from.
Company Behind It
iContact was founded in 1993 by Aaron W. Houghton, its present Executive Chairman. Ryan P. M. Allis, iContact’s Chief Executive Officer, is Houghton’s co-founder. Both Houghton and Allis, and all members of the iContact Executive Board, had extensive experience on Internet technology and business leadership before joining iContact.
Cost
Pricing for different iContact subscriptions vary depending on the number of contacts in your e-mail list. For customers with 250 contacts or less, the monthly subscription costs only $9.95 and the yearly subscription $107.46. For those with mailing lists of more than 600,000, the monthly subscription costs $699.00 and $7,549.20 for the annual subscription. For customers who have a number of contacts in between, you can refer to the table extracted from the iContact website itself.
Contacts |
Monthly |
Annual |
250 |
$9.95 |
$107.46 |
500 |
$14.00 |
$151.20 |
1,000 |
$19.00 |
$205.20 |
2,500 |
$29.00 |
$313.20 |
5,000 |
$47.00 |
$507.60 |
10,000 |
$74.00 |
$799.20 |
15,000 |
$109.00 |
$1,177.20 |
25,000 |
$149.00 |
$1,609.20 |
35,000 |
$239.00 |
$2,581.20 |
50,000 |
$379.00 |
$4,093.20 |
75,000 |
$529.00 |
$5,713.20 |
100,000 |
$699.00 |
$7,549.20 |
iContact also provides a 20% discount to non-profit organizations who wish to avail of their e-mail marketing tools.
Guarantee
iContact offers a 15-day trial for free, which you can use to send up to 250 e-mails to 250 contacts. After the 15-day trial and you decide that iContact is helpful to your organization, you can click on the “Upgrade” button and choose the monthly or yearly subscription plan that you would like to avail of.
What I Like About iContact
Unlike most other e-mail marketing software subscriptions, iContact charges per subscriber and not per e-mail, making it more affordable for business organizations to avail of their product. The software also allows its users to send more e-mails that are six times more than the set subscriber limit. So for instance, your subscriber limit every month is 10,000 e-mails, you can actually send up to 60,000 e-mails for no additional charge. Also, all names in your contact lists are considered secure and can only be accessed by you. This is because iContact has 128-bit encryption system that only authorized personnel can access.
What I Don’t Like About It
iContact also provides image hosting services but it can has only a 5MB space for this. This is still much larger compared to the image hosting services of other e-mail marketing software, but 5MB can actually be occupied pretty quickly.
Do I Recommend It?
Yes, the iContact 15-day trial is highly recommended, especially since it’s free. If you’re not happy with the results of your trial, you can always let it pass after the trial period ends.