iContact is an email marketing solution that was acquired by Vocus in 2012. The product is integrated with Facebook and Twitter and is aimed at SMBs with unlimited sending as a key feature.
$14
per month
Pollfish
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Pollfish is a survey platform that aims to provide reliable consumer data quickly. It is designed for businesses of any size, including market research agencies, marketing departments, advertising agencies, product development teams, and consulting firms. The platform offers features such as fast surveys and advanced filtering options, to empower businesses to make informed decisions based on high-quality results.
I would only recommend it if someone was a small business. I think they are the best suited for companies who will send out a coupon or offer here and there. The most recent updates made it more complicated to use for more complicated processes. It is easy to train someone on the program, and so quick to learn. But I would also only stick to the simpler things. I also think the colorful templates are great, and show great creativity. But again, it is hard to justify recommending the program when it isn't WYSIWYG.
Despite its minor shortcomings, PollFish is still very good for startups that need to gauge their product idea's potential acceptance and customer demand, and also very useful for fine-tuning their branding, messaging, product features, and even pricing. This is so much better than traditional polling and surveying, which were more expensive and much slower in the past.
Contact management. iContact is really great for entering all your contact. You are able to put them onto different lists, and let them choose which lists they would like to be a part of as well. There are many data fields provided to fill in information.
Emailing. We use the email feature at least once a month. They are always improving and adding new features, which is very helpful in presenting content in a new and exciting way to our readers. There are many options with remade templates and themes, or you can add your own.
Insights. It is really helpful being able to have the data to see what is working and what isn't. It is nice to be able to go back and see how things went in the past compared to now. Opens, clicks, shares, etc.
Obtain people's opinions on a specific topic, both quantitatively and qualitatively, as it has option for open answers.
Being able to segment my audience not only by country and state, but also by city and even socioeconomic level (something that is particularly difficult outside of the United States).
Be able to insert videos in order to make quick creativity tests.
Obtain quick results. Most of the times in only one day, even with specific segmentations.
The survey editor UI can be quite annoying. The way it scrolls back up to the top of the page whenever I click on a question to edit it makes it so that the page is constantly moving.
Oftentimes I get an "oops an error occurred" message but it never actually explains what is going wrong.
Customer support can sometimes take a long time to respond making it challenging when faced with a platform question or capability I am not familiar with.
iContact has been a quick and easy way to send any announcements and news directly to email and social media subscribers. Its tracking and reporting capabilities turn a simple email into a marketing campaign that can be used as a tool to efficiently gauge reader response and customer satisfaction, and ultimately to reach potential customers. The consistency and excellent customer service is what makes this program a pleasant experience.
I rate iContact as an easy to use program due to its user friendly dashboard and user interface. Most companies of small to medium size do not have a dedicated marketer, therefore it is someone multitasking who may or may not have this kind of experience. iContact makes it relatively simple and can actually expand one's knowledge in the area of business promotion.
For what it is and what it offers, I think it is very user friendly, intuitive and reactive. As long as you don't treat it as a powerful full service research tool and look at it more as the scrappy DIY option, it will actually exceed expectations.
iContact is regularly up and running. Only once has it been unavailable for maintenance, which is to be expected and even desired for optimal performance when needed.
They have always been responsive to any issues or concerns that have arisen with our account. Our customer account manager participates in our monthly county-wide communicators meetings via telephone to ensure that we are getting the most from the service. He also analyzes our lists to help us weed out inactive contacts.
I didn't have a say in the decision because I wasn't with the company at the time. I listed HubSpot here because I know we used it in conjunction with iContact for email automation, but HubSpot Email was only recently built-out to the point where it is today. Now, iContact and HubSpot are no longer integrated.
Pollfish is the most cost effective and the quickest survey platform. However there are questions when it comes to the actual reliability of the results that are retrieved from Pollfish surveys. However, its speed makes it tough to use other platforms, even at a potential sacrifice of the quality of data.
iContact stays the same with the number of users added or taken away. It certainly remains reliable despite increased usage, and so, can be considered scaleable in that aspect.
