Great product for just sending e-mail. Not trying to do too much.
December 07, 2018
Great product for just sending e-mail. Not trying to do too much.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with iContact
iContact is being used to send out all of our e-mail marketing hits that we send to either our entire list or to a segment of our list. It is used solely by the marketing department, but occasionally marketing will send e-mails using iContact on behalf of other departments, such as customer service or events. It is not, however, used for automated marketing e-mails that are sent to individuals at specified time intervals based on when they take certain actions is our marketing funnels. We use another marketing automation software for that.
- iContact, for the most part, ONLY does e-mail, so they're good at it. You can expect inbox deliverability to to be high because it's all they do. They don't have their team focused on trying to be everything to everyone.
- iContact has an easy drag & drop user interface to create e-mails as well as the flexibility of being able to code your own e-mails with an HTML source editor.
- They only do e-mail. This is a pro in the sense that they're good at it. But their marketing automation is lacking.
- Misses the mark on some cool things that competitors are doing like sending e-mails out at different times to individual subscribers based on when they're most likely to open your message. This would be a great feature to add.
- Segmentation isn't as good as it could be. A tagging system would be preferred for segmenting. Right now, you can really only segment based on field data and to add a field for every possible situation I might want to tag a contact record is a bit daunting. Being able to segment based on realtime behavior would also be helpful. For example, we only send to contacts that have had some interaction (opened or clicked an email) within the last 180 days. Each month, I have to pull everyone who hasn't clicked in that time and add them to a list that I exclude. I also have to remove anyone who has interacted again from the exclusion list. It'd be easier if that segment of people updated automatically so I didn't have to manually add and remove people each month.
- If you're working with a lot of contacts and you have a lot of segments, loading and performance can be slow.
- E-mail is cheap. It's going to be cheap no matter who you go with. It's not really about what you spend. It's about how many of your e-mails can get through and what your message is. If we looked at ROI of just our cost for iContact vs. what we collected in revenue from e-mail, I'm sure it would be very high. But e-mail is a supporting tool for other marketing and other marketing supports the e-mail.
- Maropost and Infusionsoft
iContact's inbox deliverability is better than that of Infusionsoft.
iContact's marketing automation abilities are not as good as Infusionsoft.
iContact's tagging and list managements functionality are not as good as Infusionsoft.
iContact's inbox deliverability is probably the same as Maropost, unless you use Maropost's smart features like optimizing send time to send when a contact is most likely to open.
iContact's list management functionality is not as good as Maropost.