iContact - Good for Small Businesses
December 17, 2018
iContact - Good for Small Businesses
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with iContact
We use iContact to manage the communications (both internal and external) at the school. This encompasses emails about performances, weekly blasts, illness announcements, and emergency communication. It is primarily used by one individual (myself) and one other, who will use it in my absence. It addresses our need to communicate with families and staff in a way that is most effective to them, as well as useful (time-wise) to us and our processes.
- Quick sends. You can trust that it will go out.
- Individual person management. We mostly use them in groups, but being able to address the small things on each account makes it more effective and makes us more efficient.
- Templates. Some of their newer templates are really nice and do more than what I could ever hope to do!
- Their emails are not WYSIWYG. We will pick a font and love it, but then see that it turned into a generic font when it was sent.
- Email upload. Their recent email uploading situation is terrible. It is a recent update and only adds time to my job.
- List management. It's not like MailChimp, but still works OK. It could be better.
- It allows us to keep in contact with the parents well. The sends are very quick, and reliable. This allowed us to fulfill our objectives of maintaining great communication skills.
- The recent update has taken more time from our schedule because it made the process to update the lists more lengthy.
- I would say that we are in a neutral state with iContact. It has helped us with our communication, but I feel their investments are in the wrong place in order to make the program superior. It gets the job done, but it doesn't cultivate the type of environment conducive to growth.
- Cost. The lower tiered levels are great for a small business; however, once you get into the next levels, cost becomes very high and makes you reconsider what you are getting vs what you pay for.
We selected iContact because it was available at the time, and in our price range. I inherited it at the school. If it had been the program it is now back then, I would not have chosen it. At the moment, we are too busy to fully vet another program, so we are stuck with this one. It does get the job done. It is great for a small business with small needs, but once you start expanding and having more intricate needs, it does not compete with others like MailChimp.