iContact Review

Detailed Reviews

iContact is now a subsidiary of Swedish software company Cision. A PR company Vocus earlier acquired the iContact and later Vocus merged with its competitor Cision.

Ever since its inception in 2003, iContact has helped uncountable SMB’s and startups share their brand story, ideas, products and services through social and email marketing. They strive to build online marketing features that are needed by small businesses to succeed.

Form Design

There is very little you can complain about if you consider this aspect of the software. iContact offers a multitude of options to choose from. The appearance styling page features a perpetual list of categories to choose from depending on your niche. It shouldn't be an issue finding a pre-styled theme that perfectly suits your industry.

User Interface

The interface of the tool is one of the most notable disadvantages. Plenty has been spoken by customers who tend to be lost as to where to begin upon launching the utility for the first time. While practice makes perfect, a more easy-to-use out-of-box solution couldn't hurt.

Email Templates

There are hundreds of inbox tested and fully customizable email templates available for their users. We are however not sure if all of them are mobile responsive like other providers offers already. Their design team also offers custom and matching email templates for a fixed fee.

Comprehensive Tools and Resources

iContact designate a dedicated marketing advisor to their subscribers running larger scale email campaigns to evaluate their action plans. The application offers comprehensive analytics features and split a/b testing capability that lets users drive the most results-oriented and cost effective marketing campaigns.  

Social Media Marketing Tools

The platform offers integration with leading social media site networks with the campaign setup process to immediately share the content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This not only gets the message seen by everyone on the fan page, but also enables users to like, share, re-tweet the messages amongst their friends. The iContact social media tracking tool keeps track of your campaign's progress and gives detailed insight into user interactions and post engagement in the various platforms.  

Third-party Application & Custom Integration

The application offers third party integration extensions with tools like Salesforce, Viewbix, Ultracart, ZenCart, 123ContactForm and many more. It also has integration options for various universally accepted customer management portals, eCommerce solutions and Google analytics services. In case the application that you want to integrate is not available in the list, the iContact API can be used to build your own program integrations without any programming knowledge whatsoever.

Strategic Advisor for Premier Members

Signing up for iContact as a Premier member has many other facilities, but the dedicated strategy advisor steals the limelight of them all. It is the advisor's responsibility to tweak an email marketing campaign under the strive perusal of a user to drive the maximum benefits of their time and resources. This is beneficial for businesses who cannot dedicate manpower and time on research to drive the maximum benefits out of their investments. The strategic advisors also act as personal trainers and assistants to make users more educated about the whole email and social marketing system.

Learning Resources

The user guides, how-to videos, tutorials, webinar courser and in-depth study materials provided with iContact are helpful for beginners and pros alike. There is no end to the knowledge of marketing and no matter how proficient someone is, there is always something to learn and inculcate in these resources. The integrated search facility makes it easier to find what you are looking for in a matter of seconds.

Analytics

While there is certainly plenty of statistics to play around with, iContact's offerings are fairly limited compared to some of the competitors like GetResponse or MailChimp. If you utilize third party SalesForce integration, however, you will see what kind of statistics the ordinary tool lacks in comparison.

Final Verdict

The interface is a bit complicated to use and however not many things may need to be learnt before starting out. There is an option to test the messages before hitting the send button and in case there is confusion, the customer support is only a call away, except the fact that they are not available on weekends. All in all, iContact comes with a great many features and facilities that are not offered by other email marketing solutions.