About iContact
iContact was established by Aaron W. Houghton and Ryan P. M. Allis in 2002. Based at Durham, North Carolina, they provide email marketing solutions to nearly 20,000 customers including a number of Fortune 500 companies. Their service is favored by market leaders such as AT&T, Vonage, Symantec, International Paper, ReMax, Centex Homes, and Viacom.
According to their manifesto, "iContact's role is to allow you to easily create your message and get it to customers, prospects, and subscribers that have requested to receive it."
Plans and Features
iContact’s service starts at only $9.95 per month for lists of up to 500 subscribers. This cost varies with the number of contacts, going up to $699 per month for 100,000 subscribers.
On iContact, you can create an unlimited number of lists, and send out personalized emails and newsletters to them. These lists can also be imported from virtually any application or database. Over 300 HTML email templates are made available to you for free along with 500kb of image hosting. Your contacts can be managed and followed-up through the inbuilt control panel, which provides detailed statistics and activity reports.
Clicthroughs, conversion rates, read receipts, bounces, unsubscribes etc can tracked through the control panel. From here, you can also prepare and pre-configure emails or e-courses to be delivered to contacts at specific intervals. Also, your emails can host customized surveys, and results can be viewed in real-time with response graphs.
You can test-drive all these features absolutely free for 15-days through the iContact website.
iContact Support
iContact’s dedicated customer support can be availed through email, toll-free telephone or live chat. An exhaustive knowledge base and FAQ can also be found at the iContact website. To top it off, user discussion forums are setup where over 2000 registered members participate and exchange information.
Conclusion
Without a shadow of a doubt, iContact is one of the most respected and trustworthy providers of email marketing solutions today. From their sheer list of offered features and ultra-cheap pricing to dedicated support and state-of-the-art infrastructure, iContact is probably the most viable email marketing option for your website.
