Jason McClain’s Email Platform Evaluation

By Jason McClain | July 6, 2016 | 0 Comment

I take email platform evaluation very seriously because email marketing is the basis of any business online. If you’re not working to build that list, then you’re not actively building your business. Building a list of contacts is the first and most valuable asset you can build for your business. It’s easy, and you can start from day one.

There are a lot of email marketing platforms out there to help you accomplish building a list. Today, I’m going to review iContact and we’ll see what it’s all about.

Four Out of Five Stars

iContact maintains a four out of five star rating for email marketing platforms pretty much across the board on various review sites. One of the sentiments you’ll see a lot about iContact is its ease of use. It also tends to rank pretty high across online comparison reviews with the likes of Aweber and Get Response. Let’s take a deeper look, and make sure it has everything an Internet marketer needs.

The Key Features of iContact

One of iContact’s biggest draws is its integration with Salesforce, the popular customer relations management platform. This makes iContact’s target audience seem to be smaller businesses and agencies. The email marketing platform also has competitive pricing, and will start new users out with a 30-day free trial.

If you are seriously considering going with this email marketing platform, then I highly recommend doing the free trial. This allows you to get in there and see if the look and feel of the email marketing tools work for you. All it takes is a lack of one key feature you need for your business to render some email platforms useless, so make sure you check it out first.

More Features Include:

• Flexible sign-up forms
• List segmentation capabilities
• Apps for iPhone and Android
• Great social media integration
• Spamcheck feature advises of red flags before you send
• White label for agencies allows for branding
• 97% deliverability rate

iContact certainly shines in the feature department. It is a viable option for an email marketer, and you can get good email marketing results from a platform like this.

Now, let’s take a look at the deal-breakers.

Possible Deal-Breakers for Some, But Not All

Once you decide to engage in email marketing, having a platform that covers all the bases is essential. The easier it is for you to get in there and set up your form and begin capturing leads, the better. So, where does iContact fall short? Let’s take a look.

• iContact has award-winning customer support, but it’s not available on the weekends. If you’re a side hustler, that could be a problem for you.
• Landing pages are not responsive. This is a huge, huge problem since Google has placed so much emphasis on mobile-friendly content. You could probably work around this using a separate landing page platform and just integrating iContact forms with HTML. It’s still a bit redundant if you’re already paying for these email marketing tools.
• Limited and clunky RSS to email. If blogging is your main gig, this is a big deal-breaker. You need this feature to get your posts to your list automatically.
• No option to import contacts from various email clients. This is also a big one. If you’ve built a list of any significance on another email marketing platform, you will want to import those contacts.
• Tiny image storage of 5MB. A picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, that doesn’t translate to megabytes. In our visually-driven online world, this is terrible.
• No Google Analytics integration. You will have to use iContact’s tracking or find some other way to track your performance.
• iContact loves limits! Email sending limits are set to 6 times the subscriber count per month. For example, if you have 500 subscribers, you can only send 3,000 emails per month.

Wrap Up

Listen, iContact is a viable email marketing platform especially if you’re starting out. The price is right and it will get the job done. However, for this email platform evaluation, I recommend a platform with fewer deal-breakers. There are a few things in there you absolutely need to achieve email marketing success like responsive pages and images. I digress, if ease of use is your thing, you’re just building a list to send products and services to, and you won’t be doing a newsletter, than you can get these few simple things done with iContact.

How are you using your email marketing platform? Is it working well for you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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