iContact

Icontact Pro is an email marketing software platform which helps businesses grow. Their focus is small businesses, though they offer to help companies with email marketing campaigns from beginner to multi-million subscriber company email lists. Icontact was purchased by another company called Vocus in 2012 comes integrated with Facebook and Twitter primarily. The pricing for Icontact Pro which is what I tested starts at $99 with blocks of 2500 contacts available for upgrade at $30 each per month. Among other paid upgrades available. All basic features are included to create personalized email marketing campaigns for inbound leads or subscribers. You can relate to customers better by using their integrated customer relationship management system. And create stylish landing pages to capture inbound traffic new email subscribers I like targeting subscribers using workflows that are based on the best content and audience demographic such as type, geography and activity. And keep points for marketing activities in your pipeline to track a prospects sales potential, as well as keep notes and personalize emails using segmentation features sometimes called lead nurturing. You can utilize real time conversation monitoring to track trends on social networks while engaging your target audience. Respond to interest shown in your brand while monitoring social signals which assist movement of prospects through sales funnel using social channels. And utilize analytics reporting to understand campaign success or how to adapt it for better results. Icontact allows marketers to send personalized bulk emails using autoresponders to drip feed campaigns and template designs with analytic reporting which would help save time. The ability create and manage multiple subscriber lists and track email opens, click throughs, unsubscribers, bounce rates is important, as email marketing is a major component of online marketing. It seems quite simple to setup though someone with no experience using email marketing software would face a bit of a learning curve. Workflow set ups in Icontact Pro helps nurture prospects through entire customer lifecycle which makes Icontact unique in the market. The ability to engage target audiences via social media is useful but seems a bit out of their specialization. Though it is helpful to compare data from email campaigns, landing pages and social posts in order to help maximize sales this component isn't as powerful as other software available just for social media marketing.

While the visual editor is easy to use and the templates diverse, editing these templates is time consuming. Some advanced features are not prominently presented and a bit difficult to implement. The HTML editor is a bit buggy and there is no way to preview templates as they would be seen in email providers. Native testing with html/css compression is an opportunity for this company to be taken more seriously. Certain dashboards are a bit difficult to navigate and find various functions when creating an email. For example, to send a test email when it's hidden in the message bar.

By using Icontact it's possible to improve communication with prospects and customer by sending personalized email campaigns complete with analytic reports. My gripes are mostly technical as I find it challenging to work with buggy content editors and editing templates. If you can manage to setup your campaign efficiently you are well on the way to obtaining good value for your money with Icontact.