Next up on our list of email marketing service providers is iContact for therapists. Last week, I looked at MailChimp — a service with a great list of features, including multi-user capabilities, mobile email creation, and a pay-as-you-go option. While iContact doesn’t have a chimp smiling at you on their homepage, I figured we couldn’t judge a book by its cover.

This week, I am diving into iContact — an email marketing service that has stellar reviews and has been a popular choice among many therapists I have worked with. Listed below are the past, current, and future services I’m covering in this series of reviews.

• AWeber
• Constant Contact
• MailChimp
• iContact
• Mailpoet

PROS OF iCONTACT

• Expert advisory services: A unique service that iContact offers is advisory services — basically a marketing expert who helps you achieve your marketing goals. When you purchase a Premier account, you are given a personal strategic advisor who gets to know your business, “like the back of their hand,” and helps you effectively market your company through email and social media marketing. Your advisor helps you by utilizing tools such as reengagement campaigns, segmentation, and message layout optimization.
• Design Services: Another feature iContact offers, which I haven’t seen in other email marketing services, is design services. If you are looking to customize your emails to match your website, or design something from scratch, a team of designers will work with you to create email templates, custom footers, subscription pages, sign up forms, and more. You can purchase design serves individually, bundled, in advance, or on an as-you-go basis.
• Email templates: As with the other services, iContact offers hundreds of email templates for you to create sleek and professional looking emails. They also have drag and drop editing capabilities, making the email creation process as easy as can be.
• Email & social media tracking: Track the impact of your emails and social media marketing with iContact’s email reports. As with other services, you can see the number of opens, clicks, forwards, and message trends. iContact also allows you to view the impact specific social media posts are having in terms of likes, tweets, shares, etc.
• Personalization of emails: iContact allows you to use mail-merge fields to personalize each email. Address people by their first names, rather than a general introduction.
• Website & Social Media Sign up forms: Create sign up forms for both your website and your social media accounts to build your email marketing list. The forms are customizable to match the color and design theme on your website.
• Image storing: iContact allows you to upload and store photos that you use commonly in your emails. This makes it easy to have everything in one place when creating your email campaign.
• Email Marketing Guide: A neat feature that iContact offers is an email marketing guide — a step-by-step training section on their website, that teaches you how to effectively market yourself. The guide has 5 sections: Planning, Contacts, Create, Send, and Track. They also have a social media marketing guide.
• Free Trial: iContact allows you to try the ropes before making any commitment. The free trial allows you to test the features and get a feel for the service.

CONS OF iCONTACT

Finding negative feedback about iContact was difficult. Most people seem to love everything about iContact, with a few minor complaints (limited support hours and a slow loading website). The one con we did find relates to Google Analytics, something that could make or break signing up.

• Google Analytics only available for premier members: One downside to iContact is Google Analytics. While other email marketing services include this in their basic packages, iContact requires a premier account to access the Google analytics tool.

PRICE OF iCONTACT

The pricing of iContact is comparable to the other services we have covered. Below are the different pricing options for iContact for up to 10,000 subscribers. You can have up to 5 million subscribers, according to their website, and if purchased annually, the price is reduced by 15%.

• 250 subscribers for $10/month
• 500 subscribers for $14/month
• 1,000 subscribers for $19/month
• 2,500 subscribers for $29/month
• 5,000 subscribers for $47/month
• 10,000 subscribers for $74/month
• 15,000 subscribers for $109/month

Next week, I will take a look at the very last email marketing service on my list — MailPoet. MailPoet is a service that many of our clients use, and one we highly recommend, so stay tuned!

By: Becky DeGrossa