iContact Review: Features and Pricing 2021

iContact in a nutshell

What is iContact?

iContact is an uncomplicated and straightforward email marketing software that allows you to create and track a businesslike and productive email campaign. Founded nearly two decades ago, this platform has helped thousands of small and individualistic businesses send billions of emails to their contacts monthly.

iContact Pros & Cons

PROS

Templates: this platform has over seven hundred intuitive, easy-to-use templates that are fully customizable in iContact’s built-in drag-and-drop editor. 

Customer support: iContact has 24/7 support for its customers. You can contact them via a live chatbox, an email address, and a phone number. They also regularly send out tips and tricks to help you use their software to its full potential via email.

Split testing: unlike some of its competitors, iContact’s A/B Split Testing feature is available for customers on all payment plans.

Quick: when you log onto this platform, you're sent straight to your dashboard, where you can create an email, a landing page, or an automation within a few minutes.

Free trial: iContact has a generous thirty-day free trial for you to decide whether their software is right for you or not. 

CONS

Lack of critical features: the entry-level base plan subscription for this platform lacks vital features, like audience segmentation and event-themed emails. 

Font: iContact has limited availability, restricting you from setting a default font, size, or color based on your branding.

Costs: the costs associated with every add-on feature related to this platform can quickly get costly. Sometimes you have to buy entire packages to take advantage of a single feature. There is no "a la carte" option. 

Who is iContact Good For?

This platform is appropriate for you if:

• You send bulk emails: iContact allows you to send bulk emails to your clients within minutes. All you need to do is load your list of contacts, create your email, and hit send. 
• You’re a: small business, an entrepreneur, a marketer, an agency, an EDU, a financial service, an event manager, or a non-profit organization. 

iContact Isn’t Recommended For:

• Someone in advanced HTML coding: iContact's email automation creator is basic, aimed at beginners with no previous coding experience. If you're adept at advanced HTML coding, this is not the platform for you.
• Someone who only sends a few emails a month: if you’re only sending out a few emails a month, the cost for subscription becomes expensive quickly, as iContact is specifically designed to send out bulk emails to your contacts.

iContact Pricing

Pricing is based on the number of subscribers that you have. Aside from the Base plan, there’s also a ‘Pro’ option, which is double the price of the Base plans, shown below.

This platform's price gradually increases as your list of contacts grows. iContact also offers twenty percent off non-profit organizations, and Salesforce plans that start at $99/month. These are just the basic price plans – if you're a high-volume sender, you'll have to call iContact for a CPM pricing quote.

Cancellation/Refund Policy

iContact allows you to downgrade or cancel at any time. All you have to do is fill out a form and contact a Customer Success Manager to cancel your account. As part of their downgrading service, you can also pause your subscription for two periods during the year for up to six months at a time.

iContact Features

This platform has sixty-six different features for you to use; however, you have to pay the entire Pro subscription plan of $30/month to have full access to all of them. Here are a few main features worth mentioning:

Insights & Analytics

Rating: 4.5/5

iContact's real-time reporting tool observes how your audience is growing and how well your campaigns perform, all in one place – the dashboard. You can easily see your campaign engagement, clicks, open rates, and deliveries. Additionally, you can also study the success of particular campaigns and analyze aggregate data quickly.

Bulk and Scheduled Email Campaigns

Rating: 4/5

This platform allows you to import contacts, create emails and send automations to everyone without requiring previous coding experience. You can also schedule emails to be sent at certain times and dates to customers, for example, birthday emails or payment reminders.

Ease of Use

Rating: 4.8/5

iContact's simplistic website makes it easy to navigate and create an email, landing page, or automation within minutes. Everything you need to set up a successful campaign is down the left side of the screen, including your account usage and a button to increase your limits if you wish to do so at a point in the future. Setting up my account was a little tricky. If you have ad-blockers enabled, you'll have to disable them before allowing access to the website.

Autoresponders and Triggers

Rating: 4.5/5

iContact allows you to trigger campaigns based on predetermined circumstances and events like clicks, landing page visits and emails being opened. You can also send a customized yet automatic email to clients when they join your marketing list, welcoming them to your business.

Personalization

Rating: 4.6/5

This platform allows you to create emails for each customer based on relevant information. Additionally, you can generate segments based on specific customer information and what they’ve done in the past before sending out your email campaign or landing page. You can also add custom fields to use information based solely on your organization to personalize emails further.

A/B Split Testing

Rating: 4.5/5

iContact allows you to improve and run tests on six different email categories to send to your clients so that you can establish what will cause the best response. Tests can be run on subject lines, from names, content, CTA buttons, graphics, and delivery times. Unlike many of its competitors, this platform's A/B Split Testing is available for all payment plans.

Subscriber Growth

Rating 4.7/5

This platform allows you to create and publish a place for your brand with landing pages, using iContact's built-in drag-and-drop editor. Additionally, you can increase your audience with custom subscriber forms that you can integrate anywhere, put on social media, or add to landing pages. You can also funnel customers from other services and places using API connections. 

iContact’s landing page editor:

iContact Automations

iContact's automation builder is simple and easy to use. Simply by building 'paths' linking each action, trigger, or event together, your automation can be ready in minutes. Here are three main things you can do with this platform’s automation builder:

• Subscriber events: you can instruct iContact’s program which and when subscribers join your automation emails.
• Engagement triggers: you can create paths for your subscribers based on how they react to your emails and landing pages.
• Date in time: you can create and send incredibly personalized emails by setting up triggers that send automations on a specific date.

There are a number of ways in which iContact’s email marketing software can be automated. You can use automation to take greater control of your campaigns, saving you potentially hundreds of hours on repetitive manual tasks.

iContact Integrations

This platform has sixty-one different integrated apps over nine different categories for you to create successful marketing emails. Zapier, Shopify, PayPal, Salesforce, Facebook, WordPress, and various Google plug-ins are some of the more well-known apps that you can easily integrate into your emails. However, there are still many less well-known apps that you can implement just as quickly. Additionally, suppose you have created your integration, app, or plug-in using iContact's built-in API creator. In that case, you can share it with them simply by filling out a form, after which iContact will share it with their customers.

There are hundreds of integration options for furthering the success of your marketing campaign.

API integrations

Powerful API can be used to create applications, experiment and problem solve

Integrations with these platforms: Ecommerce, Shopify, Magento, Bigcommerce and Woocommerce 

It has options to integrate all of the above platforms

CRM Integrations

Six CRM tools come as standard, with options to add more tools

Social Media integrations

Most common social media platforms are supported, such as Facebook

Apps 

LeadsBridge and Zapier are just two of the featured apps 

Plugins

A fairly large range of optional plugins are supported

This platform's price gradually increases as your list of contacts grows. iContact also offers twenty percent off non-profit organizations, and Salesforce plans that start at $99/month. These are just the basic price plans – if you're a high-volume sender, you'll have to call iContact for a CPM pricing quote.

iContact Alternatives

ConstantContact has a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 60-day free trial, with most of its features freely available to you. The free trial doesn't automatically renew, and you can still access your data without having to sign up once the trial expires.

EmailOctopus is a dependable software at an affordable price with outstanding customer support. This platform has a free version for up to 2,500 subscribers. After that, prices start at $20/month. 

SendX is an intuitive email marketing software that you can use to design, schedule, and track email campaigns and create sales from your emails.

Conclusion

While I found it slightly frustrating to sign up to iContact's website because of my enabled ad-blockers, the rest of the website is almost straightforward to navigate around. I highly recommend you give it a try for its thirty-day free trial if you're a small business looking for an easy-to-use email marketing tool before deciding whether it is the right tool for you or not.

There are many features at iContact that’d help most businesses to streamline their service, automate functions to save time, and fine-tune email campaigns that could eventually lead to a much larger rate of customer engagement. The only downside is that the price is quite prohibitive, with very small businesses still paying a fair sum, and large businesses paying a huge amount. Also, many of the above features are only available on the ‘Pro’ service, doubling the cost.

Why not instead try Get Response? This is an intuitive email marketing service that offers much of the same tools and products but with plans starting at $10.50 per month, a price that’s the same across the board, regardless of your number of subscribers.