icontact vs. email aces

I'd also like to mention that regardless of whom you choose as your Email Service Provider, there are a few strategies that you should consider deploying in support of your eMarketing Campaign.

The following are just a few of the strategies that iContact can assist your organization with. This is an excerpt from a post that I personally wrote in the iContact User's Group Discussion on LinkedIn:

"I would like to start out by saying that every business is different, and marketing strategies will differ greatly depending on industry, niche, geographical location, economics, and client demographics for that region. What may work for one organization, may not be as successful for another.

In regards to online marketing, some of the above considerations will still apply, while others can be negated, like geography and regional demographics.

iContact provides organizations with the invaluable ability to reach out to globally diverse markets of potential clients using both direct and indirect methods to attract and convert these leads. The following are just a few tools that are available to all iContact clients, and are fully inclusive in our pricing, irregardless of which plan you select.

Digital Word of Mouth Marketing:
Every email campaign distributed via iContact, allows for the automatic placement of a Forward-to-a-Friend (F2F) link at the bottom of the email. This allows your contacts to forward your content to other potential clients, and even allows those clients the ability to subscribe to your list.


Global Exposure to Diverse Markets:
Utilizing our iContact Community, allows iContact Publishers to quickly and easily publish online archived versions of their content. This content is organized into content categories within the iContact Community, and is further organized into Publisher Profiles for each Organization. With hundreds of thousands of hits to the Community each month, we provide Publishers with the ability to capture Community visitors via sign-up forms available in each Publisher Profile.


Social Bookmarking:
Utilizing the iContact Community as an integrated part of your email campaigns allows for your email content recipients to bookmark your emails via a variety of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and more. This function actually bookmarks the iContact Community version of your content, and allows for social bookmarking to drive massive amounts of viewers to your content (and iContact Community Publisher Profile), thus increasing your chances of sign-up conversions.


Google Page Ranking (including other Search Engines):
Due to the consistently high volume of traffic to the iContact Community, it boasts an impressively high Google Page Rank. Having external links from your content to your organization's website, increases the number of heavily weighted links to your website. This in turn allows for a much better potential to have your organization's website show higher is search engine results, as each piece of content within the Community is another "vote" for your website.


Utilizing a Website Sign-up Form:
One of the most important aspects of permission-based email marketing is having an easy to find sign-up form on your website, which can convert site visitors into opt-in subscribers. Remember to clearly state the intention of the sign-up form, and make the sign-up form simple enough for visitors of any attention span. The iContact application provides a simple to use sign-up form wizard that will walk you step-by-step through the creation process.


So, I hope this helps to shed a little light on just a few of the various ways of how you can utilize iContact's services to assist your organization in terms of online marketing strategy, and for driving targeted traffic to your various iContact permission-based opt-in sign-up forms."

Welcome aboard James!

I'm finally glad to see someone from iContact online. You'll find this a great group of passionate folks.

best,
--Jack

Actually, iContact sucks big time. Here's my experience with them.

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ust-crazy.html

Admittedly, I suck at email marketing and only recently started building a list. I don't like email marketing, but thought I'd give it a go.

My first attempt was laughable. I used Bravenet free autoresponder and the very first email I sent had a link to a catch cheating spouse site I had a long time ago in it. Don't know how or why that happened, but it did and I had to send another message to try to explain that. Most of my customers just laughed.

So I switched to iContact for my autoresponder/email service. My list is built purely from a web form and it's only purpose is to send my customers and prospects notification that I have released a new website for sale. They have all double opted-in to receive these notifications and I may send out two messages per month, or occasionally three. I do not send affiliate offers to my list. As I said, it's just for notification to my customers about my own product ... blogs for sale.

Yesterday I released a new blog and went to iContact and typed out my message. I had some great news to tell them about the autoblogged plugin I deliver with the sites and some news about extending my sale (from my previous email) and news about a new site I just released. That's it. All good news to my customers. I saved the message and clicked send.

A couple of minutes later, I get a message saying iContact has rejected my email. I go to iContact and see that they have disabled sending until I contact the "deliverability" department by phone. They have an after hours chat thing so I initiate a chat and give this guy my support number. He looks it up and says the email I sent seems unsolicited. Seems unsolicited? These people have double opted in to receive my messages. How can that be unsolicited, I ask? He then says the email seems "Introductory". I said WTF does that mean ... seems introductory. I have no clue what he was talking about.

So today I contact iContact to cancel the account. You can only cancel by calling. He says, I see you have a deliverability issue. I say ... the only deliverability issue I have is that you failed to deliver my message. He wants to transfer me to the "deliverability" people. I say no ... just cancel the account, please. Finally he does.

Anyone else get their emails rejected by their autoresponder company, or is it just me?

It's not that I didn't receive service. It's that I didn't receive any form of flexibility. The Deliverability dept assumed an immobile stance that pretty much left us with zero options. Trust me, I tried...iContact didn't care. Hell, we weren't even sending out shady emails. We were sending out health alerts to patients! lol...

As for the money, it should have been refunded. I put forward the trust in iContact by paying a year in advance...they should have reciprocated. That's a no-brainer. I hope the money iContact kept helps pay for the damage control you're attempting to exercise a year later.

Very poor customer support and business practices make iContact a terrible email service provider in my book.