Is anyone using iContact for mailing lists?

[Micheal Perkins]

I'm looking at moving my email subscription to a service instead of my server.

I've heard a lot about aweber and getresponse, but I've seen a couple big names using iContact.

Is anyone here using that or has used it? If you're using it, what do you like and dislike about it?

If you used to use it but switched, why and who did you switch to?

iContact is about $10 cheaper, but that $10 is not a deciding factor for me. I will pay the extra $10 if the service is better.

[Matt Johnson]

I work with a client who uses it for sending out corporate newsletters. I've been in there a bit messing around.

Two things that I noticed right away is that the list settings default to single opt-in and that they have no problems letting you import contacts from anywhere.

You can simply import a huge csv file of email addresses and it's no problem. Completely the opposite of Aweber.

Seems very flexible.

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Originally Posted by Micheal Perkins

I'm looking at moving my email subscription to a service instead of my server.

I'm seriously considering the exact same thing, and after all my research, iContact is the provider to which I'm planning to move my lists.

[spudzz]

From another thread:-


"I signed up for iContact's 15 day free trial. At first I liked it, it's easy to use and figure out.

But, when I get emails from iContact, whether it be alerting me that an email was sent or just from them as a company trying to get me to buy, it always shows up in my spam folder.

Kind of ironic....a business thats only job is too send emails gets sent to my spam folder.

And the emails don't get sent right away. I was testing it and signed up for a list I made. The welcome email came like 20 minutes later. And when I used confirmed opt in, same thing, it didn't come right away. Not good!"


The problem with deliverability is always there with single optin lists (it's the same with GetResponse if you use that option with them). As a nice chap at GetResponse told me, it's to do with how the email server is flagged - single optin emails are sent from an 'open' email server and that causes the spam bin issues as single optin, or no optin (as with iContact) is your standard route for spam senders. Personally, I can't remember the last aWeber email that went astray so the point is pretty clear really.

[Micheal Perkins]

The spam folder problem is a pretty big issue in my opinion. I plan to start using email marketing to contact the members of my sites. I have one free site now, the one listed in my sig file.

I have another site that has been a paid site, but no sign ups. Probably has something to do with my sales letter. I wrote it myself, basing it off other letters for similar products. I've had over 100 visitors to the page, but less than 150 and no purchases yet.

I know sales are made in the niche, just not by me. So I'm considering giving my content away as a membership site, then using email marketing to make money from my list.

So the spam problem is significant.

Matt, has the client you've been working with had problems with their emails going to the spam folder?

Does iContact have a double optin feature, or is it limited to single optin?

[Chris Lagarde]

I tried out iContact's autoresponder feature and found it simply didn't deliver a couple hundred emails (out of a list of 1500) everytime a message went out. Customer service was not helpful and ultimately (after much time on the phone over a period of days) they told me that I could not change, in any way, my autoresponder messages once I set them up.

It was the edits that caused the system to not deliver the message to certain contacts. I'm not kidding. Great user interface. I really liked it but they couldn't do what I needed which was to deliver my emails!

After wasting all my time recreating my autoresponder campaign on iContact, I went back to Email Aces which has great deliverability BUT a stone-age user interface and poor-to-non existant reporting.

After a lot of thought I'm going to give Get Response a try.

[Micheal Perkins]

Ok. Thanks for the input everyone. At this point I think I am leaning toward going with Aweber.

It will be a few days to a maybe a couple weeks before I pull the trigger and do it though. So if anyone else comes in and wants to add your 2 pennies, feel free.

[winebuddy]

you cannot import a list to aweber

well - you can but they MUST click on a confirmation link to be added to your list