iContact Conclusion

iContact received a star rating of 21 out of 25. They scored high for Contact Management because they allow you to directly import contacts from Outlook. While they are lacking a few features, including integration with Google Analytics and the free removal of their logo from emails, we found their Customer Support to be quick and helpful. Their Email Deliverability also scored high due to the high percentage of emails that went through and their spam checking tool.

iContact: Email Creation

iContact received a 4 out of 5 rating for their email creation. They provide 5 MB of image hosting space, which is within our Industry Benchmark range, and they also allow you to edit custom images. iContact offers over 500 templates, which we found to be moderately flexible. You are also able to edit and replace the images on the template. The provided templates include up to 3 columns. They also have a WYSIWYG editor, which allows you to edit your email and see exactly what your reader will see. iContact allows you to drag and drop both images and content blocks. They offer to remove their logo from your emails but at a 10% monthly price premium. iContact also includes some extra features, including the ability to put a link in your email to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn, and an iPhone and Android application for accessing your account, scheduling messages, and stat checking.

iContact: Contact Management

iContact’s received 4 out of 5 stars for Contact Management. Customers can import contacts through Excel, Outlook, and Salesforce as a CSV file. However, you are not able to import contacts from email accounts. We found that their contact management was easy to use with the use of their autoresponder feature and the automatic removal of bounces and unsubscribes.

iContact: Email Deliverability

iContact received 4 out of 5 star rating for their email deliverability. One hundred percent of the emails we sent went through in our test. They do not allow you to edit an email that has been scheduled to send without having to cancel the send. When you choose to send the email immediately, it takes about one minute for it send.

iContact: Analyzing Reports

iContact’s score for Analyzing Reports is 4 out of 5 stars. Their reports display the number of opens, unsubscribes, forwards, clicks, and spam reports, but they do not include the number of bounces or top performing links. In our test, we found that the reports accurately reflected user actions. You cannot receive reports in an email, but reports can be displayed in graphs and be exported into a spreadsheet. iContact allows you to export a clean list that does not include bounces or unsubscribes. iContact does not have an automatic A/B testing feature, but you can manually develop an A/B test by segmenting your contact list. Their reports do not integrate with Google Analytics.

iContact: Customer Support

Their star rating for Customer Support is 5 out of 5 stars. They offer phone support from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET Monday through Friday and live chat support from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. ET. They also offer 24/7 email support. We found their live chat to be very helpful and informative with no wait time. iContact offers both text and video tutorials but no FAQ section.

iContact: Pricing

iContact's free plan includes 500 contacts for an indefinite period of time for up to 2000 emails per month.  This free service has fewer features than their paid accounts. You can also get a free 30-day trial to try out their paid service. Their pricing is contact based and includes 500 contacts per month for $10, 1000 contacts for $19, and 2500 contacts for $29. Contact based pricing is advantageous if you intend to send more than one email per month to the same list of contacts.