iContact Comparison and Review

This week iContact announced the email marketing industry’s first app for the Google Android Smartphone. The email marketing software now allows small business owners and marketing professionals the ability to perform critical email campaign tasks on the Google Android operating system.

"iContact customers are tech savvy, resourceful and always on the go. We are excited to be the first in our market to respond to customer demand with the new Android Email Marketing app," says  iContact CEO Ryan Allis. "This app will help our customers manage their professional email marketing on the go."

The new iContact for Android offers these new features:

• Search and add new contacts
• Take contacts from your Android address book and add them directly to your email marketing contact lists
• Preview and send your email drafts right away or schedule all of your prepped email campaigns
• Track your messages with ease
• View your clicks, opens, and message bounces in real-time
• Forward your email marketing tracking data to anyone
• Have quick access to full iContact Customer Support inside the application

iContact for Android is the second of mobile applications from iContact. The first, iContact for iPhone, was launched in May 2010.

iContact, a popular email marketing service for small businesses, and Flowtown, the fastest growing social marketing platform on the web, announced an integration last week that will allow iContact users to segment their subscribers based on their social networking use.

Flowtown has integrated its platform with iContact’s email marketing software, and now iContact users can now easily segment any subscriber list by age group, gender, location, occupation, and social network at a low cost.

“In the past, sending targeted email was very expensive and only available to the Fortune 500,” commented Ethan Bloch, co-founder of Flowtown. “The Flowtown and iContact integration will enable anyone to segment their lists more effectively and increase open and click rates by sending more targeted email.”

With this new feature, the user is able to find out which social networks each of their contacts are on, send them a targeted email offering a specific promotion or sale, and then encourage customers to visit them on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

“This integration brings email marketing to the social web,” added Keith Moore, Chief Marketing Officer for iContact. “To be able to segment customers based on not only their age and location, but by social network, is powerful. Email has never been more social!”

Learn more by checking out the short introduction video.

Last week, email marketing software iContact announced the release of its mobile applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch.iContact’s 63,000 customers can now search contacts, access real-time analytics about their email campaigns, and send email from the palm of their hand with this app.

“iContact for iPhone lets users tap into our powerful email marketing system on the go,” says Keith Moore, iContact’s chief marketing officer. “This is just one example of what is possible with iContact’s new API [application programming interface] v.2 environment. We are excited about the many customer-focused changes coming from iContact this year.”

With the new iContact app you can:

    * Search contacts, add a contact from your iPhone address book or add contacts to any of your email marketing lists.
    * Preview your email drafts before you send them.
    * Send or schedule a send for all of your prepared email marketing campaigns.
    * Track message bounces, clicks, opens, and much more with clear graphics.
    * Forward your email marketing tracking reports to anyone.
    * Access full customer support—either by calling or emailing iContact’s support team.

Often businesses focus more on making money and less on philanthropy, but for the two founders of iContact, profitability and philanthropy go hand in hand.

In an Entrepreneur Magazine profile, cofounders Ryan Allis and Aaron Houghton discuss the humble beginnings of the email marketing provider and describe their business model, which factors in nonprofit goals. The two University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alums met in the Entrepreneurship Club in 2002. At the time, Allis owned a web marketing consulting company and Houghton owned a web design and software company. Houghton had developed an online email list management tool, and Allis soon realized how much easier it was than the software he used in his own marketing business. The two then joined forces and formed iContact Corp.

By the second year, the company started turning a profit, allowing the company to engage in charity work. Through a corporate social responsibility policy referred to as the "4-1s," iContact began donating 1% of its payroll, employee time, product and equity to various nonprofit organizations. Allis suggested to Entrepreneur that by generating profits, you can accomplish philanthropic goals without being distracted by having to raise donations, also while growing your business. 

iContact's revenue catapulted from $300,000 in 2004 to $26.4 million last year. With 190 employees and a 2009 payroll of $10.9 million, iContact was able to make $109,000 in cash donations last year. The company also donated free usage of iContact to nearly 700 nonprofits and gave each iContact employee two-and-a-half paid days off to perform volunteer work, generating 475 days of volunteer work among 63 organizations.

Not only does this article give great insight into the early days of iContact and its great business model, but it also help inspire your small business to  foster a philanthropic community at your workplace.

In its March issue, Website Magazine named iContact, a popular email marketing software for small and mid-sized businesses, the No. 1 Email Marketing Service Provider and Resource for Web professionals. The article also cites studies that show that email marketing as a dominant communications tool for marketing.
   
Website Magazine’s Top 50 rankings are measured by the website’s popularity. Rankings are based on average daily unique visitors and page views over a specified period of time. The site with the highest combination of factors and variables is ranked in the first position, which happens to be iContact.

“Email Service Providers, such as those listed in this month's Website Magazine Top 50, provide Web marketers the ability to communicate to a broader audience in a personal, non-invasive way,” commented Peter Pestipino, Editor-in-Chief of Website Magazine. “Email has retained its position as the dominant communication channel.”

The March issue of Website Magazine is available now to subscribers and in digital form on Website Magazine’s…well, website.

Some of iContact’s standard features include message scheduling, open and clickthrough tracking, WYSIWYG editor and SpamCheck, with more advanced features that include RSS feeds, subscriber action history, multiple message autoresponders and list segmentation.

A few weeks ago if you searched for iContact on Twitter, you would have seen several comments from users of the email marketing service provider who were complaining of a hack attack on their accounts and a leak of personal information. This week the company announced they are investigating the situation.

“As noted in our blogs posts, iContact may have been the target of illegal attempts to access information from our database,” iContact’s marketing executive Chuck Hester told Local Tech Wire. “We are actively investigating the allegations, but we do not have any additional information to share at this time.”

In a blog post last Monday, iContact said the company asked the FBI for help in its investigation of the hack. ”Data security is a high priority at iContact,” Hester told LTW. “We remain committed to maintaining security measures to protect customer information from illegal access.”

In another blog post, the email newsletter siteemail newsletter site addressed the data that was involved in the hack, which apparently only included subscriber email addresses. iContact also said they had no information to indicate that other data had been affected, including credit card data, customer names or affiliate names. iContact was first alerted to the issue after several customers contacted them about receiving more spam than usual. After launching an investigation, the company took steps to increase its security, including:

1.    "Adding additional monitoring and access controls.
2.    "Reviewing all internal access.
3.    "Verifying the integrity of our existing systems from outside attacks.
4.    "Expanding VPN [virtual private networks] requirements.
5.    "Evaluating additional logging capabilities.
6.    "Auditing our web, intrusion, and security systems."

No further announcements have been made regarding the investigation. If you are an iContact subscriber and believe you may have been a victim of a hacker, contact the company immediately.