Why do I need an autoresponder?
An aspect of internet marketing that is often grossly underestimated is the power of email marketing. If you have traffic and you have not started collecting leads than you are losing out on potential profits. The best internet marketers can convert 5-6% of their traffic on their first visit, but this is quite a feat to accomplish. With a mailing list however they can easily achieve over 100% conversions, meaning that if somebody subscribes to their list they can convert some people multiple times on different products.
iContact Review
I have gathered reports from many different people while surfing DP, Warrior’s Forum and Wicked Fire and one common denominator is that most people are satisfied with iContact. I cannot say the same about some of the other companies in the industry. iContact has a 99% deliverability rate according to the independent ranking company Pivotal Veracity. There are 300 different HTML templates that allow you to create professional looking emails with minimal effort and no previous experience. The service is set up so that a novice that can easily figure out how to set up their opt-in forms and send out email blasts while allowing professionals the same level of comfort and flexibility that they are used to.
iContact VS Constant Contact
The major difference between iContact and Constant Contact is the price. For beginners the monthly fee is $15 with Constant Contact compared to iContact and at the same time for larger lists such as 10,000 the savings become even more substantial. If you had 10000 subscribers it would cost you an extra $800/year to use Constant Contact.
If you would like to learn more about iContact and autoresponders in general check out iContact Review. You will also find actual user reviews from iContact subscribers.
Comparison between icontact vs aweber
1. Cost – $20/month (0-500 subscribers) vs $10/month (0-250 subscribers), $14 (500 subscribers)
2. Popularity Alexa – 256 vs 3,197
3. Ease of Use – Both are similar as both allow both HTML and TXT messages but converting a HTML to a TXT in iContact sometimes requires additional editing as words get merged. Very annoying. Also Aweber shows you the standard width so you can sentence wrap lines for smaller screens which most people have.
4. Tracking – iContacts method of tracking breaks it down per message sent and you can see the sent, opens, bounces, spams. Aweber also does that but take a bit longer to adjust to. Aweber seems to have more information and seems to focus more on a larger audience as each subscriber has more unique information tied to them. In iContact, you specify how many days after a subscriber joins to send the message. Aweber has how many days AFTER the message before. This makes total sense. If you have 100 auto-responder emails then you don’t want to have to edit each iContact email and have to adjust how many dates from entry to send the email. The drag and drop order and how many days the next email should be released after the previous one is Aweber is much easier to handle.
5. Affiliate – 20% personal and 10% from 2nd level vs 25% on all sales. Aweber raising commissions from 20% to 30%, take effect today, April 8th, 2009.
6. Spam – Aweber. Their system seems much easier to pin point what is making your message a “spammy” message. iContact also has this feature but doesn’t seem as integrated into the who editing process of a message. I find I can take a look and see which of my e-mails is more “spammy”. This is important and Aweber stresses that by making sure we understand if one of my messages is on the border of being marked.
7. Global Fields – Very similar in function but Aweber makes it a bit easier to actually use the fields.
8. Signature -YOU MUST KNOW THIS FOR AWEBER. The Text e-mail will automatically attach your signature data you specify in your list options. The HTML WILL NOT. You must manually put “!signature ” after your message. I thought that was odd that it wasn’t automatically placed like in the Text version.