Crisis and Management

Marketing gurus have always seen marketing as a pro-active activity. Focusing on and communicating with specific groups brings forth more beneficial results for both the seller and the buyer. The whole concept boils down to effective and timely communication with targeted groups.

The key, then, is to stay in touch with your potential customers. Over the years, email marketing has emerged as one of the most powerful tools to reach your niche market. iContact.com is one organization which meets this concept head on with their uncomplicated, hi-tech and userfriendly interface. (Even their logo says, “We simplify communication.”) iContact provides powerful tools for anyone who wants to create and send out email newsletters.

They also have great inbox deliverability, over 300 templates to design your email newsletter, and includes easy-to-use email marketing, integrated surveying, RSS feeds, autoresponder, and blogging capabilities from a single web application at no additional charge.

Some of the other standard and advanced features include Mail-merge Personalization, Message Scheduling, SpamCheck™, WYSIWYG Newsletter Editor, List Segmentation, Advanced Analytics and Public Newsletter Archiving, to mention a few. These features allow small businesses, non-profits, and associations to easily communicate online with their customers, prospects and members.

Subscription packages start at $9.95 per month and scales upward based on list size. They also have an Enterprise product for larger organizations starting at $660/month.

The application allows you to track the opens and clickthroughs on your emails, add a sign-up form to your web site, segment your list, and manage your subscribers. iContact takes care of managing bounces and unsubscribes for you. The software also ensures that your message gets to the inbox of your recipients through their ISP relations, feedback loops, and whitelist status.

At the time writing iContact has a customer base of nearly 16,000 members and more than 100,000 users. Market leaders like AT&T, Vonage, Symantec, International Paper, ReMax, Centex Homes, and Viacom have chosen iContact to build and improve their customer relations at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods.

If you are looking for any easy and inexpensive way to put your emarketing on autopilot and get great deliverability, iContact seems to be the most favorable option. You can try a 15-day free trial of iContact at www.icontact.com.

Perhaps you might want to check out their overview video here.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Communication, Corporate, Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.