IntelliContact Review
Published September 20th, 2006 in Email MarketingIntelliContact was very user friendly and the pricing seemed reasonable. The starter plan gives you room to store 500 contacts at a $9.95 monthly charge. I needed a simple email marketing solution to send out regular newsletters and product announcements. I decided to give it a test drive because I saw that the Manhattan Young Democrats were using the service to manage their mailing list, then how hard could it be?
I visited their website and signed up for the 15 day free trial. Next I inputted a couple of email addresses to the list for testing out the newsletter features. It was easy and finished setting it up in a few minutes.
To create my message or product announcements, I mocked up a page with Dreamweaver and pasted the HTML into their message holder. Sent that to the email addresses set up earlier. The product announcement was delivered as a straight up HTML webpage to the email. That passed all my requirements.
Other features include the creation of surveys, auto responders in the same process as creating any HTML webpage.
I was very happy with the experience, until I tried to pay for the service with my credit card this very morning. Selected the 1000 contacts package, and tried to pay with an American Express card and a VISA card. Both were blocked; what the hell? I dialed up the 866-xxx-xxxx number provided and selected option #2 because it was a sales related question and got sent directly to voicemail. Hung up and dialed again, selected option #1 while I was chatting with online help. Waited a couple of minutes and spoke to a technical representative, and she told me that my credit card account number was associated with a kill account. Huh? There was nothing she could do for me unless I send them email (which I did with a screen grab before I called). What the hell? The reason I called up because it was urgent. Somehow they have their support team all backwards to treat email as more important than a customer ready to hand them the money on the spot.
I wrote to IntelliContact that the customer service in the morning killed all the positive experience from evaluating the service the night before. The director of customer service responded five hours later via email.
Update 09/28/2006: Apart from the customer service anomaly from that very morning, I have been able to upgrade my account successfully after the initial block was removed. Installing the email collecting forms onto the websites were easy with the sign-up form wizard they have available which made it as simple as cutting and pasting the generated HTML code into the webpage.
7 Responses to “IntelliContact Review”
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WOW! That seems cool, I’m gonna give it a try! By the way, I’m sorry for not posting a link back at my blog, I’ve been kinda busy. Sorry, *fat info*.
Good to hear from you. I have turned the visibility back on, WordPress makes it easy to manage the links.
It was good to hear of your positive experience concerning the Intellicontact feature set. I am concerned as to the support you received. My name is Rob Call and I’m the Senior Accounts Manager here at Intellicontact.
First I would like to apologize for the inconvenience you experienced earlier. I know apologies don’t neccessarily solve anything however we value customer satisfaction above all else.
The error you received most likely stemmed from the account information supplied when you signed up for a trial. The credit card itself may not have been the cause, but certain information (or omission of information) caused a flag to be raised.
By now I’m sure you’ve already chosen the email marketing service that fits your needs. Good luck with your marketing campaigns.
I just felt an apology was neccessary.
Let me know if I can be of assistance.
Rob, no need to apologize. I may also have jumped the gun when the inital customer service was mishandled which makes me at fault as well considering it was standard protocol to protect your customers with the block until things were sorted out.
I am now a paying customer, so no hard feelings.
FatInfo Guy, I have been trying to decide on an email campaign service to use (including IntelliContact)… can you give me an update on how things have gone over the last few months? Thanks.
Quills, I mostly use IntelliContact for passive acquisition of users. So far it have been done its job at allowing users to easily opt-in and easily opt-out at any time from the email lists. The prices and email marketing features offered by IntelliContact are very standard and reasonably priced for smaller list owners. I have not experienced any problems other than the initial oversight of one their representative who was only following company protocol.
http://www.intellicontact.com/a.pl/51421
Anyone ever use this email account program before? Just curious, I’m looking for software that will mass create email accounts.
edit: Try reading the post before you make a comment regarding iContact.