I have spent the morning (damn my VA who I have yet to hire) faffing around changing the email & autoresponder service I use.
This kind of decision is not one to be taken lightly – especially not if you have to make all your existing contacts re-opt in just because you decided to change services.
However, this process has been a dream largely because of the new service I’ve chosen to use. I’ve made the switch from aweber to iContact.
Aweber has always been my service of choice largely because I liked the functionality on offer but I’ve never been a huge fan of the user interface, finding it fiddly & not particularly user-intuitive. It also annoyed me that I couldn’t use it when I changed to the Opera browser – which in hindsight was a benefit because it lead me to my beloved Firefox :-)
iContact on the other hand is a joy to use. It is so user intuitive, very easy on the eye and offers some additional tracking features that aweber doesn’t yet have – such as being able to see exactly which contacts open your emails, automatically removing the emails that bounce and letting you easily integrate your RSS feeds and send them out to your lists as emails.
Migrating my subscribers was easy & painless and I’ve pretty much completed the move in a couple of hours – far, far shorter than it took me when I migrated from Total Shopping Cart to aweber.
Initial thoughts so far…iContact is everything you’d want in this kind of service, it provides a user experience which is just as it should be. Will keep you updated but fingers crossed this is the last time I do this!!!
Jonathan Woodward Studio
Kinetiva
Location Independent
Vibrapreneur
Lea,
Certainly sorry to see you go and I wish you luck with the solution you chose. Just wanted to let you know that several of the features you mentioned we lacked we actually have.
“automatically removing the emails that bounce”
What Does AWeber Do With Undeliverable Subscribers?
http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/83/
“letting you easily integrate your RSS feeds and send them out to your lists as emails.”
Convert RSS to Email Automatically.
http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/129/
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the comments – and for pointing out that aweber certainly does have some of these features.
My main ‘beef’ with aweber was the user interface – as a visual person, I prefer the look & feel of icontact because I can find the features more easily. Love the icons they use and it highlights certain things that I might not have been aware of (e.g. RSS feeds in).
I was certainly more than happy whilst using aweber – no complaints from me at all – but having seen icontact, I prefer the look & feel of it. That’s just my preference however and I know many people are more than happy with aweber. If aweber looked a little more visually appealing to use (despite the recent improvements), then I would be hard pressed to choose.
Of the solutions out there, I will continue to recommend both aweber & icontact and leave it up to personal preference for others to choose their favourite.
Cheers, Lea