10 November 2007

Making email interactive


Can email be interactive? If you said "No!" then you are wrong.

Leading email marketing company, iContact has launched a unique feature around email content, called the iContact Community. It allows visitors to comment, rank, and discuss email newsletters with their subscribers which opt in.

It works by allowing email marketers to create a public profile, publicly archive their newsletters and blog posts, tag and categorize their newsletters and blog posts in categories like Automotive, Business, Entertainment, shopping and more.

At first glance, it looks very much like Digg and it's not surprising as the community employs a similar model - more interesting and relevant the content published, the higher the chances for it to get votes.

This should definitely interest those publishers who are looking to get more visitors and subscribers, as the community profile will be indexed by Google and the major search engines.

When I last checked, the Community had already 213,458 Articles, 120,876 Members and 119,016 Publishers just a few days after launch.

iContact certainly has one of the best features and one of the best prices in the market. Their user-interface is quite intuitive and streamlined. You don't have to take my word for it as you can try it out for free. Use their service to create, send and track Email Newsletters, Surveys, and RSS Feeds. They have different pricing packages from 500 to 100,000 subscribers. Anyone can join as a iContact publisher by paying $9.95 per month. This is for 500 subscribers. However, you have to contact them directly for a quote if you have a huge number of subscribers, exceeding 100,000 contacts.

If you are a non-profit organization, you are in luck as iContact is now offering a 20% discount, provided you can prove your non-profit status.

Do check out the iContact Blog as well. They have a number of tips for improving email marketing campaigns and of course updates on iContact and informations about the Broadwick Corporation.

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