|
Working as part of a web marketing team, I've had the chance to work with two e-newsletter solutions and I have become strongly opinionated as to what makes an excellent e-newsletter service and why one service is clearly better than another.
Of course I'm talking about iContact vs. Constant Contact. For years Constant Contact has been the industry leader until iContact came onto the scene. And for a long time I didn't understand why anyone would want to compete with Constant Contact--it had such a big reputation. Then I tried using it. It goes to show you that if you have a business idea that already exists in the marketplace -who is to say that you can't do it better?
And iContact does e-newsletters better than Constant Contact.
Last week, I had to edit a client's e-newsletter in Constant Contact and I was appalled at how difficult it was. Her newsletter had to be edited entirely in html, without a WYSIWYG editor. The newsletter preview opened in a separate window and took ages to load. While we have html capabilities, it is much easier to write in a WYSIWYG editor -especially if a regular person wanted to manage their newsletter. iContact has both html and WYSIWYG and has a preview button that allows you to switch seamlessly between your work in progress and viewing the resulting newsletter as it would appear in your inbox.
Simply put, the main reason I dislike Constant Contact is because it is not intuitive. There aren't clear cues as to the actions you wish to take on the site. I have to think too much to use it. And as Steve Krug taught us, "Don't make me think!"
iContact offers a free 15-day trial--I invite you to try it and poke around and tell us what you think of it and whether it's as intuitive and easy to use as we think it is.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
