Before Green Prophet signed up for iContact, a fee-based email marketing email newsletter company, we tried to do it on our own. It was a mess and a dazzling disaster.
Emails we sent out didn’t get delivered or were marked as spam; we lost formatting options using our own template, and basically it was just a general disaster which was frustrating, and worse –– time consuming. Inefficient.
Green Prophets like to spend their time researching and writing, not messing around with technology and copying and pasting thousands of contacts into Bcc fields. Before signing up for the iContact service, which we did with a lot of research (we compared services and the costs of other companies) and felt that iContact offered the right service. We’d even tried buying our own email server and it was going to cost about $1000 plus design fees plus bandwidth usage. It was all getting more complicated by the minute. We needed a solution that could help us do what we do best: green news publishing.
While we like to keep our weekly newsletter simple and to the pont, the iContact service gives a broad range of technological solutions to all kind of publishers: whether you are writing the news, a personal blog, or are selling a new painting each week. The company offers tips from entering the confusing world of social media, to reducing the chances your email will go to the spam box. If there are certain catch words that will most certainly label the incoming mail as spam iContact will ask you to correct it.
Human editors read your newsletter over to make sure the message is kosher, ie no porn or naked pics. We were stopped once because an image showed the slightest outline of a nipple. But that’s good for us because our mixed readership includes religious Jews and Muslims. We didn’t want to publish nipples or offend anyone at all.
If you’re on the fence, try it out. For a limited time and limited subscribership, iContact is free.
What you did worked really well. I now get Green Prophet news quite often and read it very frequently. Even your product showcases are enlightening. Like the kitchen composter. Even though it was showcasing an Israeli company, I went in and saw their offerings as well as other options including passive collection receptacles and outdoor units.
Keep up the good work. I find I really look forward to receiving your stuff.
Thank You
Michael Lehner
Cedar Rapids, Iowa