IContact is the second largest provider of email newsletters. Constant Contact is first. I had a chance to speak with David Roth, Vice President of Business Development, some months ago about his company. (Back before I had a blog.)

IContact’s delivery rate is reported as 99.1%, which is very good. They send 93 million emails.

In addition to newsletters, they offer surveys, auto-responders and list segmentation.

A unique feature: They provide an RSS feed of your newslettter that posts them on their web site. The result is that folks searching the web may find your content on the IContact web site. There is a public newsletter archive available. David reports that 50,000 people come to the web site through non-competitive search terms – means they are not searching for IContact or newsletter services.

The company is based in Raleigh Durham and was incorporated in July of 2003. March 20 2004 was their commercial launch.

They do have an affiliate program, however there is no support for the affiliates.

I almost switched from being a Constant Contact business partner. The reason that I didn’t was the templates to get a newsletter put together fast are better at Constant Contact. I have found that the support at Constant Contact has been great.

The reason I considered switching was because of the additional featues of surveys, auto-responder and list segmentation. Constant Contact now offers surveys and has list segmentation. I am staying put. I think that the other reason is that I had lunch with Gail Goodman. The ties that bind.