iContact Plugin Ready For Beta Testers

I’ve finished writing (the first version of) the aMail for iContact plugin to work with aMember Professional Membership Site software.

As I mentioned before in a previous post I will give my Everything bundle members the first chance to use this new plugin. If you are an Everything bundle member then you can download the iContact plugin here.

In this case that link will also work for anyone who has previously purchased any version of my aMail plugin. If you want to test it out or switch to iContact from your current email service provider then you are more than welcome.

The iContact API has a lot of nice features and it allows me to do quite a bit more than I’ve been able to do with most of the other autoresponder services.

It does not require double opt-in so that is a barrier that has been taken care of.

It allows me to automatically create custom fields which makes the setup easier than the other plugins. I’ve taken advantage of that to automatically create a lot of custom fields and populate them because it also allows me to update them in iContact when the member record is updated in aMember.

You can use these custom fields to segment your list(s). So for example one of the fields I’ve populated which will stay updated in iContact is the member status which will be set to pending, active or canceled. So when you want to send a message to just the pending members you can create a matching segment and send just to them.

Unfortunately for now the autoresponder feature of iContact does not utilize segments. That is really too bad and I’ve asked the developers to try to find a way to make that work, but they did not sound too keen to do it.

If that had worked you would have been able to get by with simply creating one list and adding everyone to it no matter what and then use your segments to control your autoresponder series. So we are all stuck with still creating separate lists for each product and one master list of all paid customers and one list of prospects and then attaching our autoresponders to those lists.

One other fatal flaw that just about every email service provider has and iContact is no exception is the ability for the list owner to control the status of the member on their lists. In other words even with the API we cannot unsubscribe someone when they stop paying and then re-subscribe them if/when they renew their membership. Just like AWeber, once a member is unsubscribed they are gone forever unless they personally go back to their site and re-subscribe themselves.

So I’m recommending that you just check the box in the plugin to not ever unsubscribe someone so that you don’t accidentally lose them.

We need to have control over this as the list owners.

The reason they don’t give us that control of course is that it would be abused. The member would unsubscribe themselves and then we would re-subscribe them even if they didn’t want to. I understand that and I agree that we should not be able to unsubscribe a member who does not want to be on our list. So I’ve asked the iContact developers to give us another status such as “suspended” that we can move a member to if we need to for any reason and then back to normal when they are in good standing.

Actually A LOT of other people have asked them for the same thing on their developer forums. They have said that they plan to do something to accommodate this in a future release of their API but would absolutely not commit to any time line for getting this done. (I’ve been underwhelmed by their responses in this regard and their lack of answering questions on their developer community forums.)

You can move them non-destructively from one list to another list manually in the admin interface. That would be another option for making this work by setting up a suspended list but you cannot do it through their API…yet.

Once that gets fixed this may be the holy grail of aMember/Autoresponder integrations.

I hope so.