Hello all,
Check this response to a “review” of my iContact account. Keep in mind that they asked where I generated my list and I showed them this blog and the optin forms I have here. (They didn’t know where I built my list even though I use their own optin forms to do so. Huh?)
This was their response after “reviewing” my site.
“Hello Matt,
MLM and network/affiliate marketing present an unique set of challenges for us. Many pyramid schemes try to present themselves as legitimate MLM businesses. In the most legitimate MLM companies, commissions are earned on sales of the company’s products or services and not recruiting alone. Company products/services should be tangible goods or services outside of the MLM model, meaning that books or CDs that explain the MLM system do not qualify as a tangible good in the view of iContact.
After reviewing your web site and the message history of your account we have come to the conclusion that we can no longer provide service to your account. The model of your business closely resembles that of a pyramid model, in which as you have admitted, no tangible goods or services are provided. The affiliate marketing systems you site promotes only mentions profit potential through recruiting and again, contains no mention of any physical product line.
You will have seven days to collect your contact data. We wish you the best in your future business endeavors.
Regards,
Chris Truitt
iContact Deliverability Specialist
2635 Meridian Parkway Ste 200
Durham, NC 27713
deliverability@icontact.com
http://www.icontact.com/terms/antispam”
MLM. Network marketing. Recruiting. WHAT!!!???
How stupid can you be!!??? Where in the hell on my site is there anything about MLM, network marketing, or recruiting???
The funny part is that they have an affiliate program themselves but they don’t understand what affiliate marketing even is! According to them, what I do is a pyramid scheme because I don’t ship physical products! How ludicrous is that!!??
By that definition, their own service is a pyramid scheme. Really, really stupid.
I used to sign high praises for iContact. But after this action and talking to other internet marketers that have had problems with them, I have to warn very strongly against using them. They have no clue about marketing!
I can’t say enough about this. USE AN EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDER THAT UNDERSTANDS MARKETING! iContact obviously does not.
Stay away. Cancel your account if you have one.
Talk soon,
Matt
.
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
I always recommend Aweber.com. Extremely easy to use interface, and surprisingly inexpensive. It’s what powers most of the big IM lists out there.
The problem with Aweber is they suck even worse than iContact! They have screwed over more marketers than I can count. I DO NOT recommend them!
Matt
Matt-
What a Joke! It’s a shame so many potentially good services are run by idiots. Thanks for sharing the info.
Jeff
I am sorry, but could you explain how aweber is no different?
The majority of IM-ers do use them, so they can not be that terrible.
Our first, original site won’t even be using an autoresponder- so there is no e-mail marketing!
That said, we have an account with get response that we will be using on our nearly 1300 other domains.
Best,
-K
http://www.for-the-troops.com
P.S. Have you tried to contact iContact’s co-founder, Ryan Allis? He’s written at least one book. I’m sure if you try & reach him personally, he might be able to help. It’s worth a shot.
Who would you go with since aweb and icont suck?
Aweber sucks because they force you to do double optin to get any kind of good delivery and they shut accounts down without warning for the stupidest reasons ever.
My buddy Amish Shah from http://www.hexatrack.com had his Aweber account shut down because he was getting too many optins during a launch. WTF?
My friends at http://www.MindMovies.com had their Aweber account shut down because they weren’t using the “right form” on their optin page. Again, WTF?
I could go on and on. But the worst part with Aweber is that you can’t migrate a list to them without forcing your entire list to confirm the optin again. Huh?!
They wouldn’t even let me duplicate my account with them without a double optin confirmation and this list was BUILT IN THEIR SYSTEM. Simply retarded.
There is more but you get the picture.
I’ll probably go with Infusion or EmailLabs.
iContact cost me more than the super-expensive EmailLabs fees so it’s easy to justify.
Hope that helps save someone the headache I’ve gone through.
Matt
Hey Matt. I’m sorry to see that we aren’t going to be able to support your specific business model at iContact. I wish we could continue to work together but it appears that Chris and our Deliverability Team have determined that our policy excludes you and this is unfortunate but accurate. If we are incorrect in our understanding of your business please explain this and we’ll humbly accept our error. Feel free to write any clarification here in your blog, we’ll keep an eye out for your response.
You mentioned that our decision was based on the assumption that “what [you] do is a pyramid scheme because [you] don’t ship physical products!” Our communications with you don’t seem to indicate that this is our impression. Chris’ email that you posted seems clear to me that “company products/services should be tangible goods or services outside of the MLM model.” This means that they must be BOTH “tangible goods or services” and “outside of the MLM model.” My interpretation of this is that we believe you provide a tangible service but that we cannot allow it because it is “inside of the MLM model.” Is it correct that your website promotes other affiliate marketing programs that themselves promote tangible products or services?
We have many very good customers at iContact who use affiliate marketing to promote their own products and services. As you mentioned, allowing affiliates to sell iContact has been an important part of our success and we continue to warmly welcome affiliates to iContact every day.
I look forward to your reply. Also feel free to contact me directly. I’d welcome more discussion on this topic or your specific business.
Warm regards,
Aaron
I don’t even know how to respond the comment left by iContact rep Aaron. Apparently affiliate marketing is “inside the MLM model”.
WTF!!!???
It’s plain that they are utterly clueless about marketing. Stay away from them or it will cost you dearly!
Matt
Thanks for your personal email and the response in your blog. From my review your website doesn’t mention the term MLM, but for that matter neither does http://www.quixtar.com. We are evaluating your business model based on information you have given us about your business and the content of the emails you sent in iContact.
Would you please post your definition of MLM in response to this comment? We may just have a disagreement about the definition.
From our understanding of your business, you are promoting affiliate programs as an affiliate of those programs. This represents multiple levels of marketing. If you were simply an affiliate yourself and were using your emails to promote a product or service this would not be multi-level marketing under our definition of it. This is why we have so many affiliates as customers at iContact.
I look forward to your reply and understand your frustration. If this is all a simple misunderstanding we will quickly apologize and try to make things right.
Aaron
Matt and I-Contact (since I know they’re reading this now):
Matt doesn’t sell anything that is MLM-related at all. He is an AFFILIATE MARKETER.
You, i-Contact, have an affiliate program. You, i-Contact, sell a non-tangible product. It’s called a SERVICE.
Are e-books non-tangible?
Selling a course telling other people how to be affiliate marketers is NOT mlm.
No problem. We’ll spread the word this is yet another company that is clueless to one of the most important segments of the market they could be serving profitably. You’re just leaving a giant hole for a new competitor to come in and rightfully take your business away from you.
Thank God we live in a country that fosters competition.
— Alan R. Bechtold, author, Will Work for Fun
Producer and star of: “Breakfast With Alan”
Thanks for that Alan.
Great points.
They have a great service with great deliverability.
Too bad they are clueless about marketing.
Such a waste of a good service.
Matt “Intangible Product Seller” Trainer
P.S. Intangible products! What a ridiculous joke in the computer/Internet age. Seriously idiotic.
Thanks for the clarification Matt. This is the response I asked for in my first comment. I’d like to ask one more clarifying question before I take my recommendation back to my team that your account is not in violation of our policy. Do you ever receive any commission or payment when your customers sign up for or use any affiliate programs? If you’ll keep the commentary in your blog I would appreciate it. Getting blog responses and personal emails from you with different content makes it difficult for your blog readers to follow our full conversation.
Alan you have also taken the liberty to change my words. If you’ll read the comment trail above you’ll see that I explicitly refer to “products and services” and explicitly explain the iContact affiliate program. But I am glad you are getting involved in the conversation. We have built our company through Internet marketing techniques from day one and have acquired more than 90% of our customers through marketing efforts online. I feel that this background will give us a good foundation on which to understand Matt’s business as long as we keep the lines of communication open. I hope you’ll reply again.
I’ve met and spoke with Ryan Allis in Chicago (one of the owners of iContact). He was at Eben’s “Green Room” event so surely he understands affiliate marketing.
He seemed like a good guy and we had a good chat.
Unfortunately, the people he has working for him at iContact are semi to fully retarded. I had similar problems with these guys acting like complete novices who have no clue what affiliate marketing is.
Trying to compare this to MLM is just plain idiotic, and makes iContact look like ignorant business folks. Ryan, seriously dude, educate your peeps. I understand wanting to protect your service to ensure good deliverability in the future. We all applaud and understand that. But allowing some of your employees to respond with such retarded remarks in public makes you guys look really bad and utterly clueless.
And considering we have thousands of people at our reach who are in the market for email services such as iContact you’d think they’d be a little bit better at educating themselves and communicating with their customers a bit better.
Just thought I’d add that Aaron from i-contact mentioned Qixstar. Or however you spell it.
This is Amway. One of the largest MLMs in the world. And LEGITIMATE as PROVEN in court battles they fought long and hard.
In my opinion, these guys simply don’t want to be in business any more.
— Alan
Aaron — you seem to be saying that i-Contact in no way will work with ANY network marketing company — and you’re still trying to define Matt’s business as being “mlm-like” as if this is somehow poison. Then you used Quixtar as an example of a company that is network marketing but doesn’t say so on their website.
The point I am making is Quixtar IS network marketing. But they have stood the test of legal challenges you can’t imagine. I don’t care for them myself — but they are legitimate. And a huge market for i-Contact’s services.
Is NO network marketing company welcome to use i-Contact?
I’m asking because I would love to bring up a competitive service and take that market in.
Just like ALL businesses — there are legitimate ones and illegal ones. Even the FTC now acknowledges there are LEGITIMATE network marketing companies.
And Matt isn’t even IN that classification so it’s a moot point.
AFFILIATE marketing is just that. There are two-tier affiliate programs and they are perfectly legal — you seem to define them as MLM.
The FTC does NOT consider two-tiered affiliate programs as illegal OR MLM. They are simple two-tiered affiliate program.
Does i-Contact utilize a sales team? Does that sales team earn commissions? Is there a team manager who earns an override? This is a STANDARD practice in MILLIONS of legitimate companies yet, by your narrow-minded definition, they would be classified as MLMs and out of your picture?
This is precisely why the FTC does not include two-tiered affiliate programs MLM OR pyramids. To do so would make a standard sales practice that has been in place in all kinds of businesses for decades illegal.
Matt — you’re still best off seeking a replacement for i-Contact until such time as they “get it.”
what a joke those guys are!!! I was looking into using them as an alternative to Aweber, but I’m glad I saw this post.
Thanks Matt!!!
Gee… that’s really bad.
But what’s more shocking is what you wrote about Aweber.
That’s crazy.
Everybody has been recommending them and they are shutting down accounts just like that?
Crazy.
I suppose you got horrorstories about GetResponse too?
Matt, thanks for posting this. Just yesterday someone suggested iContact as an option for a email service provider for my company. But after reading this, I think I’ll look elsewhere.
-Gary
It’s disturbing.
Doing business online is getting to be a bit like checking the daily mood of your local block commissar.
He’s happy, you eat – he’s not, you disappear.
Sorry someone at iContact got stuck at an Amway meeting once, or seems to be caught in the tupperware loop… no matter …
(1) Matt’s not doing that.
(2) Shouldn’t matter anyway since those activities are legal.
(3) iContact should be required to show cause with proof b4 shutting down an account.
It’s like a public utility guys – PROVE that a guy with that low a spam complaint rate is effecting your network wide deliverability.
… and give some thought to whether your firm is reaching into everyone’s affairs and regulating by cancellation.
Both sides here are flawed.
As companies, aweber and icontact both have the right to terminate an account at any given point, with or without reason. Pretty much all companies reserve the right to completely terminate the business relationship in this manner, if they see the need.
In addition, they are also in the right to go above and beyond the law for their requirements for their customers. As a matter of fact, if you call most of these places, they will tell you right off that they wont let you use purchased double opt-in leads. I unfortunately found this out after spending a considerable sum on leads. Although it is perfectly legal to send to purchased leads, most of these companies do not allow it “due to it’s propensity to incur spam complaints” i think the exact phrase is.
Although this decision is less than beneficial for me, I can absolutely see the business side from that. If what they say is true, then my list could potentially damage their company wide deliverabliity. As of such, I understand them not allowing it, even if it sucks.
I can only assume, based off of the responses above, that this is a similar issue. They don’t want to allow MLM customers even if they are technically legal, because they can f*ck up the deliverability quality. or ratio. or whatever it’s called.
As far as your account is concerned, it does look like they may have tossed you a bit hastily, but it seems like the aaron guy is attempting to make amends. Even if they are being ignorant, i feel like it would be more beneficial to everyone to work it out, IE educate them rather than flame them. I am sure that if they can safely accept more affiliate marketers without hurting their deliverability, they would be very open to it. I mean, who doesn’t want to make money if they can?
Yea, stay away from iContact. They f’ed my system up pretty bad and left my whole biz paralyzed after they got ONE complaint from a subscriber.
I was unable to market to my growing list, and the worst part was that new subscribers were paralyzed at a point where I was getting 100-150 subscribers a day.
It took me 3 days to straighten things out with them and I lost $1000s in earnings b/c they stopped my business cold b/c of ONE complaint from a moron that didn’t know how to use an unsubscribe link.
They truly are clueless when it comes to marketing! They’re clueless when it comes to mailing too!
Just a follow up for Jon Snider –
I used to feel that way too — however, there actually is liability when web service providers just lunch someone like Matt here. That said, whether it’s google, iContact, hosted apps — or ANYONE, if they have control over your business like this, you are in real danger. Plan accordingly and run alternates, (don’t scuba dive without spare air).
On deliverability – virtually every deliverability argument you hear is simply not true. ALL you have to do is segregate levels of service — It’s just more expensive to run multiple mail operations and police double opt-in lists – it’s a question of net profits, not the ability to work with your lists. At $19.95 or whatever, they’re just not going to bother.
We are considering partnering with iContact and I am doing the background research on the company.
Matt, it appears that after all is said and done, the newsletter subscription form is still powered by iContact, so you remained their customer after all?
What is the status of this incident?
I hope I didn’t ruffled anyone’s feathers…this page is quite emotional
Peace.
-d.
iContact did finally “see the error of their ways” and restore my account access. I still use their service because they do have great deliverability but I am ever vigilant because of the things they have done to me. It’s a good service just be prepared with a backup at all times because they are pretty weird when it comes to affiliate marketing.
Matt