Is AWeber good for email marketing?
Aweber allows its users to use its free plan, where you can add an email list of 0-500 subscribers and send out upto 3000 emails per month. This is a good thing for beginners trying to learn new things in email marketing.
We DigiProxy Media are beginning to require an in-depth inspection of one of the foremost popular solutions for designing and sending HTML e-newsletters. We’ll undergo the cons and pros of Aweber and discuss its pricing, features, templates, interface, and more.
What is the value of Aweber?
There are five Aweber plans on offer:
The Starting plan brings up to 500 subscribers @ $16.5 per month
501 to 2,500 subscribers: $26.15 per month
2,501 to 5,000 subscribers: $46.15 per month
5,001 to 10,000 subscribers: $66.15 per month
10,001 to 25,000 subscribers: $146.15 per month
If you have more than 25000 subscribers, you need to call Aweber Team.
A 14% discount is out there if you pay quarterly and a 14.9% discount is out there if you pay annually. There are also some discounts available for college kids and non-profit organizations.
One aspect of Aweber’s pricing Structure that potential users might like is that every one feature is out there on all plans – unlike some competing products you don’t get to choose expensive plans to unlock certain functionality.
How does Aweber’s pricing compare to its competitors?
Aweber is:
- Significantly cheaper than Campaign Monitor
- Considerably cheaper than iContact
- Roughly an equivalent price as Mailchimp
- Marginally costlier than Getresponse
- Considerably costlier than Mad Mimi
- It’s worth noting that the above comparisons don’t apply to a really small email database, several of the competing products are better value.
Key Features of Aweber:
AWeber provides you with the subsequent key features:
- The ability to import/host an email database
- A wide range of templates autoresponders
- Some marketing automation functionality
- Responsive email designs
- Reporting
- RSS / blog to-email functionality
- Segmentation options
- Phone, email and live chat support
- Integrations with third-party apps
- Importing data into Aweber
- Importing your existing database in Aweber may be a quite straightforward affair.
You can upload the subsequent file types:
- XLS
- XLSX
- TSV
- CSV
- TXT
Alternatively, you’ll add individual subscribers manually, or copy and paste rows of subscribers into Aweber.
As you import your data, you’re given the choice to feature your subscribers to a specific set of autoresponders and tag them. Not all competing products permit the addition of imported data directly into autoresponder cycles so this is often a pleasant feature to possess.
For anti-spam reasons, you’ll need to answer some questions on how you collected the info you’re importing. If your list is on the larger side, you’ll even have to attend until it’s reviewed by Aweber’s anti-spam compliance team (as is that the case with other email marketing tools).
Templates
By comparison to its Competitors, Aweber provides one among the most important sets of e-newsletters templates available: there are over 700 available.
To provide a touch of context, there are around 500 templates available for Getresponse, 90 for Mailchimp, and around 50 for Campaign Monitor.
Be straight, we don’t love all of the designs – a number of them look slightly out-dated. We would consider them to be slightly dated. Our Team would consider them to be slightly better than the Getresponse ones, but not as good as Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor’s.
However, the sheer volume of templates available means with a touch little bit of tweaking you ought to be ready to find an appropriate one for your e-newsletters. There is, of course, always the choice of coding your own too.
Aweber Autoresponders
Autoresponders – a series of follow up emails that are automatically triggered by either time or user actions – are a key part of any e-marketing solution.
Aweber claims to have Invented autoresponders back in 1998 and as such, you’d expect their autoresponder functionality to be mind-blowingly good.
On the plus side it’s very easy to line up follow up emails supported interval – for instance, automatically sending subscribers an onboarding email immediately after sign up, a promo code 2 days later, and a ‘follow us on social media’ email a week later is extremely easy. This is a typical use of autoresponders and it’s a breeze with Aweber.
On the downside, triggering autoresponders based on user actions and purchases is a bit more complicated than with key competitors Mailchimp and Getresponse.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation may be a feature that is increasingly offered by email marketing solutions like Aweber.
We consider it as ‘Autoresponder 2.0’ – where you transcend traditional ‘drip’ campaigns and make complex user journeys using ‘IFTT’ – if this, then that – style workflows.
With marketing automation, you sometimes design a flowchart where emails are sent supporting user actions: email opens, link clicks, site visits, purchases made then on.
Aweber suddenly introduced a replacement marketing automation feature which to a degree provides this functionality: ‘Aweber Campaigns’. With this feature, you can use certain user actions – namely opens and click-throughs – along with the application of tags to determine what should be sent to whom and when.
However, we assumed that the functionality must go a touch further really, tools like Getresponse and Mailchimp provide considerably more flexibility when it involves which sorts of user behaviour can trigger mailouts.
Pros of using Aweber
It’s affordable – whilst not the most cost-effective product of its kind out there, it’s cheaper than several similar solutions.
Support options are more extensive than is the case with some key competing products and supported Aweber’s Stevie awards for customer service, should be high.
It’s so easy to use.
Having strong import functionality, with the option to import a wide range of file types and add the email addresses you’re importing directly to an autoresponder cycle.
It allows you to choose whether to subscribe people to your list on one or double opt-in basis.
It integrates neatly with a good range of third party tools and apps.
It comes with a really large range of templates – quite its key competitors.
Setting up simple time-based autoresponders is very easy to do.
All email templates are responsive.
Reporting features are strong.
Segmenting data is comparatively easy and you’ll use both field contents and user activity (email opens, links clicked, etc.) to make your segments.
Cons of using Aweber
Split testing is currently disabled.
There are cheaper options out there that supply considerably more features within the marketing automation department – Getresponse being a major example.
Some of the templates look old-fashioned.
The RSS to email templates are poor and that they can’t be edited using Aweber’s standard drag and drop email builder.
Multiple segments cant be included or excluded at once when sending an e-newsletter.
Conclusion
Overall our experience says Aweber is a Solid email marketing tool.
It’s the best product of its kind available, it is reasonably priced, easy to use, and contains most of the key features you’d expect from an email marketing solution.
