Aweber Review-Email Marketing tool
In this Aweber review, I go through one of the most popular options for creating and sending HTML e-newsletters.
Continue reading for a thorough examination of Aweber's advantages and downsides, as well as a review of its price, features, templates, UI, and more.
By both the conclusion of this study, you'll know whether Aweber is the ideal email marketing solution for your company and what the best alternatives are.
What is Aweber?
Aweber is an email marketing tool that lets you do things like:
- Create a mailing list and add data to it
- design newsletters to send to your list's subscribers.
- Use 'autoresponders' to automate your email marketing.
- automate your email marketing via use of ‘autoresponders’
- view and analyse statistics related to your email marketing campaigns
Aweber was launched in 1998, and the company claims that 120,000 people and organisations have utilised the platform for email marketing.
This makes it a smaller company than some of its competitors (most notably Mailchimp and Getresponse), but it is nonetheless a well-established corporation with a strong user base.
What do Aweber do?
Aweber is tool for:
hosting a mailing list
creating attractive email templates
sending e-newsletters out to your subscribers.
Aweber pricing
There are 2 versions of Aweber: ‘Pro’ and ‘Free.’
For the Pro plans, the pricing structure is as follows:
- Hosting
and emailing a list containing up to 500 subscribers: $19 per month
- 501 to
2,500 subscribers: $29.99 per month
- 2,501
to 5,000 subscribers: $49.99 per month
- 5,001
to 10,000 subscribers: $69.99 per month
- 10,001
to 25,000 subscribers: $149.99 per month
If your email list has more than 25,000 members, you must contact Aweber for a pricing.
If you pay quarterly, you will receive a 14 percent discount; if you pay yearly, you will receive a 14.9 percent discount. Discounts are also available for students and non-profit organisations.
One element of Aweber's price structure that prospective customers may like is that all capabilities are available on all paid-for plans – unlike some rival companies, you don't have to be on more costly plans to activate particular capability. (Most of them are accessible even with the free plan).
The price variances are solely due to the size of the mailing list.
Something to keep an eye on is the subscription numbers.
- A important point to remember about Aweber pricing is that both subscribed and unsubscribed contacts are counted as ‘billable' subscribers.
- This means that even if somebody unsubscribes from your list, you’ll be charged for keeping their details in your Aweber account.
- You may prevent this fee by removing unsubscribed contacts from your account on a regular basis, but you must remember to do so.
- Aweber is not the only email marketing company that operates in this manner (Mailchimp charges similarly), but the approach is far from ideal because it results in either needless fees or additional administrative work for clients (or both!).
Key features of Aweber
Aweber has the following key features:
- the capability of importing and hosting a mailing list
- a wide range of templates
- autoresponders
- marketing automation functionality
- responsive email designs
- reporting
- split teting
- RSS/blog to-email functionality
- list segmentation options
- a landing page builder
- phone email and live chat support
- integration with third party app
Hosting your list / importing data into Aweber
Importing an existing email database into Aweber is a pretty straightforward affair.
You can upload the following file types:
- XLS
- XLSX
- TSV
- CSV
- TXT
You may also manually enter individual subscribers or copy and paste rows of subscribers into the programme.
When you import your data, you have the option of adding your subscribers to a certain set of autoresponders and tagging them.
Since not all competing programmes allow the insertion of imported data straight into autoresponder cycles, this is a useful feature.
You will be required to answer some questions about how you gathered the data you are importing for anti-spam purposes.Furthermore, if your list is large (over 10,000 records), you may have to wait for it to be evaluated by Aweber's anti-spam compliance team (as is the case with other email marketing tools). This process might take up to one business day.
In short, Aweber's importing feature is excellent – there are no issues here.
Templates
In compared to its competitors, Aweber has one of the most extensive collections of HTML e-newsletter templates: over 700 are accessible.
To put this in context, Getresponse has around 115 templates.
To be honest, I don't like all of the designs; some of them appear outdated. The templates offered by Getresponse all seem more modern.
Responsive email designs
Aweber’s email templates are all ‘responsive’.
This implies that they will automatically resize to fit the device on which they are being viewed. This is a must-have feature in the age of smartphones and tablets.
Within Aweber, you can also quickly see a preview of the mobile version of your email simply click a preview button and activate a ‘mobile preview' option to see how your e-newsletter would look on a smartphone.
(However, it's still a good idea to send several test emails and examine them on a mobile phone or tablet.)
Using web fonts in Aweber templates
Aweber, unlike many other rival email marketing systems, allows you to utilise online fonts.
This is a good thing, because online fonts are typically more appealing than the standard'safe fonts' (Times New Roman, Arial, etc.) that email marketing software frequently restrict you to — and, when used wisely, they may significantly improve the appearance of an email.
Furthermore, depending on the fonts you employ on your website, they can assist you in achieving greater brand consistency across your website and e-newsletters.
Currently, Aweber enables you to use the following fonts in your emails:
- Arvo
- Lato
- Lora
- Merriweather
- Merriweather sans
- Noticia Text
- Open Sans
- Playfair Display
- Roboto
- Source Sans Pro
- Permanent Marker
Autoresponders
Autoresponders are a series of follow up emails that are automatically triggered by either time or user actions.
For example, you might set up an autoresponder software such that
- When someone joins your mailing list, they instantly receive a welcome letter from your company
- one week later, they receive a product discount voucher
- and three weeks later, they are encouraged to follow you on social media...
…and so on.
They are generally an important element of any e-marketing strategy since they may help you save time and money.
Aweber claims to have developed autoresponders in 1998, so you'd expect their autoresponder capabilities to be phenomenal.
Surprisingly, it's merely 'okay.'
On the bright side, it is quite simple to build up follow up emails in Aweber depending on time intervals - for example, sending subscribers an onboarding email immediately after sign up, a promo voucher two days later, and a ‘follow us on social media' email a week later is incredibly simple. This is a common application for autoresponders — and it's a breeze with Aweber.
On the negative side, the possibilities for triggering autoresponders based on user activities and purchases are significantly more limited than in competing solutions.
You can use Aweber to create ‘goals' or combine automation rules with tagging to make autoresponders behave in reasonably sophisticated ways — but if you want to use autoresponders in really advanced ways, you should probably look at other products, particularly Getresponse, which provides much more extensive ‘marketing automation' functionality.
In terms of marketing automation...
Marketing automation
Marketing automation is a feature that email marketing companies such as Aweber are increasingly providing.
I think of it as ‘Autoresponders 2.0,' where you can go beyond typical ‘drip' campaigns and construct sophisticated user journeys utilising ‘IFTT' (if this, then that) type processes.
Marketing automation generally involves creating a flowchart in which emails are delivered based on user activities such as email opens, link clicks, site visits, transactions made, and so on.
Aweber includes a marketing automation product called ‘Aweber Campaigns,' which provides some of this capability.
You may use this functionality to determine what should be delivered to whom and when based on user behaviours, such as opens and clickthroughs, as well as the application of tags (which can be triggered if a user views a certain page on your site) (see above).
However, I believe this feature should go much further — platform like Getresponse offer far more flexibility in terms of which sorts of user behaviour might trigger mailouts.
As a result, Aweber is clearly lagging behind its competitors in this area.
Marketing automation in Getresponse is far more advanced than that in Aweber.
Spotlight on… Aweber’s free plan
Aweber now provides a totally free plan This is uncommon in the field of email marketing; most similar businesses provide a free trial but not unlimited access to the product.
Aweber's free plan you receive free access to the vast majority of Aweber's capability.
Aweber's free plan is that works with lists of 500 contacts & include brand advertisements in e-newsletters delivered with their free plans.
AMP for email in Aweber
Aweber has an advantage over most other email marketing systems in one area: a new technology called AMP for email.
E-newsletters have traditionally been relatively static affairs, consisting of a simple blend of text and graphics. AMP for Email alters all of that by allowing users to do basic activities (such as arranging an appointment or RSVPing to an event) right within an email – that is, without leaving their email programme or visiting a website.
It also enables email senders to include dynamic information into their messages, such as live survey results, weather updates, football scores, and so on.
Integrations with third party apps
Aweber has a large number of connections with other web apps; about 800 are accessible.
These let you to link the platform to other important cloud-based solutions, such as web builders such as Wix or Wordpress, e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, CRM systems like as Salesforce, landing page builders such as Instapage, and so on.
Some of them include specialised widgets; others entail inserting a piece of code into a website; and still others involve the use of a sync service such as Zapier or Pie Sync.
It's uncommon for Aweber to integrate with other applications as easily as Mailchimp (which appears to be the default'standard' email marketing choice for a lot of apps), but you shouldn't have too much trouble getting Aweber to operate with a fair selection of other SaaS (software as a service) apps.
Aweber integrations let you connect the tool to a wide range of other web applications
Conclusion on Aweber
Overall, I would recommend Aweber as an effective email marketing platform. It is not the finest product of its sort available, but it is dependable, fairly priced, simple to use, and has the majority of the important features you'd expect from an email marketing solution.
The key features of the programme that would sway me toward Aweber are its ease-of-use, web fonts, landing page builder, AMP for email capabilities, and extensive support. Its free plan is very generous, granting users with short lists indefinite access to all major functions.
The support component may be especially essential for consumers who are new to e-marketing and lack technological abilities (since difficulties may be resolved by talking to a real human being on a real phone line!).
The fact that you are paid to host unsubscribed contacts in your account, its very rudimentary marketing automation tools, and the inability to broadcast to several categories of data at once are the major reasons I would not use Aweber.
Pros and cons of Aweber
Pros of using Aweber
- There is a completely free plan available.
- It is really simple to use.
- It comes with lots of templates, many more than its main competitors.
- Support choices are more broad than in other important rival companies, and should be excellent based on Aweber's Stevie awards for customer service.
- It is fairly priced – while it is not the lowest product of its kind available, it is more competitively priced than other similar options.
- It has a landing page builder.
- It enables AMP for email, which is a first for email marketing solutions.
- It gives you the option of allowing users to subscribe to your list via single or double opt-in.
- It offers strong import capabilities, with the ability to import a variety of file kinds and instantly add the email addresses you're importing to an autoresponder cycle.
- It is compatible with a wide range of third-party tools and programmes.
- It makes it incredibly simple to build up basic time-based autoresponders.
- All email templates are mobile-friendly.
- Web fonts can be used in Aweber e-newsletters.
Cons of using Aweber
- You are charged to host unsubscribed contacts on your account.
- When sending an e-newsletter, you cannot include or remove several segments at the same time.
- There are less expensive alternatives available that provide far more functionality in the marketing automation sector.
- While the landing page builder is handy, it lacks A/B testing and a means to incorporate Facebook pixels / Google Analytics cookies in a GDPR-compliant manner.
- Some of the templates appear to be outdated.
- The RSS to email templates are inadequate and cannot be modified using Aweber's normal drag-and-drop email builder.
Alternative to Aweber
There are several Aweber options.
Getresponse is the obvious option if you're looking for something a little more feature-rich at a comparable pricing point. It not only allows you to conduct the types of email marketing jobs that Aweber facilitates, but it also includes webinar capability and e-commerce tools.
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