With a history of over 20 years, Aweber can be considered a giant in the email marketing space. It prides itself as one of the first service providers that offered email autoresponders when it launched in 1998. Of course, since then, many more features have been added.
Already before 2020 and the advent of Covid, Aweber let its employees work remotely – all of them. Its headquarters are in Pennsylvania, USA. Intriguingly, Aweber owns all parts of its email delivery system entirely and doesn’t use a third party.
Pros and cons of Aweber
At its core, Aweber’s a subscription-based email marketing software that is accessed via the browser. Its additional features are web push notification, ecommerce, and sharing a newsletter on Facebook and Twitter. As a customer, you can use all its features right from the get-go and are charged according to the number of subscribers you have.
Pros
- Free forever plan with autoresponders
- Reasonably priced
- Work in a team
- Landing pages and sign up forms are included in the forever free plan
- Landing pages with basic webshop capabilities including sales tracking
- Wide variety of templates for emails, sign up forms, and landing pages
Cons
- Automation workflows only cover basics
- Some terminology is confusing
Who is Aweber for?
Even if Aweber positions itself as an email marketing provider for small businesses, it still caters to companies with a large number of subscribers. Albeit, you need to fill in a special form for having a list containing more than 25’000 contacts.
Where Aweber shines is in its ability to help smallish businesses with their email marketing also because they offer excellent support through email, phone, and live chat. If you’re looking for a service that includes the basic toolset for email marketing and is affordable, Aweber is a solid choice.
Aweber user interface
Aweber’s user interface may feel a bit dated. Still, it’s well-structured so that it’s easy to navigate. You’ll find all you need in the top two-tiered navigation. For the most part, that is subscribers, forms, landing pages, reports, and list options, it’s self-explanatory.
Probably less so are what’s hidden under Messages and some of their terminology. Messages contain everything from broadcasts to split tests. It can be confusing at first when you’re used to “automation” but have to choose “campaigns” and regular emails are called “broadcast”.
Campaigns
To set up a campaign, you first have to create a template or you can also choose one from the gallery. Once you’ve created your template, you configure where (email, Facebook, Twitter), when, and to whom you want to send your newsletter.
Aweber has 3 kinds of email editor:
- Drag and drop builder
- Plain text
- HTML editor
All 3 editors let you personalise your email and have a preview function where you can view how it looks on a desktop or a mobile. Very helpful is the autosave in all 3 editors. Except for the plain text editor, all have undo and redo buttons which gives you peace of mind.
Sign up forms and landing pages
In order to help you capture email addresses, sign-up forms and landing pages are a must and as such also included in Aweber.
You can create 4 different types of sign up forms
- In-line
- Popover
- Lightbox
- Popup
Both sign up forms and landing pages have a template gallery so that you can quickly set up a form or a landing page. To customise your form or page, you use its drag-and-drop editor.
Interestingly, landing page templates include ecommerce features so that you can sell a product. To track traffic, especially when you’re driving paid traffic to the landing pages, you can add your Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel. For SEO, you can add a page title and a page description.
List management, segmentation, and personalisation
Importing a contact list should be a standard when you’re working with an email marketing service. Aweber understands that and gives you options to create new contacts to your mailing list one at a time or mass import them. You can import any kind of MS Excel list, a CSV or TSV file, or copy and paste the email addresses.
To segment your list, you can add tags and custom fields. The segments are also used for automation workflows.
Automation
Remember that automation is called a campaign in Aweber and that it’s basically an autoresponder. This means you can add a linear automation workflow with as many steps as you want. If you want a more complex workflow that has if-else-steps, you’d need to look elsewhere (for example MailerLite, Moosend, Sendinblue, and more).
Aweber integrations
Aweber provides integration with the major CMS and ecommerce platforms such as BigCommerce, WordPress, and Shopify. In general, it has plugins to integrate with the important services. If that doesn’t fulfill all your needs, you can connect it with Zapier.
Aweber reporting
You’ll be able to monitor email analytics with key stats such as open rate and clickthroughs in Aweber’s report section. The reports will help you improve and optimise your email marketing strategy.
Support
Aweber takes pride in its customer support since it has won a number of awards for client satisfaction. Quite uncommon in the email automation world, Aweber offers phone support besides email and live chat. Email and chat support are available 24/7.
Even if Aweber’s user interface is a bit outdated in our personal view, you have quick access to its searchable knowledge base, support, and video guides in the footer, so you’re never far from help when you’re working.
Pricing
A subscription in Aweber is based on the number of subscribers. You have 3 plans
- Free with limited features
- Paid
- Paid for plans for mailing lists with more than 25’000 subscribers
Is Aweber right for you?
Aweber includes all the essential tools needed for email marketing so that you can capture emails and grow your mailing list, design and send campaigns, as well as basic automation. Hence it’s a robust choice for individuals and small businesses that need a basic and cost-effective marketing service.
If you’re starting with email marketing or in general, are beginning your online journey, Aweber’s a great choice thanks to its excellent customer support that you can reach 24/7. It even gives you ecommerce features so that you can sell a product or service on your landing page. You just need to connect with your Stripe account and have a basic webshop.
If you like more advanced email marketing automation and customer relationship management features, you’d be happier elsewhere.
Original post here: Aweber review
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