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AWeber is a popular email marketing platform among bloggers and small business owners. This AWeber review explains more.
AWeber is a leading email marketing software that’s been around for more than 20 years. With AWeber, you can collect email subscribers, design newsletters, send out automatic email sequences, analyze your email campaigns, and more.
Plus, AWeber integrates with a number of third-party applications to make your marketing campaigns a success. Whether you’re a blogger or small business owner, AWeber is worth checking out for your email marketing.
Here’s why.
- Features
- Pricing
- Customer support
- Pros
- Cons
- How to sign up for AWeber
- AWeber vs. Mailchimp and ConvertKit
- AWeber review final verdict
AWeber review: features, pricing & more
AWeber is an easy-to-use tool for anyone who wants to build their email list, connect with subscribers, and automate their email marketing campaigns.
If you have fewer than 500 subscribers, you can start on AWeber’s free plan. To grow your list past 500 subscribers and access more features, you can upgrade to ones of its premium plans.
AWeber features
Let’s take a closer look at some of the plans and features you can expect from this email marketing platform.
Huge collection of templates
AWeber is a premium tool that comes with a huge variety of e-newsletter templates. In fact, it offers over 700 templates, far more than many of its competitors.
To put this into perspective, Mailchimp has around 80 templates to choose from; Campaign Monitor has about 50, and GetResponse has 220.
Not only will you have a ton of templates to choose from when writing your emails, but all of AWeber’s templates are also responsive. This means they automatically resize to any screen, regardless of the device a user is on.
Plus, they’re easy to customize with AWeber’s simple drag-and-drop builder tool. Don’t worry, you don’t need to know coding to design beautiful newsletters, forms and landing pages with AWeber’s software.
RSS / blog broadcast emails
AWeber makes it easy to share new blog posts with your email subscribers with its “Really Simple Syndication” (RSS) emails.
RSS emails are automatic email updates sent out to your subscribers each time a new post goes live on your blog. These email alerts make it easy to stay in touch with your readers while driving more traffic to your site.
You also don’t need to design the RSS emails; AWeber’s tool can do it for you. However, if you want to design your own RSS campaigns, you can use one of the many templates available.
Auto-responders
An auto-responder is one of the most important features for email marketing as it helps save time and engage your subscribers.
Setting up an auto-responder means that every time a consumer reacts to your content, such as by clicking on a link or joining your mailing list, it triggers an auto-response. The auto-response can send out a particular email, such as a free e-book or a welcome discount code, or redirect subscribers to your social media pages.
AWeber has an easy-to-use auto-responder feature. However, this tool has a limited number of auto-responder triggers to choose from. While AWeber only gives you leeway to set up five triggers, other sites (such as ConvertKit) give you nine.
Marketing automation
Once you’ve mastered auto-responders, you can set up more comprehensive marketing automations for your list. This feature is built on an “if this, then that” approach.
You can design a flowchart based on user behaviors, as well as assign tags to differentiate your subscribers. For example, you could create a blue tag for subscribers interested in your products and a green one for those who have already purchased. Or you could tag users depending on which of your forms or landing pages they subscribed through.
This email marketing tool also allows you to create follow-up emails to send to different tags. By categorizing your subscribers according to their behaviors or interests, you can send even more targeted emails and maximize engagement.
Split testing/AB testing
AWeber makes it easy to split test your emails so you can figure out which one’s most effective before sending it out to your list at large.
Here’s how it works.
You craft two or three sample emails and send them to a small portion of your list.
Let’s say you have 10,000 subscribers, AWeber chooses 350 people randomly to receive version A, another 350 will receive version B, and another 350 people will receive version C.
AWeber decides which version had the most engagement; then, it sends that one to your full list.
Most platforms such as Mailchimp, Convertkit, and Get Response only allow you to send out two email variants, but you can send up to three with AWeber.
Reports and analytics
AWeber’s analytics reports can reveal what’s working and what’s not working with your email marketing campaigns. These reports include,
- Your subscribers’ geographical location and demographic
- Sign-up method they used
- Device they’re viewing your content from
- Links they clicked
- Products they viewed
- and more
This information is especially helpful for bloggers tracking the performance of their blogs. However, if you need more comprehensive analytics, you might check out an alternative email marketing platform like ConvertKit or Mailchimp.
Landing page and form builder
A well-designed landing page can do wonders for your sales funnel and list-building campaigns. A typical landing page has a great design, attractive images, a subscription form, and text explaining why someone should subscribe.
To entice your readers, it’s most effective to offer an incentive in exchange for their email, such as a free checklist, e-book, email course, or discount code.
AWeber comes with easy-to-customize landing page templates and free stock photos. You can even add Google Analytics or Facebook pixel codes on your landing pages to track engagement.
You can also create sign-up forms, though the process of designing forms and posting them on your site is a bit less user-friendly with AWeber than with some other email marketing platforms.
Third-party app integrations
AWeber lets you integrate your email marketing account with hundreds of third-party apps such as WordPress, PayPal, Magneto, Shopify, Unbounce, and Freshbooks.
AWeber pricing
If you’re just starting to build your email list, you could get started with AWeber’s completely free plan. With this free plan, you can test out its features and see if it’s the right email marketing platform for you.
The free plan lets you set up forms and landing pages, send newsletters, set up automations, and more. But it has a few limitations, including no split testing or “abandoned cart / purchase tagging.”
If you want all these features or grow past 500 subscribers, you’ll need to purchase a premium plan. These start at $16.15 per month when purchased annually (or $19/month when billed monthly).
Pricing increases when you have more subscribers:
- 501 – 2,500 subscribers is $26.15/month billed annually (or $29/month billed monthly)
- 2,501 – 5,000 subscribers is $46.15/month billed annually (or $49/month billed monthly)
- 5,001 – 10,000 subscribers is $66.15/month billed annually (or $69/month billed monthly)
- 10,001 – 25,000 subscribers is $146.15/month billed annually (or $149/month billed monthly)
AWeber customer support
No AWeber review would be complete without a look at its customer service
AWeber has won the Stevie customer service award six consecutive times since 2016. If the award is anything to go by, AWeber offers its customers exemplary customer support, regardless of the plan they choose.
Unlike some other email marketing platforms, AWeber offers phone support in addition to email and live chat support. The email and live chat support are available 24/7, but phone support is only available from Monday to Friday, 8 am to 8 pm ET.
All that said, some users have complained of slow response times or unhelpful responses from AWeber’s customer support team. You might try asking them some questions before you sign up to see how it goes for you.
Pros of AWeber
AWeber is a powerful yet easy to use email marketing platform. With AWeber, you can set up forms and landing pages that will help you grow your list fast.
It’s easy to design newsletters and set up automations, so your email marketing efforts run on autopilot. Plus, AWeber’s segmentation and tagging functions help you send more targeted email campaigns.
AWeber is also competitively priced, especially compared to some other email marketing platforms. Since they charge based on subscribers, not features, you can feel confident that you’re getting all the features available, even on the most basic plan (with the exception of some limitations on the free plan).
The free plan, by the way, is also a great way for new bloggers to try out this email marketing platform and start growing their list.
AWeber has friendly and reliable customer service providers who offer email, phone, and live chat support to all subscribers regardless of their plan.
Finally, they have a bunch of free webinars, articles, videos, and podcasts tackling common problems that you might encounter when getting started with this tool.
Cons of AWeber
No email marketing software is perfect; here are a few potential downsides of AWeber. Although it comes with over 700 templates, some of them appear outdated.
Plus, all those options can get overwhelming; you might prefer fewer template options, as opposed to hundreds.
As mentioned, AWeber’s analytics don’t seem to dive as deeply as some other email platforms do. And its form builder is a bit clunky compared to some other email marketing platforms, such as ConvertKit.
What’s more, AWeber includes unsubscribed subscribers in your total subscriber count, meaning you might be paying for people who opted out of your email list. You’ll need to manually remove unsubscribers every once in a while to make sure you’re not over-paying.
Finally, according to some deliverability reports, AWeber emails sometimes had difficulty reaching subscribers with Microsoft email addresses such as Hotmail or Outlook.
How to sign up for AWeber
If you’ve read through this AWeber review and decided to try out a free or paid AWeber plan, signing up is easy. Head over to the official AWeber website, and click on the Get AWeber Free button on the homepage.
On the next page, provide your name, email and then click on the Sign Up button.
You will then receive a confirmation email. This confirmation email might be time sensitive, so make sure to respond soon.
After clicking on the Set Up Account button, provide your AWeber login credentials. Then follow the steps to finish setting up your account.
AWeber vs. Mailchimp and other platforms
How does AWeber stack up compared to popular email marketing platforms MailChimp and ConvertKit? Let’s take a quick look.
- AWeber vs. Mailchimp: In my opinion, AWeber beats Mailchimp when it comes to value for money, customer support, and ease of use. Mailchimp, however, takes the lead with its broad marketing automation features and its detailed analytics reports. I’d say that AWeber is better for bloggers and small businesses, whereas MailChimp tends to work well for bigger companies.
- AWeber vs. Convertkit: ConvertKit has some cool features that AWeber doesn’t yet, such as the ability to resend emails to people who didn’t open the first time with a new subject line and/or content. Plus, ConvertKit’s free plan lets you have up to 1,000 subscribers, whereas AWeber’s stops being free after 500. However, sometimes simpler features are better when you’re just starting out. For more on ConvertKit, check out my full ConvertKit review here.
AWeber review verdict: Is AWeber good or not?
Here’s the final verdict of this AWeber review: AWeber is easy to use, has excellent customer service, a free trial, decent analytics, and other advantages. Its form and landing page templates will allow you to build your subscriber list.
Plus, you can set up auto-responders and marketing automations to run your campaigns on autopilot. Email marketing has some of the best return on investment of any other kind of marketing.
And it’s an excellent way to nurture a relationship with your readers and keep them coming back to your website. AWeber can help you run successful email marketing campaigns and boost your site’s revenue, whether you’re a blogger selling affiliate or digital products or a store owner selling physical goods.
Would you like to provide even more value to your readers with a webinar? Click here for a list of my favorite webinar platforms for bloggers and online business owners.
