Email Marketing Reviews

AWeber Conclusion

AWeber's greatest strengths are its email deliverability and contact management features. They also offer in-depth reports and weekend customer support. Their email creation and email campaign reports, however, have a few limitations. But overall, AWeber offers a reliable and unique email marketing service.

AWeber: Email Creation

AWeber lets you create clean, simple email newsletters that they claim will not get marked as spam. You are given 103 email templates, which are basic templates that are more like layouts with different color schemes. Very few, if any, templates contain images. They claim to have tested these templates against the major email servers, such as Gmail, Thunderbird, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. However, the fact that they tested the templates means little, as it is really the content of the email that will contribute to it getting marked as spam. Creating an email through the online interface can be somewhat cumbersome, which has a lot to do with the layout of their site. There is a step/prompt system, which encourages you to complete a step before moving to another step. For example, it asks you to create a website sign-up form before you start adding contacts. You can bypass the prompts, but locating links or pages for the actions you want to take may be confusing. They call email campaigns “Broadcast Messages,” which isn’t the standard terminology. You are able to send “Blog Broadcasts,” which allows you to email your RSS news feeds.

AWeber does offer a WYSIWYG editor, which is easy to use. One limitation, however, is that email templates cannot be pre-viewed on a single page, side-by-side. You must first choose a template, and then click to load it into the WYSIWYG editor to view it. You can easily edit the HTML code of your templates. AWeber also lets you add attachments to your emails (although best practices dictate that attachments often get an email marked as spam). A few unique features that AWeber offers are: 1) An unlimited number of follow-up messages, or Auto-responders, (MyNewsletterBuilder is the only other email marketing service reviewed on our site that offers this) 2) An exhaustive list of shopping carts (including Google Checkout, Paypal and Yahoo) that can integrate with your campaigns, and 3) Automatic removal of the AWeber logo (Unlike all the other email marketing companies in our survey, they don’t even include the logo in your emails to begin with). The first feature may be important for those who would like the option of pre-writing their email content and scheduling it at their convenience, and the second feature may be useful for e-commerce businesses. One drawback is that AWeber doesn’t provide any image hosting space, which means that you must host the images you use in your emails on another site.

AWeber: Contact Management

Featuring prompts and a step completion bar, AWeber walks you through the process of adding contacts and creating a website sign-up form. The wizard shows you a bar at the bottom of the page with a completion percentage that increases as you complete each setup step. Again, you can bypass the setup wizard and add contacts manually, one by one, or cut & paste multiple addresses in a tab delimited (TXT) form. You are unable to import an entire file (usually CSV or TXT) to your contact list, but the cut & paste feature should suffice. When you create a new contact list, you must check the availability of your list name before you are allowed to name it. AWeber also automatically sends a preliminary opt-in confirmation email to new contacts before you can officially add them to your contact list. Your contacts must “opt-in” via email confirmation in order to be officially added to your list and to start receiving newsletters. If you do not want to send an “opt-in” message to your subscribers, AWeber lets you turn off this feature on the page where you create the opt-in message. Technically, most email marketing providers expect you to have obtained permission from subscribers prior to adding them to your list. So, the “opt-in” message is actually known as a “double opt-in” feature. While some contend that “double opt-in” is following best practices, others argue that it is a hindrance to the contact management process. AWeber marks bounces and unsubscribes in your subscriber list, and you must manually delete them by checking them off and clicking "erase." For bounced messages, they re-try the message 3 times before they stop emailing them. These can be seen in the "Underliverable Subscribers" option under the subscribers tab. Their list segmentation tool is really easy to use. A unique feature that AWeber provides is the ability to split-test your website sign-up forms to see which garners more subscribers.

AWeber: Email Deliverability

Emails sent using AWeber had a 100% deliverability rate to all major email servers that we tested. You can schedule your message in advance or choose to send it out immediately. AWeber provides SpamAssassin™, which gives your message a spam score and tells you which messages are likely to get flagged as spam and which are likely to be successfully sent. One frustration we had during the scheduling of an email campaign was the inability to change the time zone from Eastern Time to another time zone. The extra time spent converting the time is something that a large majority of people may find inconvenient. We called customer support to see if there was a way to change one’s time zone in the interface, but we were told that they do not offer that ability. The customer service rep also told us that she would pass along the recommendation for a time zone option.

AWeber: Analyzing Reports

AWeber shows you all of the essential report statistics as well as provides you with extra, in-depth statistics. AWeber shows you sent emails, subscribes, unsubscribes, bounces, complaints (spam), opens, and clicks, which are common email marketing campaign statistics. They also show you the following extra stats: opens over time, clicks over time, revenue over time, list opens over time, list clicks over time, daily/weekly/monthly new subscribers, subscribe method, ad tracking (for subscribed and unsubscribed), location by city/state/country/area code, follow up status, broadcast totals, etc. You are able to view the reports as numerical data, bar graphs and pie charts. However, you are unable to export these reports and must view them in the online interface. Although the reports do not integrate with Google Analytics, they do offer A/B testing statistics (They call these “Split-test Broadcasts”) for lists with more than 100 active subscribers. Reports can take up to 24 hours to update.

AWeber: Customer Support

AWeber’s customer support was knowledgeable, friendly and helpful. The live chat and phone support wait times were relatively short. The email support will respond to you within 24 hours, which is standard. AWeber offers an online Knowledgebase, webinars and videos that can also help you troubleshoot issues with your email campaigns. As described in the Deliverability section, AWeber’s customer support was receptive to our suggestions and recommendations.

AWeber: Pricing

AWeber charges a monthly fee, based on the number of contacts you add to your list. For qualifying nonprofits, AWeber offers 3 months of free service, followed by a 25% discount on your monthly premium from there forward. For current students with a valid .edu email address, AWeber offers a 20% discount on your monthly premium. AWeber does not offer a free trial, but they replace the free trial with a 30-day money-back guarantee. You must cancel your account after 30 days, or you will be charged the full month’s premium.