AWeber

Aweber Review

Email marketing is a much underestimated power tool for businesses, both online and the old traditional kind. It assists in touching base with potential and existing customers on a regular basis. AWeber is a popular email marketing tool which is extremely potent. It has limitations too. Here are the salient features of AWeber.

Creating a Newsletter

Let’s start from the beginning. Your email newsletter better grab the attention of readers, who are most likely to be busy and finicky. Give them something drab and dull and they will discard it like a banana peel. There is no other option but to create an impression right from word go. AWeber has over six hundred customizable templates among which you will find the right one to suit your campaign. Add your own creativity and deliver magic to your prospective customers. The best part about AWeber templates is that you will always find something which simply fits into your design.

Publishing your email newsletters

Getting the right look and feel is only one part of an email marketing campaign. You have to deliver them to your subscribers. AWeber has one of the least drop-off rates and fast delivery time. You can rest assured that the email you have worked on while sitting awake through the night, will get delivered. The same is not true for other email marketing tools. AWeber maintains high integrity and does not permit spamming whatsoever. This ensures that their email services are never blacklisted.

Autoresponder

Those who have tried their hand at email marketing know how difficult it becomes to handle subscribers once the list overflows. It’s an ideal situation but also most painful. AWeber has great autoresponders which can be used to deliver newsletters at predetermined time intervals. Some users have reported that AWeber auto responder tool is a bit clunky and rigid, but other providers don’t fare much better.

Excellent reporting tools

The quality and value of any email marketing tool lies in the reporting interface. AWeber provides a fine grained, detailed analysis of how your customers or recipients are engaging, interacting and reacting to your emails. The dashboard is pretty simple and easy to use. This information can be used to create better email campaigns by understanding the customers better.

Building your own apps

AWeber’s API cookbook has lots of apps on the boil. You will find ready-to-consume apps for WordPress, Shopify, Facebook, Twitter and for building other interfaces. AWeber Labs is an innovative and powerful feature which allows you to create your own dream templates and deliver them through various tools and services. Integration with shopping carts, PayPal and other services can be facilitated by either using third party apps or designing your own right from scratch.

Integration with social media

Social media is everywhere and email marketing has to cater to this demand. AWeber has developed some good integration tools which enable you to pull subscribers from various social media services and sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook fan page has become a favorite hunting ground for savvy marketers. With AWeber you can create a signup form. Your Facebook fan page can not only be viewed by the contacts but in addition you can invite visitors to sign up for your newsletters.

Twitter can be used effectively to broadcast newsletters. Your tweets can convert your email marketing effort into a powerful and viral marketing tool. AWeber can be used to weave Twitter into your email campaign.

Image and file hosting

A major disadvantage with AWeber was that you had to keep your files offline. Importing images was a huge problem. AWeber has lately started providing space to host your images and files which you use for creating newsletters. This also shows that AWeber listens to its customers.

Support

You really don’t care about support till you need it. When you are stuck or facing a problem, you want instant gratification. This is where AWeber jumps ahead of all competitors. The best part about AWeber is the phone support. Somehow, you feel nice when you hear a human voice responding from the other end. A big plus to AWeber for toll free phone support. It would have been better if the phone support timings were extended to 24 hrs.

AWeber Live chat is another good support feature which is efficient. Some issues cannot be resolved over phone while live chat can be used to tackle technical issues. Email support is good and response times are decent.

Importing contacts

This is where AWeber fares poorly. Those who are migrating from another email marketing tool must be extremely careful. AWeber really goes overboard as far as confirmation from subscribers is concerned. Therefore if you already have an approved list of subscribers, make sure that you inform them in advance about your confirmation mail. Many subscribers simply won’t respond to the confirmation mail and you will lose them forever. This is a major disadvantage of changing over to AWeber. The only solution is to opt for AWeber in the first instance itself.

Free Trial

This is another aspect where AWeber trips down. AWeber offers a free trial which is more an irritant than an incentive. You have to pay $1 for the first month and for this you have to give your credit card details. Who on earth wants to reveal their credit card details over the net for a measly $1? Moreover, your card will be automatically charged from the second month unless you specifically discontinue the services. AWeber should do away with this ridiculous system. They must either give one month free trial or charge customers from day one.

SSL issues and content error

This is another major issue which AWeber has been unable to rectify. One of the popular ways to get visitors to sign up for newsletters is to display a popup. In case you have a secure SSL connection, a message about error due to mixed content will be displayed every time the popup appears. This is because you cannot use AWeber forms with a secure connection. Visitors won’t sign up unless they feel secure and AWeber will not work with secure connections.

Conclusion

AWeber as a whole is a good package for email marketing. Pricing is reasonable as compared to other providers. You can choose from a wide variety of templates. All the templates offered by AWeber are responsive. It can be used in combination with RSS feeds.

It’s better to avoid migrating to AWeber due to the confirmation email it insists on. You must ignore the free trial and decide in advance whether you would like to use the tool.