AWeber Review

AWeber is popular for its superior autoresponders and is a solid performer in most aspects of email marketing. The company offers a bit less when it comes to importing contacts, but that’s mostly just a one-time issue for new users.

The Good

Excellent autoresponder capabilities

Providing timely, personalized, and targeted messages to your customers is a big part of email marketing success. For example, when a new customer signs up to your list, it’s good practice to send them an introductory welcome email. You might follow up with a second email a week later and another at the end of the month in order to keep your company on the customer’s mind. AWeber’s great autoresponder tool enables you to automate this process, ensuring your customers get the information they need right when you want them to. All you have to do is create a series of emails and set up an autoresponse schedule. You even have access to more than 150 email templates to make the email design process quick and easy. If you’re looking to really engage your customers, AWeber’s autoresponder tool is a fantastic way to do it.

Numerous integration options

The ability to integrate your email marketing account with other online services enables you to improve information sharing across different business functions. For example, you can insert AWeber email subscription forms on your website, blog, and Facebook page so all your visitors can easily sign up. If you use an online customer management service such as Zendesk or Salesforce, you can set up your account to automatically show which of your customers are subscribed to your AWeber emails as well as which emails they’ve received from you. You can even integrate your AWeber account with many of the most popular shopping cart tools, enabling you to add a new customer to your email list when they make a purchase on your website. Serious email marketers can also visit AWeber Labs to build their own apps and time-saving tools using the AWeber API, a flexible programming interface that provides you access to your AWeber data and all sorts of powerful functions. With so much flexibility at your fingertips, AWeber makes it easy to take full advantage of your customer data to optimize your marketing strategies.

Regular live webinars

If you’re new to email marketing, you’re sure to appreciate AWeber’s excellent live webinar courses, which include real-time instruction from AWeber experts and even a Q&A segment for follow-up questions. You start off with an introductory course designed to get you ready for your first campaign. Later, you choose from a variety of more advanced webinar courses that cover topics such as email analytics and social marketing strategy. These free courses help you nail down the finer details of email marketing so you can take full advantage of your opportunities.

Easy Report Access

When it comes campaign effectiveness, there’s a lot more to keep your eye on besides revenue numbers and subscriber counts. To really understand how your campaigns are working, you need to look at how your customers are interacting with your emails. AWeber provides just this kind of data, which is accessible at any time through the company’s email reporting dashboard. You can bring up charts that show how many of your contacts opened your emails and how many clicked on the links within your message. This kind of information tells you a lot about how engaging your emails are and helps you identify problem areas to solve. You can also bring up data on your subscribers, including location information and records detailing when and why customers unsubscribed from your list. Although most email marketing companies provide access to some customer data, AWeber does a very nice job in this area, providing you with the exact information you need to create better, more effective campaigns.

The Bad

Limited data importing capabilities

AWeber provides two importing methods: a manual text-based upload and a spreadsheet upload (they accept XLS, XLSX, TSV, CSV, and TXT files). Many email marketing companies also offer uploads from accounting programs and even online customer management services like Zoho or Salesforce. If you plan to use either of these options, you have to figure out how to extract the data yourself. However, this is typically an issue you’ll only run into once so it likely won’t be a problem for most.