AWeber Review 2021: Hidden Gem or Totally Overrated?

In this AWeber review, we’ll look at one of the oldest email marketing solutions. We will go through what makes it an excellent ESP, the drawbacks, and of course, the pricing. Hopefully, by the end of this review, you will be able to decide if AWeber is the best tool for your business.

Let’s begin!

AWeber Pros AWeber Cons
  • Easy to use
  • Excellent customer support
  • Unlimited emails
  • Features included in all plans
  • Great reporting capabilities
  • 700 plus email templates to choose from
  • Single and double opt-in service
  • It integrates with many apps
  • Web fonts are allowed
  • No Google Analytics
  • No resend to unopened
  • You can’t send a broadcast to multiple segments.

What is AWeber?

AWeber has been in business since 1998 and has a client base of 100,000 individuals and companies. Like any other emailing app, AWeber helps you create a mailing list, design and send newsletters to your subscribers, automate your emails and view statistics related to your email campaigns.

The Best AWeber Features

To start off this AWeber review, let’s cover all of their best features & how they can be used.

AWeber Automation

AWeber claims that they invented autoresponders back in 1998 when nobody else knew about it. This alone gives them a 5-star in our books for making the concept of email marketing so much easier. That being said, it seems they have been left behind where advanced automation is concerned.

AWeber allows you to set up autoresponders for everyone who signs up to your mailing list. They will receive a welcome message immediately and timed follow up emails weekly. Any person who takes action such as clicking a link or purchasing a product also triggers autoresponders.

You can also set up the autoresponder to send emails depending on a subscriber’s time zone to increase your open rate. Additionally, you can set up rules to remove a subscriber from one list t another. For example, it can remove someone from prospects after they purchase a product.

While reacting to clickthroughs, opens, and tags is great; ESPs like GetResponse and ActiveCampaign provide more flexibility when it comes to automation.

AWeber Support

AWeber has won numerous awards for their outstanding customer service and support over the years. Their representatives are friendly and prompt to help you sort out any issue. AWeber provides great one-on-one support via emails, chat support, and social media. What stands out about them the most is the fact that they still have phone support from 8 am to 8 pm, which is rare nowadays.

It’s important to note that AWeber also has a rich knowledge base filled with articles, walkthroughs, troubleshooting explanations, and everything you can think of. You can also check out their video tutorials and webinars for a more comprehensive walkthrough of the platform.

Ease Of Use

AWeber may not be the easiest ESP to use, but they try. When you sign up on the platform, you will be greeted with an introductory video that helps you set up the whole thing. You can skip the video, but I recommend you watch it because the platform has some learning curve.

For example, you need to fill out some stuff that includes your business address and any customizations you want to be featured on AWeber’s opt-in confirmation message. The video will also help you understand AWeber’s lingo; campaigns mean automation, broadcasts are regular emails, and legacy follow up emails are autoresponders.

Once you are done with that section, everything is smooth and straightforward. The screen has six tabs along the top, and every tab has some drop-down features, so make sure to look at them.

While you can’t import your contact list directly from Gmail, AWeber allows you to import from any of these file types; XLS, XLSX, TSV, CSV, and TXT. Alternatively, you can always copy and paste rows of people manually in groups of ten.

What stands out about the data import feature n AWeber is that you can add a subscriber directly into an autoresponder cycle, so they hit the ground running.

Broad Choice of Templates

When it comes to email templates, no one compares to AWeber. All 700 of their templates are responsive, meaning they adjust themselves accordingly on any device. You also see a preview of how they will look on mobile devices before you send them.

A wide range of templates is not the only beautiful thing about AWeber templates. Unlike their competitors, AWeber allows you to use web-fonts to enhance the appearance of your emails. Web fonts can also help you create a brand appearance or at least demarcate between your site and your newsletters.

Split testing

A/B testing allows you to send a variant of newsletters to a handful of people so you can monitor which one performs best. Like most of its competitors, AWeber automatically rolls out the best performing version to the rest of your mailing list. AWeber allows three variants when split testing, which is reasonable enough.

Reporting

AWeber has some cool reporting features. Besides the usual open rate, click-throughs and bounces, you can also see;

  • Where people are opening your emails from, geographically
  • The growth of each list over time
  • Overview of sign up methods and
  • A history of subscribers activity i.e. past opens, clicks, preference

The only problem with AWeber analytics is that you have to flick through different sections to get a clear picture of the reports. Other platforms like GetResponse and MailChimp give you all the reports in one place.

Landing Page Builder

The landing page builder is a relatively new feature in AWeber and an excellent welcome for that matter. Landing pages work very well in data capture and lead generation. You can easily design a landing page on AWeber and add some of the provided stock photos to make them more appealing.

AWeber also allows you to add a Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics tracking code to monitor landing pages’ performance. This helps because there is no A/B testing for landing pages.

RSS to Email

If you are a blogger, it’s crucial that your audience read your new post when it’s still hot from the kitchen. The RSS to Email feature in AWeber and other competing ESPs make this possible by sending an email to notify your subscribers every time you put up a new blog post. However, AWeber calls this feature blog broadcast. (I told you they have their own language).

One other thing to note is that AWeber won’t allow you to use the standard email templates for blog broadcasts. They provide a separate list of blog broadcast templates for you, and you can’t edit them using a drag and drop feature.

AMP for Email

In this AWeber review, you will notice that AWeber has come up with more than just autoresponders. For example, they have pioneered this AMP to emails feature which allows subscribers to take corresponding actions on your emails. For instance, they can make an appointment or RSVP to an event without leaving your email.

AMP to email also allows you to send dynamic content like survey results, scores, and weather updates with your emails.

AWeber Review: What We Don’t Like

Segmentation

AWeber makes segmenting easy based on emails opened, links clicked, products bought, and web pages visited. You need to go to ‘manage subscribers’ and start segmentation from there.

What we don’t like about AWeber in this respect is that you can’t send emails to multiple segments at once. (Does this remind you of MailChimp?) However, you can send emails to multiple lists.

AWeber Review: Pricing

AWeber prices remind me of ConvertKit. Their system is pretty straightforward: you are only charged according to the number of subscribers you have. This also means that you get all AWeber features they offer on every plan, including their new free plan.

The AWeber pricing structure looks as follows;

As of July 2020, AWeber has simplified its pricing system even further. Not only did they add a forever free plan for up to 500 subscribers, but they also reduced their pricing tiers to two only – The Free and the Pro version.

Final Thoughts on this AWeber Review

Overall, this AWeber review showed us that AWeber is a fantastic tool for small to medium-sized businesses. What we may have skipped discussing in detail in this AWeber review is that you can choose between using the provided templates to design your emails, code your own HTML templates or create a message from scratch in plain text format.

The entire interface is easy to use, intuitive, and full of exciting features to explore. Compared to other emailing tools in the same price bracket, AWeber seems to level up in terms of features, and it’s great that you can get all the cool stuff on every price plan.

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Emil Faschanghttps://socialsummitagency.com
Instagram & Digital Marketing Expert | Online Entrepreneur for 4 Years | SocialSummitAgency Founder | 19 Years Old

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