As I have been talking about recently, building an email list is more important than ever in 2021.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve done some posts relating to building an email list and also how to communicate best with that list (aka email marketing).
Today, I am going to be reviewing a very popular email autoresponder service called Aweber which has been around for many years.
I’ve used it for many years myself, and I am now taking a look at how it performs today in regards to key email marketing features that you need. Hope you can use my updated Aweber 2021 Review to make the best decision for you.
What is Aweber?
Aweber is a very popular email marketing autoresponder service.
It’s been around a long time (since 1998), and according to the website there’s 100,000+ businesses using the platform for their email marketing.
Some of the key things you can do with Aweber is building a mailing list (via a data capture form), designing newsletters for your subscribers, automating your email marketing with autoresponders and viewing important stats related to your email marketing. Using those statistics, you can tweak and improve your email marketing over time.
In terms of where Aweber is within the email marketing space, I would say it’s mid-market – it’s not the most expensive service out there, but it’s not the cheapest either. One of it’s main competitors is Get Response.
Whilst it has lots of powerful features, it’s obviously not the most powerful email marketing service out there, but it does have a lot of features that make it very useful to most people.
Aweber Key Features
Aweber has lots of features that business owners need for their marketing.
- Integration with 3rd party apps
- Phone, email and live chat support
- List segmentation options
- Split testing
- Responsive email designs
- Marketing automation through campaigns
- Wide range of templates
- Auto responders
- RSS/Blog to email functionality
I am going to be going to be talking about some of these features, and my experiences with them, and how I rate them.
Templates
Aweber actually has one of the largest collections of HTML newsletter templates out there.
There are over 700. Other services (such as Get Response) have maybe 200, so Aweber really leads the way here with just how many there are.
That’s great, however some of them look a bit outdated, but there is a huge number of them.
If you tweak them yourself, I am sure you can find a good solution for your email marketing campaign.
There are a high volume of templates available so you have lots of choice.
Responsive Email Designs
Aweber’s email templates are responsive.
What does this actually mean?
It means they resize themselves for the device that they are being viewed on. I have to say this is very useful, and even essential, in 2021.
Let’s face it, lots of people are reading emails on different devices such as tablets and smartphones. This is really important.
It’s great to see that Aweber has adapted and their emails seem to fit very well on every device. They are very good responsive email designs.
AutoResponders
What is an autoresponder?
An auto responder service automatically sends emails to your subscribers when they opt in, according to a preset schedule.
For example, when someone becomes a new subscriber, there is a set schedule that is triggered where they will receive emails. This could be once a day for a week, or once a day for two weeks, and everything in between (whatever you want).
The schedule can be as long as you like, but it is an automated set of emails that goes out to your subscribers when they opt in.
As you would expect, Aweber has a very good autoresponder service, and to be honest, this is absolutely essential with any email service.
Automation is so important, and you can’t be manually sending emails out.
There needs to be some automation along with manual emails.
Aweber was one of the early adopters of an autoresponder service back in 1998. Their autoresponder sequence always works great. I’ve never had any issues with it. It’s very simple to operate, and it’s clear what schedule of emails that your subscribers would receive.
This is a very great feature of Aweber.
Marketing Automation (with Aweber’s Campaign Feature)
Marketing automation is like an autoresponder sequence, but far more advanced and developed.
Subscribers will not just receive emails based on a schedule, but they’ll also be lots of other variables worked into that.
For example, if a subscriber clicks on an email and buys something, they will go into a separate auto responder sequence for buyers.
Or it might be that they have shown interest in something, but not bought a product, in which case they will go into another autoresponder sequence.
For a long time, Aweber had really fallen behind their competitors on this and it just didn’t have much advanced marketing automation.
However, I am glad to report that over the past few years, they’ve released “Aweber Campaigns” which has really given it enough to match up with their close competitors.
There is a lot that can be done with Aweber campaigns, and it’s good to see that they’ve added this because they really were falling behind.
Single and Double Opt-In Available
When subscribers are opting in, you have two options: a single opt-in or a double opt-in.
A double opt-in is seen as better for a “quality list”, because it’s making them confirm their subscriptionn via email by clicking a link. This extra commitment seems to make them a more valuable subscriber over time even if lots of people will “slip through the net” and not bother confirming.
Aweber is flexible on this in that they do allow a single opt-in option.
Obviously, using a single opt-in will allow you to build a list faster, but the quality of that list will be lower because people are having to jump through less hoops to be subscribed.
This is one of the reasons Aweber has been popular with internet marketers, in that internet marketers often want single opt-in because it’s a much faster way to build their list (subscribers are not slipping through the net).
It’s great to see that Aweber has given flexibly on this, and haven’t restricted people to only using double opt-in.
Reporting
Just like with other email marketing services, Aweber has some reporting features to show you, such as how many new subscribers you’re getting per day, and also showing how your specific lists are growing over time.
It also has charts showing where your subscribers are in the world.
This is definitely all covered within Aweber’s reporting.
I personally found it quite fiddly to use, and not as user friendly as it could be.
Also, the charts themselves look a little out of date by today’s standards.
Obviously, Aweber has been going since 1998, and I think some of the reports are dated and could do with being updated. They do they job, but they don’t look as nice as other email marketing services. However, reporting is there.
Aweber 2021 Review Conclusion
I’ve used Aweber for many years, and it’s always been known as a very solid performer in the email marketing space.
As I’ve pointed out in this post, it certainly seems to do things very well and it has lots of features. Not everything is perfect but it is a solid service and the company has a great track record.
Over recent years, they had fallen behind in some areas like marketing automation, but like I pointed out, they are catching up and have introduced the Aweber Campaigns function.
In summary, I absolutely recommend Aweber. It’s very well priced, and it’s a reliable performer in the email marketing space.
I would recommend getting started with Aweber and email marketing in general.
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