AWeber- A Good Competitor?

So, What is AWeber? 

AWeber is an impressive email marketing automation platform that gives businesses and their marketing teams the ability to send out automated, professional-looking, and personalized email contents and messages to targeted prospects and customers. Users can take advantage of this marketing solution for them to engage with prospective and existing customers in a fast and effective way, enabling them to build and maintain smooth and strong relationships with prospects and customers. 

AWeber allows users to create their mailing lists which show the names and contact information of people they need to reach out to as they launch email marketing campaigns. The platform makes sure that they can completely and deeply identify the people contained in such lists, making it easy for them to classify contacts or recipients, understand their needs and attributes, and deliver the right emails to the right people at the right time. 

AWeber automates many email marketing related activities and tasks such as responding to emails sent by prospects or customers and sending follow-up emails according to the schedules users have set. It can also seamlessly work in tandem with one’s existing content management and email management systems and other types of enterprise or business tools and applications.

AWeber features

Main features of AWeber are:

·         Email Newsletters

·         Email Marketing Analytics

·         Email Analytics

·         Sign Up Forms

·         Blog Newsletters

·         App Showcase

·         Autoresponders

·         Best Email Marketing

·         Bulk Email Marketing

·         Direct Email Marketing

·         Subscriber Segmenting

·         Email Deliverability

·         Permission Email Marketing

·         AWeber Mobile App

·         Subscriber Management

·         Business Email Marketing

·         HTML Email Templates

·         Drag and Drop Editor

·         Email Marketing Campaigns

Campaign Management 

The biggest question you should have when opting for an email marketing platform is, how easy is it to make a professional email and send it out? Thankfully, the campaign manager with AWeber is run with a drag and drop editor. This means you don't need to know anything about coding.

In addition, you have the opportunity to develop automated campaigns that go out at certain periods of time. So, if you'd like to send out an automated email to every new ecommerce customer, it only takes a moment to setup

Automated Follow Ups 

One of my favorite features is all about sending out automated follow up emails based on customer activity. For example, if a customer comes to your website and buys a product, you may want to send them a thank you message. If after two months they don't come back, AWeber has tools for sending out coupons for bringing people back to the store.

Solid Signup Forms 

Integrating with most ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce is no problem, and the signup forms you place on your ecommerce store are quickly configured and beautifully branded. This assists with growing your list fast, and it also allows for A/B testing.

Subscriber Segmenting 

Anyone who runs an online store knows the importance of customer segmentation. Sending out broad emails to everyone is going to return fewer conversions. So, AWeber has comprehensive tools for segmenting the people on your list. Maybe you have some people who you consider VIPs. Maybe you like shooting emails to people who haven't been to your shop in awhile. Regardless, the features are there for making this segmentation happen.

Wonderful Ecommerce Integrations 

From PayPal to Etsy, and Shopify to WooCommerce, AWeber has an onslaught of integrations with tools that are bound to come up on your ecommerce journey. For example, you may want to get an email signup form on your WordPress site powered by WooCommerce. Not only is there a plugin for this, but it only takes a moment to get it combined and placed on certain parts of your website.

Tracking 

Click-throughs and opens are all included with email analytics. View which products people are most interested in, and in turn, segment your lists based on the reports that come in after sending out email newsletters.

Email Campaign Creation

One of the most important features provided by any email marketing tool, is a simple strategy for broadcast creation. Fortunately, AWeber happens to provide one of the largest selection of templates for e newsletters and announcements on the market. In fact, there are hundreds available, including HTML templates that can be customized according to your needs.

If a wide selection of email templates (over 150) wasn't enough to impress, then AWeber also provides more than 700 different sign-up forms to help you build your email list to begin with too. These forms are available to place on your social media platforms, blog page, website and more.

So, how good are the email templates exactly?

Well, obviously not all of them will suit your personal style.

There's a good chance that you'll find some templates on AWeber that seem pretty outdates. However, you can always customize the templates that you don't like with the intuitive email editor tools provided. These features give you the option to upload images to your template, add a logo and more.

Email Template Fonts

One particularly compelling thing about AWeber email templates, is that you get a lot of control over your font options – more than you'd usually get from most email marketing solutions including GetResponse.

The opportunity to access web fonts in AWeber means that you can provide an experience that's very different to the basic one-size-fits-all options provided by most email options. Most software solutions come with a handful of “safe fonts” to choose from, and that's it. Which makes it difficult to stand out in a cluttered inbox.

Another great thing about being able to use customizable fonts, is the fact that you can achieve more consistency by using the same typefaces as the ones on your websites and blogs.

Autoresponder Email Creation

While any email template might be important to your overall communication strategy for customers, there are few things more appealing to today's businesses than an autoresponder feature. Autoresponders in your email marketing tools allow you to automate the way that you reach out to your target market based on specific triggers.

For instance, when you set up an autoresponder series, you can make sure that your customers always get an email when they leave something in their cart or finish a transaction. AWeber actually claims to be the first company to have created the autoresponder in 1998 – which is a big point in their favor if it’s true.

Since AWeber tells people that they were the inventors of the original autoresponder, you'd probably assume that their automated emails would be phenomenal. However, it's mostly just okay. You don't get some of the more advanced features that you get in GetResponse or ActiveCampaign for instance – but you do get a relatively straightforward strategy for establishing emails based on triggers.

For instance, you can automatically send all of your subscribers an instant onboarding email from the moment they sign up to your list. If you want to boost your chances of success you can also follow up with an opportunity for them to follow you on social media sent via email, plus a promotional code to get them buying quickly.

Typical autoresponders are very easy to create and great for beginners in the email marketing space. However, triggering your autoresponder based on user purchases and actions isn't as simple as it would be with a competitor like GetResponse or Mailchimp.

Sure, you can create goals or link automation rules to send emails in specific ways – but you're not going to get the full strategy solution for building unique connections with your audience that you'd get from other competitors. For instance, there's no CRM functionality to let you include crucial data about your customers in your email campaign like you'd get with GetResponse.

Integrations

Usually, when features (like autoresponders) are limited on a certain email marketing tool, one of the best ways to upgrade your functionality is with integrations. A wide range of integrations gives businesses more opportunities to expand on the capabilities of their email marketing tools. What's more, now that today's companies are using a huge selection of software for marketing, including things like CRMs and blog creation tools – it makes sense to invest in email marketing services that play well with others.

AWeber connects to a huge variety of other cloud-based tools, such as web builders like WordPress and Wix, CRM solutions like Salesforce, tools for landing pages like Instapage and beyond. Depending on the integrations you choose, the offerings from AWeber can be pretty advanced. For instance, some come with a snippet of code that you can add into a website, and others feature unique widgets.

AWeber's integrations are far reaching, and there's even a handy search function on the website to help you find the options that are right for you. For instance, you can flick through available integrations according to categories like CRM, content management, landing pages, lead generation, memberships and more.

However, AWeber isn't quite as seamless and straightforward when it comes to plugging into other software as some of the other alternatives on the web, such as MailChimp. You shouldn't have a problem getting this solution to work with other software as a service (SaaS) apps, but you might find that the integrations aren't quite as in-depth as you'd get elsewhere.

Automation

As mentioned above, there are few things more important in email software these days, than the right solution for automation. AWeber is pretty good when it comes to taking some of the headache of email marketing off your shoulders. You can go beyond the basics of your typical drip campaigns (mentioned above), with complex workflows that include if-this-then-that logic.

AWeber gives you the option to design your own sales and marketing flowcharts where emails and interactions happen according to user actions, email opens, site visits, link clicks and so much more.

Overall, the automation solutions on AWeber go quite a bit further than your email autoresponders, which is a great thing. There's even the option to access functionality through AWeber “campaigns”. This allows you to initiate specific user actions, specifically clickthrough's and opens. There's also the chance to add specific tags to your segments to determine what kind of content should be sent to which customers.

AWeber recently introduced a host of new marketing automations in their “Campaigns” feature set. It's not advanced as the kind of campaigns you can create with things like GetResponse, Mailchimp, or even Klaviyo. However, AWeber will make sure that you have everything you need to really get a jump start on your email strategy.

Final thoughts

While a strange paid trial and goofy pricing setup used to hold back AWeber, it's clear that the company has worked to rectify these problems. It's now, in my opinion, the most powerful option for email marketing if you're handling an online store. Not only do you receive integrations to your store, but the templates are incredible.

AWeber deserves serious consideration from all ecommerce entrepreneurs, and it only takes a moment to get a feel for what the platform offers with the free plan.

If you have any questions about this AWeber review, feel free to give us a shout in the comment section below.