AWeber Review: Is It Worth It?

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E-mail marketing is hailed as one of the most important components of online businesses. And the good news is that we have lots of e-mail services to choose from, making it easier and more accessible for anyone to create professional-looking newsletters with the click of a button. 

Aweber is one of these e-mail service providers. In this post, we hope to look at the benefits and challenges of using Aweber, so that we can help you make an informed decision about whether or not it’s the service for you. 

What is AWeber? 

First things first. Aweber is essentially a tool for email marketing. Founded in 1998, Aweber has since helped more than 120,000 businesses and individuals to get their e-mail marketing off the ground. 

Admittedly, Aweber is a smaller entity than some of the larger e-mail marketing companies like GetResponse and Mailchimp, but it’s still a well-established organization with a strong userbase. 

Its main functions include: 

  • letting you create a mailing list and capture vital information into this database;
  • letting you design e-newsletters to send to your subscribers; 
  • automating the e-mail marketing process with autoresponders set in place; 
  • showing you and analyzing important statistics relating to your e-mail marketing campaigns. 

Pricing Options for AWeber 

At the time of this writing, AWeber offers the following pricing options: 

  • Free version: The free plan lets you experience a toned-down version of the full plan, allowing you to keep a list of a maximum of 500 subscribers; 
  • AWeber Lite: Starting at $14.99 per month, this plan allows you to send unlimited e-mails to unlimited subscribers in one list; 
  • AWeber Plus: Starting at $29.99 a month, you get to send an unlimited number of e-mails to an unlimited number of subscribers in an unlimited number of lists! How much higher can you go? 
  • AWeber Unlimited: Oh yes. In case you not only need unlimited e-mails to unlimited subscribers in unlimited lists, you can still go for the AWeber Unlimited, which goes for a fixed fee of $899 per month, but with personalized account management by experts in the AWeber team 

A caveat: just because the Plus and Lite versions offer unlimited numbers, these are not the case for the starting price points. For example, going over 100,000 subscribers means that you need to pay a higher fee. 

Our recommendation is that if you have over 100,000 subscribers, you can get in touch with AWeber for your specific requirements. That way, you won’t end up shocked by the automatic price calculation. 

Also take note that paying on an annual basis can give you a discount of between 16% to 33%. 

Comparing AWeber’s pricing plans with its competitors, you will find that it can be cheaper than most. Currently, it’s cheaper than MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and iContact. The more affordable options compared to AWeber include GetResponse and Mad Mimi. 

Of course, you need to understand that pricing is not the only point of comparison between these services. In the next section, we hope to look at AWeber’s general pros and cons. 

Key Benefits of AWeber

Here are some of the key features and benefits of AWeber: 

Ease of importing a mailing list 

Users report that uploading an existing email list into AWeber is very intuitive. You can upload different file types, including XLS, XLSX, CSV, and TXT, or just copy and paste the fields into the database. 

Wide availability of email templates 

AWeber boasts of one of the largest sets of ready e-mail templates, currently at more than 600 variants. This is at least three- or four-fold that offered by MailChimp and GetResponse, two of the leading companies in e-mail marketing. 

Of course, you won’t get access to these 600 templates if you’re only on the Free or Lite plans, but even then, you can still get a big bulk at your fingertips. 

Automatic email resizing capability 

One of the main strengths of AWeber is that it has the capacity to resize e-mails automatically to make it readable on whatever screen the receiver opens it on. We feel that this is a real deal-breaker for many e-mail marketing service providers, because after all, what’s the use of sending a newsletter that someone opening on a smartphone won’t be able to read? 

We also recommend using the Preview button and sending some test e-mails just to make sure. But this sure gets rid of one potential headache. 

Marketing automation and Autoresponder capability 

Perhaps one of the most important roles of an e-mail marketing service is the ability to automate everything. That way, you can let the service do most of the work for you. 

The good thing about AWeber is that it also comes with a handful of campaign templates for an autoresponders

For example, you can set up a ‘welcome’ series for anyone who just subscribed. Then you can set up a ‘lead magnet’ autoresponder for sending out a series of free downloads. You also have the option for a ‘YouTube’ series where you can share you latest videos, or a ‘blogger’ autoresponder set for those who opt to receive regular updates of your blog. You can even create a whole ‘mini-course’ for an online learning series. 

Detailed reporting and split testing function 

Your e-mail marketing can be even more effective thanks to AWeber’s reporting capability and split testing. You can test subject lines, e-mail content, etc, and see which ones result in the most responses. 

Blog to email and other third-party integration 

Third-party integration means that you can easily link AWeber with any other online tool you’re currently using. Do you know that at the moment, it boasts of more than 700 integrations with third-party apps? 

Its blog-to-email integration also means it can automatically send out e-mails with excerpts from your latest blog post. 

Challenges for Using AWeber 

So far, one major challenge with AWeber is its way of calculating who constitutes a subscriber. Apparently, its pricing is dependent on how many people you have on your e-mail lists, even if some of them already unsubscribed along the way. This means that, as long as you don’t remove the person from your list, they count towards your billable number. 

We believe this is one of the main reasons that clients have misunderstood AWeber, and ended up paying more. But if you’re diligent at regularly doing spring cleaning, you should be fine. 

Is AWeber Worth It? 

Based on these benefits and challenges, we believe that AWeber can be a very useful tool, especially for someone who has the ability to create lots of automated marketing campaigns. These targeted campaigns can be very effective at reaching, retaining, and re-igniting current and potential customers, and we believe you can make AWeber worth its price. 

However, if you have more specific requirements or subscribers that number in the hundreds of thousands, we recommend you to get in touch with AWeber to make sure the service meets your expectations. 

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