In this Aweber review, we take an in-depth look at one of the most popular solutions for designing and sending HTML e-newsletters. We’ll go through the pros and cons of Aweber and discuss its pricing, features, templates, interface and more.

HOW MUCH DOES AWEBER COST?

There are 6 Aweber plans on offer:

Hosting and emailing a list containing up to 500 subscribers: $19 per month
501 to 2,500 subscribers: $29 per month
2,501 to 5,000 subscribers: $49 per month
5,001 to 10,000 subscribers: $69 per month
10,001 to 25,000 subscribers: $149 per month
25,000+ subscribers: call Aweber for quotation

HOW DOES AWEBER’S PRICING COMPARE TO THAT OF ITS COMPETITORS?

Aweber is, in general,

significantly cheaper than Campaign Monitor
considerably cheaper than iContact
roughly the same price as Mailchimp
marginally more expensive than Getresponse
considerably more expensive than Mad Mimi

It’s worth noting that the above comparisons don’t really apply to small lists however – if you have a small email database, several competing products are better value.

For example, hosting a list containing 1000 records will cost you $29 with Aweber, and…

$12 per month with Mad Mimi
$15 per month with Mailchimp
$15 per month with Getresponse
$29 per month with Campaign Monitor *
$32 per month with iContact
But at the more expensive end of things, hosting a list containing 10,000 records will cost $69 with Aweber and…

$149 per month with Campaign Monitor *
$79 per month with iContact
$75 per month with Mailchimp
$65 per month with Getresponse
$42 per month with Mad Mimi
That’s just two examples of course, and Aweber’s competitors have different pricing tiers that will occasionally make Aweber cheaper, occasionally more expensive. But generally I’d say Aweber is priced roughly in the middle of the e-marketing solution scale.

Of course, pricing is not the only factor you should base your decision on…the more important thing to work out is what bang you get for your buck. So let’s look at some Aweber features.

* A quick note about Campaign Monitor: there are some cheaper Campaign Monitor plans available which allow you to host the same quantities of email addresses as outlined above, but they limit the number of e-newsletters that you can send to them. For the sake of a fair comparison, I’ve referenced the costs for Campaign Monitor plans that permit unlimited broadcasts.

KEY FEATURES OF AWEBER
Aweber provides you with the following key features:

the ability to import / host an email database
a wide range of templates
autoresponders
responsive email designs
split testing
reporting
RSS / blog to-email functionality
segmentation options
phone, email and live chat support

IMPORTING DATA INTO AWEBER
Importing an existing database into Aweber is a pretty straightforward affair. You can upload the following file types:

XLS
XLSX
TSV
CSV
TXT
Alternatively, you can copy and paste subscribers into Aweber.

As you import your data, you are given the option to add your subscribers to a particular set of autoresponders, and tag them. Not all competing products permit the addition of imported data directly into autoresponder cycles so this is a nice feature to have.

For anti-spam reasons, you will have to answer some questions about how you collected the data you’re importing.

In essence, Aweber’s importing functionality is good – no complaints here.

TEMPLATES
Example of an Aweber template
Example of an Aweber template

By comparison to its competitors, Aweber provide one of the largest sets of e-newsletters templates available: there are over 700 available. To provide a bit of context, there are 500+ templates available for Getresponse and 300+ for Mailchimp.

Toe be honest, I don’t love all of the designs – some of them look slightly dated. I would consider them to be a bit better than the Getresponse offering, but not as good as Mailchimp’s. However, the sheer volume of templates available means that with a little bit of tweaking you should be able to find a suitable one for your e-newsletters. There is, of course, always the option of coding your own too. So in general, I’d give Aweber a thumbs up in the template department.

AUTORESPONDERS
Autoresponders – a series of follow up emails that are automatically triggered by either time or user actions – are a key part of any e-marketing solution.

Aweber claim to have invented autoresponders back in 1998 and as such you’d expect their autoresponder functionality to be mind-blowingly good. Oddly, it’s just ‘okay’.

On the plus side it is very easy to set up follow up emails based on time interval – i.e., automatically sending subscribers an onboarding email immediately after sign up, a promo code 2 days later and a ‘follow us on social media’ email a week later is extremely easy. This is a typical use of autoresponders and it’s a breeze with Aweber.

On the down side, triggering autoresponders based on user actions and purchases is a bit more complicated than with key competitors Mailchimp and Getresponse. Using Aweber, you can create ‘goals’ or combine automation rules with tagging to make autoresponders behave in quite funky ways…but it’s definitely easier to make use of autoresponders in advanced ways using other products, particularly Getresponse.

That said, Aweber are working on a new feature, ‘Campaigns’, to provide easier ways to work with autoresponders and trigger them based on user actions and events (see video below).

Ultimately I’d give Aweber a ‘could do better’ report when it comes to autoresponders – but to be fair, they are trying to, and I don’t think it’ll be long before we see some improvements in this area.

RESPONSIVE EMAIL DESIGNS
Unlike some other e-marketing tools – notably, Mad Mimi – all Aweber’s email templates are ‘responsive’. This means that they automatically resize themselves to suit the device they’re being viewed on. In this day and age of smartphones and tablets, this definitely is a good feature. One minor gripe I have however regarding the responsive designs is that to preview them you’ll actually have to send a test email to a smartphone. On other platforms you can usually just hit a ‘preview on phone’ button or similar.

SPLIT TESTING
Split testing (also known as A/B testing) involves sending variants of your e-newsletters to some of your mailing list, monitoring the performance of each, and sending the ‘best’ version to the remainder of your list. Most e-marketing tools handle this automatically for you: you create a few different versions of your email (using either differing content or subject headers), send them to a sample of your data, and your e-marketing solution will roll out the best performing version automatically to the rest of your mailing list.

Split testing’s pretty good in Aweber. You can create four variants of an email. This compares positively with Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor and Mad Mimi – Mailchimp allows you to work with 3 variants; Campaign Monitor 2; and Mad Mimi doesn’t facilitate split testing at all. Getresponse, however, provides better functionality in this department, allowing you to split test a more generous 5 variants.

REPORTING
Email analytics in Aweber are good. In addition to being able to monitor key stats such as open rate, clickthroughs and bounces, you can also look at a lot of other useful analytics / information, including

the growth of lists over time
an overview of sign up methods
where people are opening your email (i.e., geographical location)
the history of an individual’s activity – you can view past opens and clicks etc. at a per-subscriber level
and much else.

In terms of how this compares with competing products, I would say that Aweber’s reporting is more comprehensive than that which is available in Campaign Monitor or Mad Mimi; however, I would argue that Mailchimp and Getresponse both provide better reporting interfaces. With the latter two products you seem to be able to get more of an overview of information in one place, particularly when looking at the performance of individual e-newsletters. With Aweber, you’ve effectively got to flick between three sections – “Broadcasts”, “Subscribers” and “Reports” to get an overall picture of analytics, whereas Getresponse and Mailchimp present most of their reporting information on one dashboard (which you can use to drill down to specifics).

RSS TO EMAIL
Like similar e-marketing products, Aweber can take your site’s RSS feed and turn it into e-newsletters that get sent out according to a schedule that you define. This is particularly handy for bloggers who want their mailing lists to automatically receive an e-newsletter containing their latest content after they publish a blog post.

It’s worth noting however that you can’t use the standard Aweber template designs for RSS-to-email purposes – you have to choose from a set of templates which are specifically designed for this purpose. On the plus side, there are quite a few of these to choose from – more than most other e-marketing solutions I’ve tried; on the down side, some of them look pretty dreadful. And annoyingly, you can’t use the standard Aweber email drag and drop interface to edit them. With a bit of tweaking, you should be able to find something that works but I think there is definitely some large room for improvement here.

AWEBER SUPPORT
Aweber’s support is one of the stand-out features of the product. Phone support, email support and live chat support is all available – this compares very favourably with some key competitors including Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor and Mad Mimi, who only offer email support. Additionally, there’s no hoops to go through to contact support – relevant phone number and email details can be viewed easily on the company’s contact page, without any requirement to trawl ‘knowledge bases’ or fill in any forms beforehand.

On top of that, the company recently won a Gold Award in the US’ National Customer Association’s Stevie Awards, which augurs well for the quality of the support you’ll receive when you contact them. If you are a novice to email marketing, then this sort of easy access to good-quality support is a strong argument in favour of using Aweber as your email marketing provider.

In terms of its availability, you can contact Aweber’s live support team from 8am-8pm ET Monday to Friday, and 9am to 5pm ET Sat-Sun.

AWEBER REVIEW: THE CONCLUSIONS
I hope you’ve found this Aweber review helpful so far, but if you haven’t made your mind up on whether this is the e-marketing solution for you, here’s a breakdown of some pros and cons of using it.

PROS OF USING AWEBER
It’s easy to use.
It’s reasonably priced – whilst not the cheapest product of its kind out there, it is cheaper than several similar tools, notably Campaign Monitor and iContact.
It has good import functionality, with the option to import a wide range of file types and add the email addresses you’re importing directly to an autoresponder cycle.
It integrates neatly with a good range of third party tools and apps.
It comes with a very large range of templates – more than its key competitors.
Setting up simple time-based autoresponders is very easy to do.
All email templates are responsive.

It provides a reasonable number of split testing options (more than Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor and Mad Mimi).
Reporting features are strong.
Segmenting data is really easy and you can use both field contents and user activity (email opens, links clicked etc.) to create your segments.
Support options are considerably more extensive than is the case with some key competing products.

CONS OF USING AWEBER
There are cheaper options out there which offer considerably more features – Getresponse being a prime example.
Some of the templates look a bit dated.
The autoresponder functionality is a bit on the basic side – although that said, it looks as though the new ‘Campaigns’ functionality is soon set to change that.
The RSS to email templates look pretty awful and they can’t be edited using Aweber’s standard drag and drop email builder.
Overall I would classify Aweber as a solid performer – not necessarily the best emarketing product, but one that is reasonably priced, easy to use, and well supported. The strongest arguments for using it are probably that its interface is user-friendly; its wide range of integrations with other tools; and that you can avail of support from Aweber easily.

The support aspect positions it as a good option for anyone starting out in e-marketing without a truckload of technical skills: you probably won’t get stuck, but if you do, you can talk to a real human being on a real phone line about your problem.

FREE TRIAL OF AWEBER
One of the best ways to decide whether Aweber is for you of course is to avail of its free trial – you can try the product free for 30 days here.