In this instalment of the email marketing review series, we move our eyes over to the aWeber platform, and take a look at what this platform has to offer businesses of all shapes and sizes!
A Bit Of History
aWeber has been around since 1998 so it’s an early entry into the market. Currently serving over 120,000 customers you could say aWeber is certainly a big player in the market and appear to know what they’re doing!
On the inside, they are a fun-loving company which strive for excellence in their operations and don’t take themselves too seriously. However on the outside they’ve got a strong business platform and their website matches this image. This tells me they’re a dynamic company that grows and changes with the market and new technology.
Pricing Packages
In terms of pricing, the structure is fairly simple to follow and understand. From the starting point your entry level service subscription cost is $19/month for 0-500 subscribers with 501-2500 subscribers coming in at $29 a month. If you were to compare this to MailChimp their free service is an advantage for small businesses as the MailChimp free service gives you more for free than the entry level subscription from aWeber.
However with aWeber you’re paying for better service, more on that to follow.
It’s worth noting that unlike some competitor products that while there’s no free account option available, there is a free 30-day trial option, so if you’re considering a switch from another product or just wish to give aWeber a go as your starting package you can do so without any cost to start with.
Of course if you like what you see you can convert to a paid subscription easily from the aWeber website!
The Cool And The Not So Cool Features
If you’re looking for a solid platform for small to medium business this one is probably it, the 30-day trial is a really good way to get started and gives you plenty of time to test the system if you have a weekly newsletter to send out.
The click tracking and follow up part of the package is quite good and comparable to MailChimp.
The support offered to customers by aWeber is fantastic. You have access to 24 hour 7 days a week phone, chat and email support! compared to MailChimp which offers only email support. If something goes wrong while you’re with aWeber there’s help right around the corner whenever you need it.
There’s only one real complaint that keeps coming up about aWeber, and that is, they try to push the user into using the more default or premade design layouts for their emails. There is room for customisation but if you’re a business that wants a custom email with a bit of custom code in the formatting you might find it harder to get aWeber to do exactly what you want it to do! It isn’t flexible in formatting.
Integration Abilities
As you could expect the aWeber team have released their API to enable integration with other services and has fairly solid compatibility with other services out there. The list is of course very long but is available here if you’re using any of those services, make sure there’s aWeber compatibility in there before you sign up!
Summing Up
While lacking a free service, the 30-day trial is enough to help you decide if this software is for you, barring any compatibility issues (there shouldn’t be any really, the integration list is huge!) you should find aWeber a good fit for your newsletters if you’re not fussed about the formatting, and are happy with their standard versions!
With fantastic user support, this is surely a winner for small businesses without IT support on hand, that don’t mind using a more predefined template for their email format.
image:unsplash
