Email Marketing and Email Newsletter Software: Aweber Review

By Partho, Gaea News Network
Wednesday, October 7, 2009

aweberaspxWhile searching for the top email marketing services we came across one of the leading service providers - AWeber. It is a widely used email marketing service that delivers email newsletters and manages email marketing campaigns. AWeber allows users to send out pre-scripted emails to the list or broadcast emails. It has been designed to address email marketing needs of small businesses and provides various email marketing tools for gaining news customers and managing the existing ones.  Aweber features a host of efficient tools that is especially conducive for Blogs setups. We decided to delve into features of AWeber email marketing and email newsletter software to analyze the pros and cons.

Email Marketing features

Aweber allows users to use different address for every list. Going by the spam laws you need to use a snail mail address to be able to have a list and send out emails to your list. Aweber can change that address so that you can add different companies. This saves time for opening different account per company. You can tweek the list according to your preferences.

Promotional tools

Aweber has some cool email promotional tools for users such as the 103 HTML email newsletter templates. The templates allow variety of layouts with different color schemes. These could be handy tools to allure the anonymous visitors. Further, it allows automated, personalized emails and email web analytics. It allows users to track who opens and clicks on their email links from the weekly reports generated by the software.

Step/prompt system

This is an interesting feature with Aweber. It encourages the user to complete a step before moving to another step. Say for instance, it asks you to create a website sign-up form before you start adding contacts. However, users can bypass the prompts. Then again, it’s difficult to locate the links or pages for the actions that the user wants to take.

Marketing Tools

Aweber has a set of advanced marketing tools. Users can send blog newsletters to email, integrate shopping carts in e-mail marketing promotions. It provides vital information for marketing such as best time to send the newsletters to the clients with the help of web analytics feature.

Email Deliverability

Unlike other email marketing programs like constant contact, Aweber goes an extra mile to offer productive client relationship. It ensures that the promotional material is not lost due to spam blocking and filtering. Especially, Aweber has years of experience in building relationships with ISPs. It automatically remove unsubscribe and bounces.

Blog services

Blog owners have several tools to exploit from this email marketing service. The Blog Broadcast feature can be used to notify the subscribers via email when new posts arrive. This updates can be set automatically. AWeber system scans updates of the RSS feeds and when the new updates arrive they are updated in the Blog Broadcast newsletter. The user can schedule how often this Blog Broadcast is to be sent out. The Knowledge Base has extensive information regarding how to let subscribers choose how often they receive a Blog newsletter when they are signing up.
Further, Aweber offers a good choice in blog newsletters replacing the conventional RSS Feed, which most people don’t read.

Pros

Aweber’s greatest strength is the email deliverability and contact management support. Other positives in favor of Aweber include

  • WYSIWYG editor
  • Free removal of the Aweber logo from emails
  • Schedule auto-responder
  • Integrate contact lists with 26 Shopping Carts
  • Scheduled Auto-Responder
  • Facility to Integrate contact lists with 26 Shopping Carts (including Google Checkout, Paypal, and Yahoo), Membership Sites & Podcasting Tools, and Lead Services
  • Detailed reports
  • Easily cut and paste contacts into your email list

Cons

Looking for the negatives in Aweber, we came across a major glitch that is the software offers no trial version.  Some of the other shortcomings of the software include

  • Lacks free image hosting feature
  • Although there is a WYSIWYG editor the email templates cannot be previewed on a single page
  • No options for exporting reports
  • Limited options for importing contacts

Conclusion

The host of email marketing tools offered by Aweber that makes it perfectly fit for small businesses looking to market their services . Aweber seems to be an estimable prospect for Blogs owners and those looking for small budget marketing campaign via emails. Over Aweber makes for a better email marketing with a varied approach, specifically the tools for approaching potential clients.

Discussion
April 13, 2010: 12:53 pm

I would say just use Omnistar Mailer

October 8, 2009: 10:33 pm

If you are a medium sized company or one that resides purely online then an in house email marketing system is probably worth investing in as it will be tailor made to your company and staff.

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