Choosing the right email marketing software can be easy, after you’ve learned how to start a blog and progressed to building up your readership.
[UPDATE] We no longer use and recommend Aweber. After years together, we moved to MailChimp, our new marketing partner which we’ve found to be better in most every way. Most noticeably, their system is truly easy to use and very, very flexible. We tried them out of curiosity, and there was no going back.
AWeber – our favorite email marketing software – gives you the ability to create newsletters and sign up forms, and to manage your subscribers – quickly and easily. They are the only company that we trust with our own email list…
And it’s a fully managed, hosted service – which means they worry about all the back end system and software stuff, leaving you to focus on growing your list. Which is where you want to be.
Here is a breakdown of the main features AWeber provides, and why we like them:
Set Up Is Super Easy
AWeber is easy to set up, which means that you can use it for many different purposes, including newsletters, ezines, email courses, etc. Your emails can do anything you want, including drive readers to a blog post, a video, a sign up page or anything else!
Free 24/7 Customer Support
Aweber customer service is the best support you can get from an email marketing software. It offers complete customer support that not only provides 24/7 assistance, but it also uses customer feedback to improve the email service according to the user-base.
They also have a support blog that continually provides valuable resources focused on their new developments and tools. Plus, you have the Live Chat support feature with minimal wait time, where trained representatives help you during business hours and beyond.
Flexible Campaign Customization
AWeber also delivers flexible campaign customization, which makes it very easy to use various content and resources (e.g. video, audio, etc.), which fits perfectly if you are managing multiple mailing lists, each with different needs.
The service provides a smart scheduling and sequencing option that helps you better organize and launch strategically targeted marketing campaigns. So, you can send your mailing messages on certain days or after a specified number of days, weeks, months, etc. You also get unlimited autoresponders with unlimited length and fully integrated HTML creator and plain text message options.
Accurate Tracking And Monitoring
The service also delivers accurate tracking and monitoring tools that help you change and boost your mailing campaigns where needed. One of the features allows you to track who opened the marketing email, which makes it so much easier to see whether your email is reaching your target market. When a subscriber clicks on a link within your message, the information is tracked and determines which strategies works so you can concentrate on that area.
Affordable Pricing Structure
AWeber offers a $1 trial for 30 days (click here to try it for yourself), so it’s basically a risk-free experience. The only real complaint we have with them is that they seem to overcharge their high end customers, (e.g. instead of giving you a discount over 50,000 subscribers they increase the rate). However, for growing your customer list to that level, it’s totally affordable.
AWeber offers the following current pricing structure based on number of subscribers:
- 0-500 $19 a month
- 501-2500 $29 a month
- 2501-5000 $49 a month
- 5001-10000 $69 a month
- 10001-25000 $148 a month
- Over 25000 Contact For Price
Your customer list, follow-up and communications are the backbone of your online business, so it’s safe to steer clear of any free email list services, as chances are you’ll end up with your email address labeled as spam and it’s just not worth it!
Automated Blog Posts
Aweber also works great in blogging, where subscribers play a huge role in your success. The more you engage them, the more they read, the more they comment and syndicate. So it’s in your best interest to encourage people to become subscribers to your blog. One way to do that is using an RSS feed and another option is the blog newsletter.
Think of your posts as sales letters for your blog and every new subscriber as a successful conversion. Sales letter won’t be effective if you don’t have a strong call to action, right? Ask people to subscribe!
AWeber magically converts your blog posts into emails. Not only that but they also take your feed and convert your RSS to email newsletters. All you need to do is give them your feed and tell them how often you want your message delivered. It doesn’t matter what blog software you use, Aweber will take your posts and send them as emails.
Contact Management
The system allows you to import contacts from Excel as well as cut and paste directly into the online address book. However, you cannot import directly from Outlook or any email provider, but they do allow you to automatically respond to any incoming emails. Another great thing is that AWeber automatically removes unsubscribers and puts them off of your list while allowing unsubscribers to provide feedback as to why they unsubscribed.
High Reliability
As we mentioned above, with free email list services your genuine marketing campaign would often get labeled as spam. AWeber is known for its high end performance. It also alerts you in case your messages appear “spammy” so you can make the necessary adjustments to get through the spam filters.
If you choose AWeber or any other email marketing tool, you should first make some time and go through the entire system, see how everything works. Then spend the next few days creating several squeeze pages and use the rest of the 30-day trial period to build up enough of a list to allow Aweber to pay for itself. Another benefit of using Aweber is that the web hosting is covered by Aweber so there should never be installation or others problems.
If you’re looking for a complete solution to sustain your marketing efforts by email marketing with newsletter updates, AWeber is the software of choice. It’s easy to set up, you benefit from free live video seminars, it’s easy to integrate other software (e.g. PayPal) and it’s also extremely affordable. The $1 test run is a bargain considering all the benefits and support you will get for your online business.
Try Aweber for yourself for just $1 and you’ll find out why they’re the only email marketing software or service we trust with our own email list. (They also have a REALLY good knowledge base and newsletter to help you make your campaign successful once you sign up)
