AWeber is one of the most popular newsletter / autoresponder services available today. As a hosted solution with a decade’s worth of development behind it, it is a very powerful tool with a large community of power users to draw experience from.
Because AWeber is a hosted solution from a well-known vendor the likelihood of your campaigns hitting an inbox is very high. AWeber themselves put the delivery rate at 99%.
Currently AWeber has over 150 email templates and hundreds of matching form templates built to match your websites theme. In the past I would normally build my own from scratch, but with recent additions to their library of templates I’ve just been using the one’s included with AWeber and modifying them to fit my needs.
Check out my previous articles: Is AWeber Your Email Marketing Partners?
One of the most talked about features of AWeber is the fact they encourage double opt-in on all their campaigns. By forcing users to verify their subscription with an email verification process your lists will certainly be smaller, but the flip side is that you will only be marketing to people who genuinely wanted to subscribe to your list. To most marketers this is a benefit not a deterrent. Aweber agrees, and in fact when you create a new list within Aweber this feature is automatically set to Confirmed Opt-In. You can change the status by going to My Lists / Confirmed Opt-In and then explicitly turning this feature off.
As with any commercial class mailer AWeber makes good use of variables for within your emails, to add a personal touch to your mailings. {!firstname_fix} will allow you to include the subscribers first name within the body of the email. {!date dayname+1}allows you to advertise an important event you have coming up with the +1 being how many days away it is. For instance you might want to say “Be sure to watch your inbox this Saturday for a killer deal”. All of the variables are clearly documented in AWeber’s front end.
With a recent update AWeber now includes the ability send campaigns at specific time intervals, automatically. This is a very strong method for increasing open rates, see below.
Another feature helping AWeber to stand out from the pack is a spam filter tool in which AWeber gives you feedback on how spammy your message is. A message with a high spam score will greatly reduce its likelihood of bypassing the spam filters used by email servers around the world. You’ll want to run all your campaigns through this before delivery for best results.
Likely one of the best features of AWeber is it’s detailed statistics page. Users can see who opened their emails, who clicked a CPA link, and more importantly perform split testing to see which campaigns work, and which one’s need to be shelved. The data is displayed in a very easy to read manner with charts and graphs (see below). You can of course either export this data, or make use of AWeber’s API to manipulate the data to your liking.
Recent updates to AWeber have brought it up to speed with commercial self-hosted solutions like email marketer. What I liked was the ability to send a broadcast only to subscribers who didn’t open or click on your previous broadcast. Alternatively, you could send an extra bonus offer to people who clicked your last email, but didn’t purchase. Very handy!
Aweber’s autoresponder feature is explained in the video below.
Visit AWeber’s current promotions page for more info.
Try AWeber’s Autoresponders for $1
- A bit of a learning curve.
- A few users have reported difficulty sending videos in their emails.
- No free trial, although they do offer a $1 trial for the first month that you can cancel at anytime without further charges.
- Gorgeous web templates and forms
- Social Media Integration (Facebook, Twitter, RSS).
- Amazing statistics with access to your campaign data via API..
- Ability to specify which days and what time of the day your follow up messages deliver to help increase your open rates and response.
- Unlimited autoresponder emails.
- Great tutorials and videos for new and advanced users.
- Highly reliable and fast email delivery. Perhaps the best in the industry.
- Very strong support staff with fast turnaround times.
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- $1 for first month
- $19/month (up to 500 subscribers) | $49/quarter | $194/year
- 501-2,500 subscribers: Add $10/month
- 2,501-5,000 subscribers: Add $30/month
- 5,001-10,000 subscribers: Add $50/month
- 10,001-25,000 subscribers: Add $130/month
- 501-2,500 subscribers: contact AWeber