Aweber Review – Email Marketing & Autoresponders
Aweber Review
Aweber is a hosted email marketing service that specializes in providing small to medium sized online business owners with email marketing and automation tools.
Specifically it’s used to by webmasters and affiliate marketers to build, manage, maintain and broadcast email newsletters to readers as a means of encouraging interested prospects back to their websites (and sell other offers, advertising etc).
It is also used to provide automated email follow up solutions where sequences of predefined emails are delivered to leads over set intervals of time to help close more business – (referred to as “Autoresponders” if you’re a total newbie).
Essentially automated email marketing.
Aweber has been around for as long as I can remember – and I’m fast turning into an internet marketing dinosaur by most standards. In fact they formed the company the same year that I came online (1998). I do remember when they were very young and jostling for market position of the small business email marketing niche, of which they have accomplished quite well over the years, now boosting over 65,000 clients.
That of course is a very good thing if you’re considering using a hosted email marketing provider to take care of your email marketing needs (rather than an in-house solution or script / software) as I doubt they’ll be going anywhere soon.
If you’ve been around for sometime now you’ll also notice that Aweber is the company of choice used by most of the “big name” marketers out there.
Now there are far too many features to go through each one individually, so I’m only going to briefly mention those that are most important when it comes to email marketing.
The first and most important is email deliverability. If your email marketing messages aren’t getting through to your leads, whether you’re publishing a newsletter or doing automated follow up email campaigns then what’s the point.
Because Aweber has been around so long they’ve managed to form relationships with most of the major ISP’s out there, and in addition to having very robust anti spam policies and practices have become renowned for their excellent email deliverability rates. If more of your messages reach the inbox of your leads you’re going to bank more coin – it’s as simple as that.
The next most important feature is that you’re able to create unlimited email marketing lists / autoresponders on your account. All of them can then be integrated to work together to manage your email leads effectively and as automatically as possible.
For example you may wish to create one mailing list to manage your email newsletter.
You might want to create an autoresponder to automatically deliver a 30 day (or whatever) mini email course on a topic related to your products or services to help close interested leads into customers.
You might want to create another autoresponder to automatically follow up on new customers to ensure they satisfied, offer them backend products to increase revenues and so forth.
As soon as your leads become customers, you can setup your account to automatically remove them from your mini email course follow up sequence, and they’re seamlessly switched over to your customer follow up emails. All hands free.
This gives you great flexibility in whatever you want to do with your email marketing.
Another very important feature are the email marketing analytics that come with your account. These statistical aspects will show you such things as who opens your email messages and who doesn’t. They allow you to track which readers are clicking your links and who aren’t. In addition they allow you to segment and follow up with your subscribers based on their click, open, and sales activity.
They will also allow you to measure sales revenue generate by subscribers and split test different messages and sales letters to help improve sales conversions to see what’s working and what’s not working.
Know specifically what’s going on with your email marketing messages is critical when it comes to fine tuning your offers and providing readers with what they want to develop a better relationship and increase revenues…
Aweber Review - Email Analytics
Other excellent features include; easy shopping cart integration, signup form (squeeze page) creation, an RSS to email feature for turning your blog (or any RSS feed) into an instant email newsletter, and if you want a quick start solution you’re also provided with over 100 different HTML email templates that are basically copy & go.
The biggest downside to using Aweber (or any hosted email marketing service for that matter) is the ongoing costs that are involved.
Your alternative would be to purchase your own email marketing script or software application that installs on your own web hosting account. These are generally a one time purchase with no ongoing costs (although do take into account “upgrading costs” when new features are added to the software).
However with in-house solutions you can run into major issues with your hosting company when you start sending large volumes of email regularly.
Ultimately you might have to upgrade to a better hosting account to compensate in which case you’ll end up paying more. Most people running an in-house solution have dedicated servers for this reason and you’re then talking about paying several hundred dollars per month just for hosting.
You can also suffer from critical email deliverability issues. This is the major problem when going in-house as it only takes one or two unjustified spam complaints before you can’t send any emails to ALL Yahoo or Hotmail.com email addresses, for several months, as an example.
There are also numerous other problems that most online business owners just don’t want to bother with, so they are more than happy to go with a hosted solution.
And having said all of that, the ongoing costs with Aweber are ultimately negligible – especially considering that your email marketing lists are going to be the biggest asset your online business has bar none.
Pricing is also very competitive and scalable depending on how big your email list becomes over time. I would even say Aweber’s pricing is insanely cheap.
As I write this, if your mailing list is below 500 readers you’ll only pay $19 per month. If it’s between 10,000 and 25,000 readers then you’re looking at $149 per month.
That means that as your list grows and you generate additional revenue you can comfortably move up the scale and expand. So it’s an attractive option for those who need an effective way to keep in touch with their email leads and are just starting out.
And if you can’t earn $149 per month from a mailing list of 25,000 readers to cover your expenditure then something is going serious wrong – and not with Aweber.
The only pet peeve I have with Aweber is that they do not allow you to import any existing mailing lists you might have, without forcing all of those readers to reconfirm that they wish to remain on your mailing lists. Those imported readers have to click a link to stay on your lists, and if they don’t, they get scrubbed (called double optin).
I guess that’s a bit of a “catch 22” pet peeve as it is also a valuable spam control they have in place so there’s nothing that can really be done about that.
So if you have any existing mailing lists then perhaps it’s time to give them a decent “clean” (email scrub) anyway and make the move over to Aweber.
If you’re new to the internet marketing game you should also be aware that there is a pretty decent learning curve – but again – email marketing is going to be the powerhouse behind your revenue generation online.
So make sure you take your time to thoroughly examine, test, and learn everything that’s available with your Aweber account – it’s invaluable, even from a standard email marketing education perspective.
All in all I would certainly recommend Aweber as the preferred email marketing solution for anyone that wants to automate their marketing as much as possible and not have to deal with any of the headaches of trying to manage everything themselves…
