Email Deliverability, Review

AWeber Email Marketing Review

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AWeber is a very popular web-based email marketing service.

What is an email marketing service?

An email marketing service is a company that does all of the technical aspects of maintaining an email/newsletter list. If you want to start sending out an email newsletter, since it is one of the best ways of marketing on the internet, there are many email marketing services that will handle the removes, bounces, ESP whitelisting, and all of the other tasks a large email newsletter sender would have to do.

The down side of using any email marketing service is that you have to follow their rules and do thing their way. So it’s very useful to know how the different email service providers work so you can make an intelligent decision on which one to use, as there are many of them.

AWeber


AWeber is a great choice when looking for an email marketing service. They are extremely tough on spammers which give them an incredible delivery rate. They claim to get 99.4% of their emails delivered to the inbox – which is an incredible statement. Many people don’t realize that just sending out an email to 1000 people doesn’t necessarily put 1000 emails in 1000 email boxes. I’ve seen a newsletter who claims to send to over 100,000 people only get 24% delivery. That’s over 76,000 people who signed up to get the newsletter but didn’t receive it.

My Only Warning About AWeber

UPDATE: Right now, I’m very impressed. Somehow, the affiliate manager for AWeber Communications emailed me after seeing this post to mention that I missed a setting in AWeber that handles most of this warning. See below:

The reason AWeber has such a high delivery rate is because they require “confirmed opt-in” for every email you add import to your list. If you are transferring from another email marketing service, each subscriber you import will need to confirm that they want your newsletter. Depending on how active your list is, you may lose a lot of your subscribers.

Anyone who subscribes to your email newsletter via the web form will OPTIONALLY be sent an email asking for them to confirm their subscription. They will have to click the link before you can send them more emails. You can turn this setting off on the My List > Confirmed Opt-In page. There is a large GREEN button that says ON, click it to make it into a large RED button that says OFF. (It may be OFF by default.)

This is probably the biggest and only downside to AWeber, but it is the reason they get such good delivery.

Ratings

General:

Setup: 9 – They have very well-designed user-friendly instructions to help you set up your email list.

Ease of use: 8 – I only made a couple (minor) mistakes while learning the web-based system.

Customer Support: 9 – Great Support. Only once have they not answered immediately. (Tickets, Live Chat and Phone Support) They don’t hide their live support behind a FAQ section. It is very easy to find ways to contact them.

Online Help: 9 – They have a well updated FAQ section that I haven’t used much because Live Chat is so easy to use.

Sign Up Form:

The Process a subscriber goes through: 8 – Very simple and easy for subscribers to understand.

How easy it is to modify the form: 9 – Very easy to modify.

Features

Autoresponder (automatically send new subscribers new emails at user-defined intervals), Email Broadcasts, Email Tracking (clicks, opens, bounces, marked-as-spam), Reports, custom fields and ability to have multiple lists running on the same account.

Price

They have a tiered price range depending on how many emails you have on your list:

Subscribers Monthly
0 – 500 $19
501 – 2,500 $29
2,501 – 5,000 $49
5,001 – 10,000 $69
10,001 – 25,000 $149
25,000 + Contact Us

Summary:

As you can see, I’m a fan of AWeber. I have been doing a lot of research into email marketing systems, and I’ve heard a lot of great things about them. They also have a great affiliate system, too.

Visit AWeber.com

Let me know if you have any questions or comments,
Ashton Sanders
Websites in a Flash

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