Email Marketing Software Review Part 2: AWeber
Posted in B2B Email Marketing on July 21st, 2009 by admin – Be the first to comment
This is the second part of our email marketing software review. Our first review was of Savicom, a service that Charlwood eMarketing has been using for 3 years now. We heard about AWeber from a variety of sources, but mostly referrals from professional bloggers (Darren Rowse – ProBlogger.com) and others who have large subscriber counts, and need to get really good email deliverability.
So, I took their free “test drive” for 30 days for $1, and then $19 per month after which includes up to 500 subscribers in my list. The reason they say it’s not free is to reduce SPAM/hackers taking a test drive and then sending out unsolicited emails and then dissappearing. They offer a 30 day money back guarantee, so I thought that’s a reasonable risk I’m willing to take (even though I’ve got more than 500 subscribers alone from my free b2b email marketing ebook).
When you finish signing up, you are brought to a main control panel where you can name your list, add subscribers and set up options for a web sign up form and confirmation email. A wizard guides you through the process. Unlike other email software providers, AWeber guides you through every step in detail, including cutting and pasting a subscription form onto your site. They also get so detailed as to allow you to customize your unsubscribe page with your logo and custom copy – very impressive! 
When you import your list, you are limited to 2,000 per day (Savicom allows you to import up to 50,000 emails before they ask for a faxed contract to ensure SPAM law compliance). Also, any emails you import will receive a subscription confirmation message (which you can customize) to confirm that they have agreed to receive information from you. Optionally, if you’ve done this already with another email software vendor, you’ll need to prove to AWeber that they were double-opted in using your old email service. Many other email providers do not take this extra step to ensure that they are double opted-in. Note that your sign up confirmation email will be manually reviewed after 1 business day by AWeber. This is a little labour intensive, but again ensures the maximum likelihood for optin legal compliance.
Their help wizard also guides you through writing a welcome email to those who just subscribed via web form. This email includes many tools such as an HTML set of templates, personalization and automatic wrapping of text to be optimized in most email applications. If you are stuck along the way, AWeber includes some really great video tutorials. They range from getting started with your account, to setting up an HTML email template to adding a web form to your site.
There are some great RSS options with AWeber. Firstly, you can automatically convert your HTML email or newsletter to RSS with a simple checkbox option. There is also an RSS to Email function (Blog Broadcast) which allows you to instantly convert your RSS feed from your blog to a nicely formatted HTML email newsletter format. You can choose to send automatically when the number of new blog posts reaches a specific threshold, or send on a specific day immediately or on a regular schedule every day of the week.
AWeber has been helping over 61,000 businesses raise profits and build customer relationships using opt-in email marketing software for over 10 years. If you are interested in demo’ing their software, try their test drive below like I did;