Pricing and Features
AWeber offers month-to-month, quarterly, and annual plans for each of its tiers. The least-expensive plan, for up to 500 contacts, is $19 per month (or $49 per quarter or $149 per year). AWeber adds $10 to the normal rate to expand the service to 2,500 users and adds $30 to increase the capacity to 5,000 users. AWeber also automatically sets you up for automatic billing. If you change your mind, the company offers a 30-day full refund. Watch out for the $29 report on how to develop an email marketing strategy. It's really easy to click on the wrong thing when checking out and wind up with the report in your shopping cart. If do you wind up buying it by mistake or don't find it useful, AWeber promises to refund your money. There is no free trial or free version to test out the service—but AWeber does let you try out the software for just $1 during the first month. That's a good deal.
Creating a Subscriber List
AWeber lets you manually add up to 10 contacts—subscribers—via a form. Each record collects the name of the person, email address, ad-tracking value, and the name of the initial email message the person will receive. This can turn into a long and tedious exercise for a long list of names. The import tool is a better choice, as it has a textbox to cut and paste an entire comma-delimited list of email addresses. You can also upload a spreadsheet (XLS and XLSX), text file (CSV, TSV, and TXT). Unlike Campaigner, MailChimp, and GetResponse$15.00 at GetResponse, AWeber doesn't have Gmail or third-party integration for pulling contacts, which is disappointing. You can, however, export the Gmail contacts to a CSV file and use the import tool.
Creating a Campaign
AWeber treats emails a little differently from other services. There are different processes for creating Follow-up Series, which are essentially the auto-responders mentioned above, Broadcast messages, and Blog Broadcasts. Follow-up emails are sent automatically every time a new user is added, and Broadcast messages are one-time messages, such as newsletters. Blog Broadcast grabs posts from a blog and compiles them into a newsletter form. You can also create your own mail templates using the Email Template Manager, where you can customize existing templates or write your own using AWeber's API. I decided to create a Broadcast message. AWeber opened a message builder where I could drag in elements and change the text. I had become so used to working with email templates that this new builder template threw me for a loop for a bit. But it was still easy to create and test my messages. Once you're satisfied with your newsletter, you can send it right away or schedule it for a later time. I couldn't find an option to send campaigns at a specific local time based on a recipient's location, as you can with GetResponse.
Tracking Campaigns
Once you've sent your broadcast, you can track its success through the Reporting tool. For each campaign, you can see the open and click rate as well as the number of replies and unsubscribes. There's no Google Analytics integration, but there is a very helpful step-by-step guide on how to use Google Analytics on a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) basis with AWeber. AWeber has one of the most extensive sets of reports I've ever seen in an email marketing tool. Available reports include list opens over time, list clicks over time, new subscribers, subscriber growth, ad tracking, subscriber location, follow-up statistics, and more.
Customer Support and Bottom Line
AWeber is all about hand-holding. There are numerous video tutorials to help you figure out what to do, and almost every field or option to fill out has a link that opens up the relevant help text. Unfortunately, live help is very limited. Phone and chat support options are only available during business hours. If you want the option to call at any time, you'll want to choose a service other than AWeber. Campaigner, for example, offers 24/7 phone support. AWeber offers a mix of basic features (such as file import) with advanced features (creating your own email templates) in an easy-to-navigate user interface (UI). AWeber's extensive reporting tools and user segmentation abilities make it a solid performer, one you would do well to consider for your business. With more extensive live support options and more information about things that went wrong, AWeber could have been a top-tier service on par with our Editors' Choices for email marketing tools, Campaigner and .