In this detailed AWeber review, we’re going to take a closer look at one of the most popular email marketing services. We’ll look at AWeber pros and cons, pricing, templates and more so that you can have a detailed, well-rounded review and decide for yourself whether or not it would be a good fit for your business.
Don’t have time to read everything? Here’s our overall rating:
Table of Contents
What is AWeber?
AWeber’s popularity is particularly high due to the fact that it was one of the first email autoresponders on the market, going back all the way to 1998. Since then, they’ve added a variety of features to continue to maintain their ranking at or near the type of major email marketing services.
At its core, AWeber is an email marketing service that lets you create a mailing list. With that mailing list, you can attract subscribers, send HTML newsletters, automate the sending of email campaigns with autoresponders and get detailed reports on your email analytics, including what percentage of people received and opened your email, as well as what percentage clicked on the link within it.
Is AWeber Free?
Many email marketing services have created a free plan similar to MailChimp’s free account, and AWeber is no exception. However, it differs in that while MailChimp lets you use the service for free if you have up to 2,000 subscribers, AWeber limits up to only 500. Both services also display their banner or logo at the bottom of your emails.
If you want to learn more about AWeber free, check out our AWeber Free review. You can also see how it compares to other free email marketing services.
AWeber Pricing: How Much Does AWeber Cost?
AWeber is available with a free plan, as well as several paid plans. AWeber pricing is broken down as follows:
- Up to 500 subscribers: $19/month
- 501-2,500 subscribers: $29/month
- 2,501-5,000 subscribers: $49/month
- 5,001-10,000 subscribers: $69 per month
- 10,001-25,000 subscribers: $149/month
- 25,001+ subscribers – You’ll need to get a custom quote from Aweber support
AWeber Coupon Code: Does It Exist?
Although AWeber pricing is pretty much in line with other email marketing services like GetResponse and ConvertKit, people nevertheless look for an “AWeber coupon code” to see if they can understandably save some money. Although there’s no AWeber coupon code (no matter what those coupon sites tell you, there isn’t one), AWeber does have a few options to help:.
You can get a 14% discount if you pay quarterly, and a 14.9% discount if you pay yearly. If you’re a student or a non-profit organization and have proof of this status, you can send AWeber a copy of your ID or other documentation to get a discount.
What’s Included in AWeber Pricing?
Unlike other email marketing services, AWeber pricing is not segmented by features, but rather by subscribers. That means all features are available on every plan, and the only difference is the number of subscribers you have.
It’s worth noting one major caveat when it comes to AWeber’s subscriber-based pricing, and that is that it counts all subscribers toward your total — even if those users unsubscribe or their email address bounces (as undeliverable or for whatever reason). Keep this in mind as you read over our AWeber review to better understand some of the drawbacks of this popular email service.
With that being said, some of AWeber’s features aren’t as extensive or as well-developed as those of other email marketing providers, but ultimately, the decision you make as to which email marketing service is best is going to depend on precisely what you plan to use it for.
AWeber Pricing Compared to Other Email Marketing Services
If you’re comparing AWeber vs. MailChimp or one of the many other email marketing platforms based on pricing alone, you should know that AWeber is:
- Much cheaper than Campaign Monitor
- Somewhat cheaper than iContact
- Approximately the same price as MailChimp
- Slightly more expensive than GetResponse
Generally-speaking, AWeber pricing is pretty much “middle of the road” among email marketing providers, and its feature-set is equally so. Let’s take a closer look at some AWeber features of note:
AWeber Features:
Like many email marketing services, AWeber hosts several must-have features that will make designing, sending and analyzing your email campaigns much easier. These features include:
Importing Your Existing Email List into AWeber
If you already have an email list, you don’t have to feel like you’re stuck with the same email service you signed up with originaly. You can export and then import that data into AWeber. AWeber accepts the following types of email list data:
- XLS/XLSX (Excel Spreadsheet)
- TSV and CSV (tab and comma-separated values in a spreadsheet)
- Plain text
When you import email addresses into AWeber, you’re asked if you’d like to add those subscribers to a certain autoresponder or tag them under a certain category. In addition, you’ll need to answer some basic questions on where those emails are coming from and how they came to be your subscribers, since AWeber wants to prevent people from buying email lists just to spam them.
HTML Email Newsletter Designs
This is where AWeber truly shines. With over 700 (yes, seven hundred) email templates to choose from, you’ll find a wide range of designs to suit your tastes and email marketing goals. Keep in mind that since AWeber has been around since 1998, some of these email templates look a bit 90’s-ish, but thankfully most of the templates that are available are more clean and modern-looking.
You can also create your own template and import it into AWeber. That brings us to the next question that gets asked whenever we mention email and design in the same sentence:
Are AWeber Email Designs Mobile Responsive?
Mobile-responsive emails are more important than ever, and AWeber has ensured that all of their email templates are indeed mobile-responsive. That means that the emails automatically resize themselves to fit whatever device they’re being viewed on — whether it’s a tablet or a phone. You can even see how your emails look before they’re sent by clicking the “mobile preview” toggle when designing your email in AWeber.
Keep in mind that the mobile preview is just a close approximation of how your email will look. The best way to know for sure is to view it on various mobile devices yourself.
RSS to Email Templates
If you want to use an email marketing service to simply send a blog digest — that is, a collection of links to your latest blog posts, AWeber can do that as well. This feature is called “Blog Broadcasts” but it works with any service that uses an RSS feed.
Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks to the Blog Broadcasts feature is that it doesn’t use the normal AWeber templates noted above. Instead, you have to choose from a different set of templates and many of them look like they haven’t been touched since the early 2000s. You also can’t drag and drop to edit the template in the same way that you can with standard AWeber templates.
AWeber would do well to freshen up these templates and rework them to be more in line with the more contemporary-styled designs of its email templates. It’s still possible to edit them and rework them into something attractive, you’ll just need a bit of programming knowledge to do it.
AWeber Autoresponders
This is the heart of the AWeber service and how it became one of the most popular email marketing solutions on the web. Autoresponders, simply put, are follow-up emails that are sent depending on the action a user takes.
So, for example, if you were giving away a free report on your website, a user could subscribe to receive it, and in doing so, automatically trigger your email autoresponder series to continue sending them tips about whatever your website topic is. You can customize how often emails are sent as well, so if you want them to get a tip every day, or once a week, or whatever interval you choose, you can do that.
AWeber makes it push-button simple to set up your first autoresponder. To their credit, they’ve honed and refined the process to make it very easy for even complete beginners to get started and get acquainted with how the service works.
But its simplicity is also its biggest drawback. If you want something basic, like offering a free report, sending a welcome email with a download link, and then a few weeks later, a special offer just for subscribers, AWeber makes it easy to do.
If, however, you want something more complex, like an autoresponder that tracks whether or not a user visited a specific product page and added the item to their cart, then reminding them that inventory is limited and their cart will be deleted in 48 hours, that’s completely different and much more involved. If you want a more involved autoresponder, we recommend GetResponse instead, which allows much more detailed automations.
AWeber Marketing Automation
These days, autoresponders alone are simply not sophisticated enough to allow for the deeply personalized communication that you need in order to stay front-of-mind with your subscribers. For that, there’s marketing automation.
Marketing automation lets you customize the “flow” of your content based on certain triggers — that is to say, when a customer interacts with your email in a certain way (like clicking a call-to-action button to learn more about a product), your marketing automation can follow-up by automatically subscribing them to a campaign all about that product.
AWeber allows you to access this feature within its “Campaigns” section, and you can use opens and click-throughs to follow-up with your users accordingly. You also have the option of using tags, which are special labels that you can use to group your subscribers under certain keywords, and then tailor your marketing messages accordingly.
What Are AWeber Tags?
For example, if you sell handbags online, you could group your users by tags that would separate them based how you group them together. Maybe some are looking for cross-body bags, others are looking for purses, and still others are looking for travel bags. Each one of these is a different segment but all of them can be grouped within the main category of handbags. You could use tags to sort them into “cross-body bags”, “purses” and “travel bags”and then follow up with specials and other content accordingly.
The problem is, you have no way of knowing that the user would fall into this category unless they specifically opened or clicked on a link in your message for that product in particular.
AWeber limits you to using marketing automations based on opens, click-throughs and tags, which seems like a lot, but competing autoresponder services offer much more flexibility and more features in this regard.
For instance, GetResponse lets you set up triggers based on a user’s prior purchase, the specific page they visited and where they are in your overall sales pipeline. That means you can know with absolute certainty what a user is interested in and can coordinate your content flow accordingly. As far as email marketing automation goes, AWeber has some catching up to do with its competitors.
AMP for AWeber
One of the latest technologies available for email marketing is AMP, which allows for more interactive elements to be added to your emails. For example, instead of having users click a link to fill out a form on your website, you can embed the form directly into your email. This represents a great opportunity for email marketing and greater interactivity within your emails, and AWeber has embraced it wholeheartedly.
As of this writing, you’ll need to add AMP components directly to your AWeber campaigns (learn how to do that here) and some web development experience is needed, but AWeber tells us they’re working hard on integrating these features into your account itself so that no additional know-how is needed to set up AMP features.
The Opt-In Process
AWeber gives you more flexibility in determining how you’d like to handle the opt-in process. For example, you can choose a single opt-in, which means that users don’t need to verify that they signed up for your list, or a double opt-in which makes them click a link to verify that they do indeed want to receive emails from you.
Both types of subscriber opt-ins have their pros and cons:
With a single opt-in, you’re giving your users one less hoop to jump through in order to become a subscriber, but you’re also increasing the chances that your emails will be marked as spam (in other words, you have no proof that the user experessly requested to receive emails from you).
With a double opt-in, you have proof that your users expressly wished to hear from you, which keeps your spam score low, but also gives the user one more hurdle to jump in order to become a subscriber on your list.
AWeber Reporting
AWeber’s email analytics are exactly what you’d expect. All the information you need, like open-rates, clickthroughs and bounces are available plus historical information like the growth of your list over time. You can also get granular details on a specific subscriber’s activity like which emails they opened and clicked-through.
However, other email marketing services, particularly GetResponse provide more information in this regard, and in a format that’s much easier to drill down into. You can see everything via a comprehensive visual dashboard and then click on individual details to learn more. Fortunately, AWeber is working hard on revamping their analytics dashboard to make it cleaner and easier to use.
AWeber Data Segmentation
AWeber lets you create segments quickly and efficiently. Segment users based on any of your database fields, including the date they subscribed, the links they’ve clicked and the products they’ve bought. To get to the segmentation screen, click on Manage Subscribers, then do a search and save that search as a segment.
The process of segmenting your subscribers isn’t nearly as straightforward as it could be, but many email marketing services have followed AWeber’s lead on this and operate in a similar way (even if it is clunky and not nearly as user-friendly as it could be).
Unfortunately, the service doesn’t allow you to broadcast emails to all or some of your segments at once. This is problematic if, like in our handbag example above, you want to send out an email to segments that overlap — like users who are searching for cross-body bags as well as messenger bags.
In or der to do this, you’ll need to either create messages that are specific to cross-body bags OR messenger-bags, or you’ll need to create a new segment that includes both groups. If you want to exclude a segment, like including cross-body bags AND messenger bags BUT NOT leather bags, you’re out of luck. As you can see, this is a cumbersome process and not really much of a benefit. There could be a great deal of improvement here.
AWeber Landing Pages
Landing pages, also known as squeeze pages, are pages that are designed to do one thing and one thing only — capture user data, often in exchange for something (like downloading a free report). To their credit, AWeber has made their landing page creator as simple and straightforward as their email designer, so it’s easy to drag and drop images and other fields into your landing page and build it out in the same way as you’d design an email.
You can also add Google Analytics code or a Facebook Pixel to your pages to track information on users who found the page through one of these services.
Unfortunately, AWeber doesn’t let you split test your landing pages. One of the best reasons to create a landing page in the first place is so that you can split test to see which one gets more subscribers. Thankfully, AWeber does integrate with third party services that do allow you to create landing pages and split test them, which brings us to our next section:
AWeber Integrations
Another area where AWeber shines is its integrations with third party services and apps. All of the most popular website building and marketing platforms are here, like WordPress, Instapage and more, as well as CRMs like Salesforce. If you want to extend AWeber’s functionality, it also works with tools like Zapier, although the process to integrate them may not be as straight forward as simply installing a plugin, like with Instapage or WordPress.
AWeber Support
AWeber’s support is an area where the company truly excels. No long hold times, no phone tag, and support is available by phone, email and live chat. If you’re just starting out with email marketing, having support on hand to answer your questions can make all the difference between succeeding and failing in email marketing. AWeber support is available from 8am-8pm Eastern Time (US) Monday through Friday while live chat and email are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
The Bottom Line: AWeber Review – Worth It in 2021?
AWeber is an excellent resource if you’re just starting out with email marketing and want diligent and dedicated support by your side. In addition, with a little bit of development know-how, you can tap into some pretty amazing technology and make your emails more interactive using AMP.
If you only need basic automation and don’t want a lot of the bells and whistles of other email marketing services, AWeber is a good first step. You can sign up for the free account to test the waters, but if you’d rather grow your subscriber base with no limits, it’s better to sign up for a full account and get your first 30 days free. You can do that right here.
