Why I Recommend Aweber for Email Marketing
You have a lot of choices when it comes to listbuilding and email marketing. In the past I’ve worked with several different systems, including self-hosted options, membership scripts like DAP and Amember, hosted systems like Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, and Aweber. I’ve even had the opportunity to work with the truly robust Infusionsoft.
And yet I keep recommending Aweber. Here’s why:
Deliverability. As someone who depends on your email list to make money, this should be number one on your list of requirements. Sure, you can send email from your shopping cart or even from your own server, but at least some of those emails are going to end up caught in the spam filter.
Why? Because email providers use (among other things) the IP address of the originating server to determine if the email is spam or not. Your site is very likely hosted on a server with many hundreds of other sites. If one of those sites gets flagged as a spammer, your domain will very likely suffer the same fate, and all your emails will be sent to the spam folder.
Aweber works hard to keep their servers free from spam, and has a team of experts who constantly monitor deliverability issues, so they can stop any issues before they begin. They stay in contact with the major ISPs and work to keep Aweber’s IP addresses off the blacklist files to ensure your email gets through. Do you have time to monitor each and every email provider?
Flexibility. I had the privilege of attending a webinar with Paul Evans in which he taught advanced listbuilding techniques, and one of the things he emphasized was having multiple lists for the same product. He recommends both a “prospects” list – those who sign up for a free introduction – and a “customers” list – those who buy – for each product you have. While I think that’s a brilliant idea, it could quickly get out of hand in terms of cost and maintenance.
Aweber allows you to have as many email lists as you like, so two for each product is not an issue. More importantly, though, they allow you to automate the process by which a list member is moved between lists. So someone who is on your prospects list can be automatically moved to your customer list the minute he or she makes a purchase.
In addition, you can segment your list based on actions they take on your site. For example, you might set up an upsell product on your thank you page. Aweber will track who clicks through to that page, so you can contact them with other, related offers later.
Tracking. Open- and click-through-rates are easily tracked in Aweber, giving you instant insight into what works for your market – and what doesn’t. You can even further refine your campaigns by using automated split-testing on email subject lines and opt-in forms. Simply set up two similar emails or forms, and Aweber will automatically serve each to half your readers.
Price. At just under $20 per month, Aweber is a great deal. You can have up to 500 subscribers and unlimited lists. Additional subscribers will run you a bit more – you can see the pricing structure here.
I know there are systems that are less expensive – MailChimp, for example, is free for the first 500 subscribers – but remember those “free” services come with a different kind of price tag. They often have restrictions (Mailchimp will close your account if they catch you promoting affiliate products), deliverability issues, and lack tracking and segmenting options.
Email Parsers. Do you use a shopping cart or membership script, but still want to manage your email with Aweber? Email parsers make it easy. Aweber comes with more than 40 pre-configured scripts that allow your software to automatically add members to your mailing lists, and remove them when they are no longer a customer.
The Downside to Aweber
With all that said, there are some things I don’t like about Aweber.
Opt-in forms. Frankly, they’re pretty rudimentary and rather unappealing. Most people use them because it’s easy (yes, I’m guilty of that as well) but if you want a form that really matches your site, you’ll need to have a designer create one for you.
Blog Broadcasts. One nifty feature I love and use is the ability to send out a broadcast to my mailing list whenever the blog is updated. You might even be reading this in a blog broadcast email. What I don’t like about them is the fact that only one feed is allowed. For example, if I want to send a broadcast with my latests posts from this blog, and in the sidebar add the latests posts from another site, I can’t do it with a feed. I have to input the sidebar information manually.
Ready to start building your email list, or looking to upgrade from another system? Aweber offers a trial price of $1 for the first month. That’s plenty of time to take it for a test drive to see if it’s a good choice for your business. Click here to sign up, and if you have questions about the service, let me know in the comments. I’ll be glad to help you out if I can.