Aweber Review: Is This Email Marketing Tool Worth the Hype?

At this point in time, we are spoiled for choice when it comes to email marketing services as there are just so many options, old and new.

Founded in 1998, Aweber has been around long enough to watch many of the big names in email marketing grow to the size they are today, such as MailChimp, Sendinblue, MailerLite, and more.

Even with these industry titans rising, Aweber has remained competitive, providing users with an email marketing platform including all of the features and benefits of its contemporaries at an affordable price.

Aweber claims the important distinction of inventing the autoresponder, a very important email marketing tool that most other email marketing platforms would adopt down the line. The autoresponder has paved the way for all kinds of email automation, making subscriber management much simpler through automated campaigns and transactional emails.

In this Aweber review, I’ll discuss Aweber’s feature set and pricing plans, then I’ll give my recommendation on whether you should or shouldn’t go for Aweber as your email marketing solution.

Hopefully, by the end of this review, you’ll also be informed enough to make your own choice about Aweber as your potential email marketing solution, instead of just relying on what some guy on the internet says.

Aweber Features:

1. Email marketing: Featuring a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop editor and dozens of email templates, Aweber lets users be efficient with their time and make the email creation process simple and intuitive.
2. Landing page builder: Users can create landing pages and forms with Aweber’s drag-and-drop editor, similar to their email editor. Aweber’s landing pages also allow users to customize their domains by connecting their own website, if they have one.
3. Autoresponders: As Aweber claims to have invented autoresponders in 1998, Aweber allows users to send emails automatically and build automated campaigns using a variety of templates. These can be used when creating segments to send automated emails to multiple lists, and these emails can include rich content like signup forms or other interactive content elements.
4. List management & segmentation: Aweber makes audience segmentation easy with simple (and somewhat limited) but great features like audience tagging and creating custom fields to gather more information from customers. Additionally, Aweber lets users choose whether they want a single opt-in or a double opt-in, allowing users to choose whether they want to filter their list’s opt-in process for higher-value subscribers.
5. Blog broadcasts: Using your site’s RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication feed), you can have your blog content published and sent to your email subscribers like a weekly newsletter, and have your emails sent to subscribers at the perfect moment based on their local time.
6. Integrations: With access to over 750 third-party integrations, Aweber provides users with all possible solutions for whatever they desire, from e-commerce to webinar support. These integrations include CMS (content management systems), CRMs (customer relationship management), e-commerce integrations like Shopify, and much more.
7. Customer support: Even with their free plan, Aweber offers users 24/7 live support via chat or email. Once you choose to upgrade your plan you gain access to 24/7 phone support, priority in the chat, email, and phone support systems, free migration, and even a personalized account manager with their Unlimited plan. Additionally, in each section of your Aweber account dashboard, there are guides and FAQs that customers can use to solve any of their own problems before resorting to Aweber’s other support options.

Email Marketing

Building emails using Aweber has been one of my personal high points using this email marketing service. While drag-and-drop editors are fairly standard and similar to many email marketing services, I found that Aweber’s editor is incredibly responsive and intuitive for new users to pick up.

Additionally, if you don’t want to do all of the work of creating email campaigns from scratch, you can access Aweber’s library of email templates to help ship email campaigns to your customers as fast as possible.

You can also create your own email templates to reuse later, which can be very helpful if you’re looking for brand consistency without having to redesign the whole email for every email campaign.

One nice-to-have feature that Aweber has as a part of their email marketing platform is AMP emails, A.K.A. interactive emails.

This can include sign-up forms for list building, product boxes to sell products, gamified content blocks like a spin-the-wheel game, and much more.

AMP email is pretty much limited only by your imagination, so you can let yours run wild and design beautiful interactive emails that your subscribers will love.

When it comes to email deliverability, Aweber is unfortunately a little lacking. While not bad, per se, Aweber scores lower than some other platforms like GetResponse or ActiveCampaign.

Their email deliverability rate is still around 80%, so you should still be seeing emails consistently arriving in your subscribers’ inboxes.

Blog Broadcasts

Aweber’s blog broadcast feature is a tool that allows bloggers to automatically send an email to their subscribers whenever a new blog post is published. It integrates with popular blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger, and enables bloggers to customize the email’s subject line, preview text, and content leading into your blog post.

The feature also includes options to add social sharing buttons, personalize the email with the subscriber’s name, and track open and click-through rates. Bloggers can schedule their blog broadcasts to be sent at a specific date and time or immediately after publishing a new post.

Overall, Aweber’s blog broadcast feature simplifies the process of reaching out to subscribers and promoting new content.

All you need to do to set up a blog broadcast is to find your site’s RSS feed URL.

How do I find my site’s RSS feed URL?

To create a blog broadcast, you need to find your blog’s RSS feed URL first.

To do this, you can go to your website and view its HTML code (Option + Command + U for Apple; Control + Shift + C for Windows).

From there, you can do a term search using Control + F, type in “RSS”, then your website’s RSS feed URL should be in quotes after href=.

For example, on my website, the RSS feed URL is https://griffinlin.com/feed, pictured below:

As you can see, there are two instances of an RSS feed URL; one that is just the RSS feed, and one for comments. Choose the general one, and copy/paste that link into Aweber’s RSS feed URL box when you want to set it up.

Aweber has an article on finding your RSS feed URL as a part of their knowledge base, so if my explanation here isn’t clear enough, visit theirs and get a taste of their knowledge base.

Integrations

Just like many other email marketing services, Aweber offers users a host of integration options for users to connect their business software together with. From CRMs to CMSes, Aweber allows users to connect their favorite business apps directly to their email marketing through widgets, code injections, or sync apps.

The only difference between Aweber and other platforms’ integration options is that Aweber natively integrates with over 750 other platforms.

For reference, GetResponse offers users over 100 integrations natively.

That’s a pretty large difference.

At the top of Aweber’s mountain of integrations is arguably one of the most important: their Canva integration.

With this integration, you can access the popular graphic design app Canva directly within the Aweber interface, work on a design (like an email banner, a call-to-action, a photo, etc.) and insert it easily into your newsletter.

If you’re not satisfied with over 750 native integrations on Aweber’s platform, you can always integrate with Zapier. Doing so will give you access to more than 4,000 additional integrations and allows you to create more complex integration workflows between your business apps.

Customer Support

If I could only praise Aweber for one thing, it would be their customer support. This sentiment isn’t limited to just me, either; as of 2021, Aweber has been recognized by the Stevie Awards for their excellent customer service 6 years in a row, taking home the silver and bronze medals for Customer Service and Contact Center of the Year in 2021, respectively.

Aweber doesn’t make you jump through hoops to get the support you need. Their contact numbers and emails for phone and live chat are clearly displayed on their “Contact Us” page and in the “Help” section of your Aweber account dashboard.

From the “Help” section, you can search for whatever issue you’re having and access Aweber’s knowledge base to look for a solution. Below that, you’re given links to Aweber’s 24/7 live chat, their toll-free phone number, and their international phone number.

Additionally, if you still need help, you can email an expert by putting in your name, the email address they should reply to, your inquiry type, and a short description of whatever issue you’re having. If you’re an Aweber Plus member, you can skip the line and receive priority access to their solutions team.

If you’re feeling antisocial, are outside of call or live chat hours, or just want to solve your problems yourself, then you’re still in good hands. Aweber provides users with a comprehensive overview and how-tos for each section of the user dashboard.

For example, in the Automation tab of the dashboard, under your automations, there is a Knowledge Base Help widget that describes what an automated campaign is and how to trigger one, a video tutorial on the same topic, and a blog post guide to creating a successful email marketing campaign.

Overall, Aweber’s customer support is excellent. From their knowledge base and blog to their live chat and phone support options, users can expect to have whatever problems they encounter solved quickly and efficiently. The only downside I can see is that their customer support is English only, so international users might have a bit harder of a time connecting with support staff.

Aweber Pricing

Like many email marketing platforms, Aweber lets users try their platform with their free plan. Using this free plan, users can have up to 500 subscribers and send up to 3,000 emails per month, along with one email list, one landing page, one email automation, basic templates, and basic email support.

As free plans go, Aweber’s plan is somewhat limiting compared to other platforms like MailerLite as subscriber count and monthly emails are concerned. However, the plan is still free; if you’re not satisfied, you aren’t trapped with Aweber’s platform and can go with another service as you please.

As for Aweber’s paid-for plans, there are three options: the Lite plan, the Plus plan, and the Unlimited plan. The price of these paid plans scales with how many subscribers you want as part of your plan.

Unfortunately, Aweber doesn’t offer a free trial for these plans, but the free plan offers enough features for users to get a taste of what the paid plans offer.

Also, as with many email marketing platforms, you can get a discount of between 16% and 33% on these plans if you choose to pay annually instead of monthly.

Lite

The Lite plan, the most affordable of Aweber’s pricing plans (excluding the free plan, of course), is a considerable upgrade to the free plan starting at $14.99/mo. This plan offers unlimited subscribers (with a catch; I’ll get to that when I talk about the Plus plan), one email list with list segmentation, three landing pages, three email automations, basic templates, advanced message analytics, and 24/7 Aweber customer support.

This is a great place to start once you’ve outgrown Aweber’s free plan and are looking to scale your email marketing campaigns. You aren’t at the point where you need all the fancy features from the more expensive plans, but you or your email list has outgrown the free version and its limited features.

Plus

Aweber’s Plus plan, starting at $29.99/mo, is where their feature suite becomes truly comprehensive. Instead of one email list, you can have as many mailing lists as you want with multiple segments as you so choose.

Same with automated email campaigns and landing pages; instead of three, you can build as many as you want. You also have access to all of Aweber’s templates for emails, landing pages, and automations, plus advanced landing page features like Facebook pixel tracking.

Also, if you care about branding in your emails, you can remove Aweber branding from all of your email marketing campaigns and landing pages.

Now, I said I’d talk about the catch to having unlimited subscribers with the Lite plan here, and the Plus plan shares that same catch.

If you have more than ~50,000 email subscribers with the Plus plan or ~100,000 with the Lite plan, you can save money and get more features by going with the Unlimited plan.

While I’ll talk more about it below, the Unlimited plan doesn’t scale in price with how many subscribers you want; you can have as many subscribers as you want at a fixed price.

Unlimited

If you have a list of over 100,000 subscribers, then the Unlimited plan is the plan for you. At a fixed price of $899/mo, you get personalized account management, priority email support and phone support, and (as the plan’s name suggests) unlimited access to Aweber’s features suite. This includes their landing page builder, email templates, drip campaigns, and much, much more that would take too long to list. Visit Aweber’s pricing page for all the features their Unlimited plan comes with that I haven’t included here.

Contrary to its name, however, this plan doesn’t allow users to send unlimited emails; the amount of emails you can send monthly is determined by multiplying your subscriber volume by 12.

Aweber Key Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Free-forever plan with useful features to help businesses start email marketing easily.
• Simple user-friendly interface, to help new users create their email campaigns simply.
• Tons of templates in case you want to skip the building and hit the ground running with your email campaigns.
• Strong integration profile, with over 750 direct integration options including Canva, CRMs, CMSes, etc.
• Incredible customer support, from their knowledge base and blog to phone and live chat support.

Cons:

• Users are charged for unsubscribed contacts on your account, so users have to delete unsubscribed contacts to avoid being charged more.
• Fairly basic automation capabilities, no visual workflow editor available.
• Customer support is only available in English.

Aweber Conclusion: is it right for you?

In this Aweber review, I’ve discussed Aweber as one of the best email marketing services mainly because of how malleable it is. You can do so much with it, and Aweber’s support staff can help you find functionality in the app that you might not have even known existed.