Pennsylvania-based AWeber have been in the email marketing business for over 20 years. One of their biggest claims is that they invented the autoresponder, which is no small thing. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that one of their promoted features is email marketing automation.
You might have checked out the AWeber reviews offered by users online, and whilst they are pretty positive, they may not give you the whole picture. Our review of AWeber is based on a methodical approach and uses our practical experience and knowledge of dozens of other simple and advanced email marketing automation tools.
Paying customers have access to all their features from day one, and it’s only increasing subscriber numbers that increase the membership price. They recently launched a free plan for those with less than 500 subscribers, but features are limited, and you can only send up to 3,000 emails per month.
Apart from automation, AWeber offers split testing (A/B testing) and ‘Email Web Analytics, which allows you to use your own domain in links you want to track clicks for; this means you can easily track product sales. Oh and in terms of mobile apps, they have not one, but three different mobile applications for Android and iOS. One for stats, one for lead capture on the go, and the other for email curation.
They also offer a smart email designer that gathers logos, images, brand colors, and text from websites and social media channels to create "ready-to-send" email templates. We’ll dive more into the email templates and builder's side of things later.
So, a handful of interesting features in there - but let’s have a closer look and see if being the first also means being the best choice for your email marketing strategy, 24 years down the track:
Aweber screenshots
Aweber Pricing
For more information about AWeber’s prices and plans check out our guide.
> Compare prices with our cost calculator
Pros and Cons
List management tools:
Keeping lists organized is simple with AWeber, as you create automation rules to manage your subscribers. Be aware, though, that you have a separate dashboard for each list, and this can be confusing.
Sales tracking:
Not always an option, even with advanced marketing automation, yet AWeber allows this via their email web analytics feature (you just need to insert some JavaScript code into your website). With the PayPal integration, you can see all your sales in your AWeber account and perform marketing actions on these customers.
Support:
Apart from a fast and friendly customer support, they also have great education tools for first-time users including articles, videos, and podcasts.
Landing page templates:
AWeber offers loads of really nicely designed landing page templates. There are also tons of categories, so you’re bound to find something you like, whatever the industry.
High price and unfair subscriber count:
Their pricing is a bit steep, coming in close to some of the more advanced newsletter tools, despite the fact that they lack the pro-features to justify the price.
The worst part is that even unsubscribed email addresses count towards your monthly quota!
Lack of advanced features:
They lack a lot of advanced features, such as built-in sophisticated marketing automation and spam and design testing.
Is Aweber the right newsletter service for you?
Recommended if:
You need phone support:
Not a lot of the email newsletter services provide this, but as a company that’s been around for two decades, it’s not surprising that AWeber would invest a lot into customer service. Live chat support and email support is also available.
You want to sell:
Thanks to AWeber’s integration with PayPal, you can sell your services and products via emails and on your sales page. You can also automatically add those who buy from you to a list and send them ultra-targeted emails. You’ll be able to track all PayPal sales in AWeber.
Not recommended if:
You want to get the most bang for your buck:
Honestly, there are very few instances where we’d recommend AWeber over another tool, mainly because there are many other similarly-featured tools that are a lot more affordable (e.g. MailerLite, Sendinblue).
You want high delivery rates:
AWeber’s deliverability rates are well below average. You’d be much better off with ActiveCampaign or MailerLite.
Rating details
| criterion | rating | comments |
|---|---|---|
Ease of Use |
| The fact that you have to switch between lists can be a little confusing at first. Also, their terminology could be confusing for experienced users: marketing automations are called ‘Campaigns’ and regular emails are called ‘Broadcasts’. Other than that, the new interface design is easy to navigate. |
Newsletter Creation | ||
Editor |
| The editor is easy to use and offers a good range of content blocks. Content creation is sped up by the fact you can drag images, buttons, and other elements in between paragraphs in your emails – usually, you’d have to split your content into separate text blocks. They also now offer AMP for Email, meaning you can add an image carousel, RSVP to an event, sign up for a newsletter or leave a product review all without leaving the email. What’s more, when you paste a link in your emails and hit return, and it will automatically expand into a preview card, so featuring your content couldn’t be easier! |
Personalization | | Similar to other tools, If/Then/Else logic is available in a fairly standard format. You can also add personalization via custom fields. |
Email types |
| Classic newsletters, autoresponders, automations, RSS and A/B testing. You can also create paid newsletters by connecting your Stripe account. |
Choice and Flexibility of Template Designs |
| There’s quite a good selection of responsive templates available (some offer multiple color schemes to choose from). A new partnership with design tool Canva brings added flexibility to email design, as well as the thousands of stock photos available to you through their recent integration with Unsplash. |
Email Marketing Automation |
| It allows for creating triggered emails, limited to when someone subscribes to a list, or has a particular tag. Then you’re able to send a message, apply a tag or set a waiting period. If you want to set up more advanced email automation campaigns, you can do so by importing them from AWeber’s marketplace. It’s a bit clunky, but at least there are a few more options now. |
List Management |
| AWeber have good list segmentation, allowing you to manage new subscribers via their automation features. You can easily set up a rule, for example, that unsubscribes someone from a particular list after leaving another. |
Registration Forms/ Opt-in & Opt-out- Process |
| You’re given style options for pop-up, in-line and lightbox, and it offers a number of form template designs. Regarding adding contacts, it has standard options available, as well as integrations that allow you to sign up contacts from WordPress, Facebook, Wix, Paypal, etc. You can also set up forms directly on any landing pages you build in their editor. |
Deliverability |
| We would have liked to see better results from AWeber. Sadly, they don’t have a great track record in our deliverability tests. That said, our latest test saw a huge improvement, so let’s see if they can keep this up next round! |
Reports and Analysis |
| Reporting is one of AWeber’s stronger areas. For emails, you can get names of openers and clickers, web visits, and also conversion and ecommerce tracking info. You also get some pretty impressive overall reports (account and list-based), including clicks over time, subscriber growth, sales over time and more. There isn’t direct Google Analytics integration available though. |
Languages |
| The site is only available in English. |
Further Features | ||
Spam- and Design-Testing |
| These are not available. |
Bounce Management | | Soft bounces are counted as hard bounces after three times, then they are unsubscribed. |
Blocklist | | This is available. |
Storage available for data and images | Unlimited | |
Pro Features | ||
Authentication | | SPF and DKIM are supported. |
Own Domain | | It’s possible to use your own tracking domain via AWeber Web Analytics. |
Different levels of account access | | There are three roles that you can assign to your users, with varying levels of account access. |
Integrations | | There are quite a few integrations available, and many big names are there such as Zapier, PayPal, WordPress, Shopify, Salesforce and more. |
Landing Page Builder | | The templates provided are plentiful and really modern-looking. It’s also easy to customize them as you wish. SEO options are available. You can accept payments in 100+ currencies, and AWeber’s ecommerce element will let you pull in products you have already created in Stripe. A recent addition is a “Link in Bio” page for Instagram and TikTok users. This LinkTree-style feature is available on all AWeber accounts. |
Customer Support |
4.5/5 | Support is fast and friendly, via all mediums. Their knowledge base is good, though I’d recommend email and online chat over the knowledge base. |
Overall rating |
3.5/5 | All in all, AWeber has the essentials, it just doesn’t provide enough advanced features or a strong enough user experience for the asking price. Their deliverability is also something to keep an eye on. You can get more for your money with other email tools. That said, we do like their landing page templates and sales tracking options. |
Aweber’s Email Templates
Drag and Drop Email Builder
Aweber’s drag-and-drop email builder offers an extensive selection of HTML email templates, and by extensive we mean a whopping 700 fully customizable email templates. What’s more, they are all responsive, automatically resizing their email design based on your device. Building an email campaign on Aweber is particularly easy thanks to their user-friendly platform and the design options and integrations available. Compared to the email marketing competition, this is particularly appealing, but as we mentioned, it comes at a considerable cost.
Within the drag-and-drop builder, you can easily change color schemes and design layouts, add your logo, and even add free stock photos to your email templates thanks to their handy integration with Unsplash. Their integration with Canva is also extremely useful, allowing you to stay within one platform when both designing your email marketing banners and building your campaigns. If you aren’t familiar with Canva, it’s really easy to create highly professional-looking marketing material thanks to its broad content library.
For the more advanced user, Aweber recently added a new tool to their email editor to help speed up your writing process. Markdown allows you to format your email text through symbols, scaling writing time right down. For example, you can type ** before your copy to make it bold.
Smart Designer Email Builder
The Smart Designer Email tool seems like an extremely powerful tool from the outside. Let’s see how it works in 4 easy steps:
- First of all, you select the Smart Designer once you click on “create message”
- Next, you’ll be asked to submit your website and will be asked for your email editing skill level. You can select Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced.
- From here, you are asked to define your business goal- you can choose from the following: Sell a Product Online, Build an Audience, Sell a Service, and Others.
- Then you’ll be presented with a selection of templates to choose from, in our case, there were 7 templates. Each template featured our logo, the general color scheme, and some imagery from our website. The quality of these templates and their relevance to your brand probably depends on how well-structured your website is, but I was quite happy with the result.
And if the drag and drop email builder, smart designer, and plain text email marketing tools aren’t enough, there’s also the option of coding your own template.
Note: Once your campaign is ready to send, one thing that could be slightly confusing is the scheduling part, as the option for this is not very obvious. Sending your campaign out immediately, on the other hand, is much more straightforward, so I can see some people going for this option by mistake.
Awebers Mobile App Suite
As we mentioned, Aweber offers not one, but three mobile apps, each one built with a very different purpose.
AWeber Stats
This app enables you to check your email marketing stats from your iPhone or Android device. You can view all of your campaign stats; from sent messages to scheduled broadcasts, your subscriber activity, and more. This Aweber app is very beneficial for those who need to keep track of your email marketing activities when out and about, you even have the capability to track your customer follow-ups, and other up-to-the-minute updates such as click-through rates, open rates, etc.
Atom App
This app is essentially a mobile-hosted signup form that allows you to add new subscribers to your email list on the go. It’s extremely easy to use, all you need to do is select the mailing lists you’d like them to sign up to and job done! This app is perfect for those who may need to gather contact information at networking events or business meetings, as you can easily add the people you meet directly to an email list without an active internet connection. Another great aspect is that you can edit the theme and the design to keep it consistent with your brand.
Curate App
Aweber customers can use this app to create an email newsletter directly from their smartphones. From the app, you can edit, preview, and send the newsletter to your subscribers, which is a really practical tool for marketers on the go. However, we’d suggest using the web version to set up more sophisticated marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
It’s fair to say, AWeber has all the basics you need for a small business and does quite a good job at educating first-time users with its range of customer support articles, videos, and podcasts. The issue is that, apart from customer service and landing page solution, there isn’t a particular area where Aweber really excel in when it comes to its features.
With all things considered, this wouldn’t be a problem if it was priced for budget-conscious beginners, yet the costs are on par with other email tools like GetResponse, which offer much more for the same price. One positive thing about Aweber is that, no matter how many subscribers you have, you always have full access to their features (unless you’re on their free plan). But these features still might not be enough for the asking price.
Aweber Alternatives
ActiveCampaign comes with a very flexible and powerful automation approach and modern-looking and flexible registration forms – something AWeber should really work on. Additionally, ActiveCampaign’s deliverability is outstanding. If you need further information, check out our AWeber and ActiveCampaign comparison.
MailerLite is a cheap solution with excellent designs and a solid email marketing system. It also comes with a couple of perks (like a landing page editor) and we find their interface very easy to use.
GetResponse is an interesting alternative. It has many advanced features (e.g. sales funnel), and comes with excellent automations and advanced design and testing tools.
FAQ
What is AWeber used for?
AWeber is a cloud-based email marketing service used to send newsletters, autoresponders, set up forms, amongst other things.
Is AWeber a CRM?
AWeber stores your email marketing subscribers, allowing you to move them between lists, send emails, etc. However, it is not a CRM system; it’s lacking in sales and lead generation functionality.
Is AWeber better than Mailchimp?
After much testing, we’d say no. You can see our full analysis of the two providers in this Mailchimp vs AWeber comparison.
Is AWeber legit?
AWeber is a legit email marketing tool. It safely stores your customer data and offers a secure way to manage your subscribers.
AWeber deliverability - is it any good?
AWeber’s deliverability is very poor according to our bi-annual deliverability tests.
About Charlotte Evans
Latest Updates
10 Nov 2022 - General update
19 Sept 2022 - Added PayPal integration
25 Apr 2022 - Deliverability rating decreased
30 March 2022 - New landing page templates added
17 March 2022 - Note about legitimacy added
28 Feb 2022 - Small price increase
25 Jan 2022 - General update
6 May 2021 - General update
15 Mar - Deliverability rating updated
15 Jul 2020 - Added free plan
25 Apr 2019 - Review updates
7 Jan 2019 - Deliverability rating updated
20 Mar 2018 - Deliverability rating added
19 July 2017 - Update in automations and templates.
22-31 May 2016 - Initial tests
