How To Choose The Best Email Marketing Solution

A Comparison Of The Top Three Email Marketing Solutions: AWeber, iContact, Constant Contact

Part Two: AWeber Review

In part one, we discussed advantages of paid email marketing solutions over free tools. You also learned of several important features that must be considered when choosing the best solution.

In this part of the series, we will examine the features of the most well-known email marketing services company: AWeber.

AWeber was established in 1998 and currently employs 65 workers. They have a customer base of over 102,000 businesses.

How is AWeber different from its two major competitors, iContact and Constant Content?

Deliverability-Related Features

AWeber claims the highest deliverability rate at 99.34%. With such a high deliverability rate, you won’t need to worry about emails not reaching their destinations.

AWeber clearly lays out its plan to achieve this. They maintain good relationships with all of the major ISPs, and go to great lengths to prevent spam from being sent out. Thus, ISPs are much less likely to flag an email as spam if it was sent by an AWeber server.

AWeber accomplishes this by a comprehensive spam detection system. Every email is analyzed and compared to emails likely to be affected by spam filters. If your email is likely to be flagged, AWeber will bring this to your attention.

They have very strict policies regarding sending spam and will close accounts of those violating their standards.

Analytics And Tracking

AWeber’s reports will provide you with a substantial amount of information. You can see how many people open your messages, click through rates on e-mail links, and how many people unsubscribed from your list.

More detailed reports can show which webpages on your site your subscribers visits, how much revenue each of your messages generates, and which products they buy.

An easily understandable graphing function allows you to graphically compare multiple sets of data. For example, you can compare how many of your subscribers opened your emails for this month and last month.

You can even use a feature called “goal tracking.” You will see how many subscribers stop at each point along your sales funnel. The sales funnel starts with subscribers opening the e-mail, then continues as they click through to your website, read the landing page, and so on until the sale is made. As soon as you view this report, you will understand where you are losing the most people within your sales funnel.

Another advanced feature is called segmentation. By using this feature, you can sort your lists for analysis using many different criteria. For example, you can view only subscribers that were added to the list after May 1, 2011 who have purchased at least $100 in products from you. This allows you to send highly targeted messages to your subscribers based upon past habits and group demographics.

Customer Support

AWeber shines in the customer support category. Live support is available via phone, e-mail, chat, or webinars. Not only are live agents available by phone to help you 12 hours a day through the week days, they also have chat agents available both Saturday and Sunday for eight hours a day. Thus, if you experience problems on the weekend, you can get solutions right away. You can also search for answers in their extensive knowledge base.

Frequent live webinars are conducted through the week. Different topics are featured. These webinars are an excellent place for beginners to ask questions that will be answered on the spot. They also host advanced webinars describing how to use reports effectively, how to create effective email newsletters, and how to improve your web forms to gain more subscribers.

Additional Features

AWeber is constantly innovating to try to stay ahead of its competition. A couple of their noteworthy additional features include impressive HTML message templates and a web form generator.

The HTML e-mail templates are expertly designed and will add to your business’ professional image. They are heavily customizable. You can easily change color schemes and information collected. They also provide coordinated matching templates so that your email series can be given a theme.

The web form generator is new. With it, you can create professional web forms in no time at all. There are hundreds of premade templates for a variety of uses, and they add more regularly. You can customize the different fields with drop downs, radio buttons, and text boxes. These can help you build your list quickly.

Conclusion

AWeber has many useful features that will help you build and refine your email campaigns. Additional tools assist you in building your list more quickly. Customer support is excellent. Their representatives are extremely knowledgeable and helpful. Visit AWeber.com

Continue on to part three where we will discuss the features of iContact.