Aweber.com Review

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One of the most used email marketing services is aweber.com, and it is especially popular in the internet marketing industry, due to its extensive range of features. The idea of the service is that it provides complete management of customer emails, from the initial sign up forms on your website right through to sending the message throughout the life of the customer’s membership.

Getting started with Aweber is very simple. You can sign up for an account at aweber.com, and you will instantly get access to begin creating your mailing lists. You can get started for just $1, which covers the first month of your membership. After that, your monthly subscription will cost $19, up to the point you exceed 500 subscribers to your lists.

The pricing structure is very straightforward; consider the $19 per month a base price and you are then charged according to the number of subscribers on your lists. Up to 500 list members is included, and above that an extra $10 per month will cover you for up to 2500. The rate then rises on a tiered basis to 25,000 subscribers, which costs $130 on top of your monthly subscription. If you have more people trying to join your lists that is fine, but you will need to agree pricing with Aweber directly.

The first thing you will need to do is create a list in your control panel. This is a relatively quick process, and the online wizard will guide you through setting this up. You will need to include information such as the email address you are sending messages to subscribers from, and your regular postal address to comply with CAN-SPAM regulations. Aweber have taken great care to ensure the service will protect you from accusations of spamming.

Once your list has been created, you will be able to build a form to collect subscriber details on your website. By default they recommend that you simply collect a name and email address; this will allow you to send emails to customers personalised with their name. You can also add custom fields to collect further information from customers if you wish. The signup process is very simple for visitors to your site; they just fill in the form on your website and are invited to check their email for a confirmation message. This email contains a link to click, and that finalises membership to your list. It is possible to disable the second step (turning subscription into what is known as a single opt in process) however this does open you up to spam complaints, as people could add an address to your list that they do not own.

Once the user is on your list they can receive two types of message from you, which Aweber term Follow Up messages and broadcasts. They are both types of email, but there is an important distinction. Follow Up messages are also known as auto responders; they are prewritten messages that are sent to a user on a schedule starting from the point they sign up. For example, you might send a subscriber a welcome email immediately after signing up, followed by an overview of your product range a few days later. You can schedule an unlimited number of messages for members to receive, and this can run for years into the future if you so wish. Broadcast messages are sent to all of your subscribers (or a subset of them that you choose) immediately as you press send. This is more likely to be used for newsletters and other time critical messages such as special one off deals.

One highly important feature that the Aweber.com website handles for you is unsubscribing requests. These are a legal requirement, so it is a great idea to have this as an automated service to eliminate the possibility of human error. A lot of people embarking on email marketing campaigns try to avoid making unsubscribing easy, but this is the wrong approach. If people wish to unsubscribe, they do not want to receive you messages, so are very unlikely to buy from you or visit your site. Focus on the people who are interested, not the ones that are not. Aweber even gives users the opportunity to send you feedback about why they wish to stop receiving your emails, which is a fantastic tool to help you improve.

Finally, the Aweber.com website provides in depth statistics about your email campaigns. You can choose to track information such as what percentage of subscribers open each message, how many click through from a link in each message, and if specific follow up messages are causing a high level of unsubscribe requests. By learning to use these reports to your advantage, you can test variations to messages and make improvements to keep your subscribers happy.

Aweber is a very well thought out system which means you can focus on the messages you send, and forget about how to send them. Using this powerful tool will give you a great chance to improve your business or website and keep your subscribers coming back time and time again.