AWeber

What is AWeber?

AWeber is an email marketing tool that allows you to:

• create a mailing list and capture data onto it
• design newsletters that can be sent to the subscribers on your list
• automate your email marketing via use of ‘autoresponders’
• view and analyse statistics related to your email marketing campaigns

AWeber have an entirely free version. This allows you to use most of the features of AWeber, so long as your mailing list contains less than 500 subscribers (after this, you’ll need to subscribe to a paid plan).

AWeber provides you with a wide range of email marketing features, the key ones including:

• the ability to import and host a mailing list
• access to a large range of responsive email templates
• autoresponder functionality
• marketing automation functionality
• reporting
• split testing
• RSS / blog to-email functionality
• list segmentation
• a landing page builder
• phone, email and live chat support
• integrations with third-party apps
• basic ecommerce features

Templates

By comparison to its competitors, AWeber provides one of the largest sets of HTML e-newsletter templates available: there are over 700 available.

Responsive email designs

AWeber’s email templates are all ‘responsive’.

This means that they automatically resize themselves to suit the device they’re being viewed on. In this day and age of smartphones and tablets, this is an essential feature.

You can also see a preview of the mobile version of your email easily within AWeber — you just click a preview button and toggle a ‘mobile preview’ switch to see how your e-newsletter is likely to look on a smartphone.

RSS to email templates

Like similar e-marketing products, AWeber can take your site’s RSS feed and turn it into e-newsletters that get sent out according to a schedule that you define.

In AWeber, this feature is called ‘Blog broadcasts’ — although technically you can use it with any content that produces an RSS feed.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are a series of follow up emails that are automatically triggered by either time or user behavior.

For example, you could create a programme of autoresponders so that…

• when somebody signs up to your mailing list, they immediately receive a welcome message from your business
• one week later they receive a discount code for a product
• three weeks later they receive an encouragement to follow you on social media…

Marketing automation

Marketing automation is a feature which is increasingly offered by email marketing solutions like AWeber.

I tend to think of it as ‘Autoresponders 2.0’ — where you go beyond traditional ‘drip’ campaigns and create complex user journeys using ‘IFTTT’ (if this, then that) style workflows.

With marketing automation, you typically design a flowchart where emails are sent based on user actions: email opens, link clicks, site visits, purchases made and so on.

A/B Testing

Split testing (also known as A/B testing) involves sending variants of your e-newsletters to some of your mailing list, monitoring the performance of each, and sending the ‘best’ version to the remainder of your list.