AWeber Communications Review – Meets All Your List Building And Email Marketing Needs

In this review I will be giving a detailed review of AWeber Communications and their list building and email marketing product.

List building and email marketing has always been and will continue to be one of the most effective forms of internet marketing available. It seems like an easy concept: get peoples’ email addresses and send them emails; however, in reality, it is much more complicated than that.

If you want to be successful with email marketing than it is necessary to use a service such as AWeber that specializes in doing exactly what you need: collecting email addresses and sending out effective emails.

Now, let’s take a deeper look into what AWeber has to offer:

What’s So Great About AWeber?

Instead of beating around the bush in this review, I will tell you upfront that I highly recommend AWeber’s services to anyone wanting to foray into email marketing. Let me tell you just some of the great services AWeber has to offer.

Easy Navigation

Some websites with many features such as AWeber are not laid out well and incredibly confusing to navigate. Lucky for us, AWeber is not one of those sites. Actually, navigation in and around their website is quite simple and intuitive due to their well designed menus. It is easy to get from one place to the other without getting lost and confused.

Variety Of Message Types

It is always important to be able to customize and tweak how you interact with all of your subscribers. With AWeber you are able to send three different types of messages to your subscribers: Follow Up Series, Broadcasts, and Blog Broadcasts (further explanation in the product overview section below). This allows you to reach out to all of your subscribers in the most effective way possible and, in some cases, save you A LOT of time.

Flexibility & Customization

Speaking of messages, every message you send out to your subscribers is highly customizable. You are able to create and edit your messages using AWeber’s intuitive Drag-and-Drop Email Builder (this is my preferred method). If you want even more customization you can work with the HTML editors or simply send out a plain text message.

Email Templates

Creating beautiful emails is really easy. Within AWeber you have access to over 600 fully customizable email templates. This combined with their Drag-and-Drop- Email Builder allows you to easily craft completely customized email messages.

Sign Up Forms

Having a good, well designed sign up form that fits the aesthetic of your website is crucial to getting new subscribers. Within AWeber you can create multiple types of sign up forms using their drag and drop editor. (See product description below for more details on the four types of sign up forms you can create)

Implementing Sign Up Forms

There are three options to implement your sign up forms on your website. The first is to install the form yourself by taking the code and placing it manually on your webpage. The second is to have AWeber email the code to your webmaster so they can install it for you. The third is to have AWeber host your sign up form, this takes away any need to deal with code and/or other technical aspects.

App Integration With 3rd Party Services

Not only can you implement sign up forms within your own website, but you can also install apps and extension on 3rd party sites as well. This is great if you have a large Facebook or WordPress presence or do a lot of business through PayPal or other services.

List Management

Maintaining large email lists can be an incredibly difficult task, especially if you have multiple lists that you need to manage. Within AWeber, list management is a breeze as each list has its own unique page. You are able to sort out all of your email addresses and edit single lists, add to lists, subtract from lists, basically whatever you want.

Subscriber Management

Within AWeber’s subscriber management section you are able to easily manage all aspects of your subscribers. You can see the details about who is subscribed, who has unsubscribed, who opened which emails, which links did they click on, etc. You are also able to manually add or delete subscribers to and from any of your lists.

Click to enlarge

Detailed Reports And Analytics

Some people love numbers and others not so much. If you love numbers, you will love the detailed reports AWeber has to offer. Every statistic you could imagine; opens over time, geographical information, estimated revenue, and many more are measured and displayed within AWeber’s analytics system. (See more in the product overview section below)

Support

The support offered within AWeber is actually really great. If you have a problem, you can either look for a solution in their extensive training area filled with guides, videos, and webinars, or you can contact their responsive customer support. I have always had good service with them.

Are There Any Stumbling Blocks With AWeber?

To be honest, I think AWeber is an excellent product; however, there are two aspects that may become a problem, especially for less experienced users.

1. The amount of information available within AWeber may become incredibly confusing and overwhelming at first. There are just so many options of what you can do that it’s easy to get lost.
2. If you are not good with code, or do not have a personal web developer, than implementing your sign up forms on your website or blog may prove to be a challenge.

What Do I Get For My Money?

Now let’s take a detailed look at what you get when you subscribe to AWeber. I will go through each aspect of their website so you know exactly what you will be paying for.

Home

Let’s start with the home page. Here you will have an overview of all of the lists you manage. You can also see a daily update of any new subscribers or unsubscribers that have been added to your lists, scheduled broadcasts that will be sent out at some point in the future, recently sent broadcasts with some basic statistics, and some list stats showing more precise subscriber statistics for each list you manage.

Messages

Obviously, one of the biggest aspects of AWeber is its message creation and sending platform. Within AWeber there are three different types of messages you can create and send to your lists:

1. Follow Up Series: Creating a follow up series will save you a lot of time and effort in the long run. Essentially, you create a set of emails that will be sent out based on a specified period after a certain event. This event can be when the user subscribed or when the previous email in the series was sent. For example, I can create a follow up series that will send one email per day, at 6pm, for five days after a person first subscribes to my list. This is the best we to create an autoresponder.
2. Broadcasts: Broadcast emails are emails that are created and sent out once. This is what you typically would use for your weekly or monthly newsletter. You spend time creating the message and once it’s ready to be broadcast you send it out to your entire list of subscribers.
3. Blog Broadcasts: Blog broadcasts are a really nifty way to automate the process of keeping your subscribers up to date with your latest blog posts. Essentially, you link AWeber with your blog and, after a predetermined number of new posts, AWeber will automatically convert your posts to email format and send it to your lists.

Also, remember that as you are creating any of these types of messages, you are always able to utilize AWeber’s list of over 600 fully customizable HTML templates within their Drag-and-Drop Editor.

Subscribers

AWeber also gives you many subscriber management options. You are able to view detailed information about your subscribers, transfer subscribers from one list to another, add new subscribers to the lists of your choice, delete subscribers, etc.

Sign Up Forms

Within AWeber is a custom sign up form building platform which you can use to create multiple types of forms. It is actually really intuitive and easy to use and allows you to be super specific with any customizations you would like to make.

The four types of sign up forms you can create are:

1. 

   Click to enlarge – Sign up form builder

   In-Line: These forms will appear on the actual webpage itself, either within your content or on in a widget somewhere on your sidebar or footer.

2. Popover: This type of form ‘hovers’ over your webpage after a certain amount of time. These are the annoying, yet effective, sign up forms that will show up on top of the video you were watching or post you were reading. The advantage of this over a traditional pop-up form is that it usually cannot be blocked by your internet browsers.
3. Lightbox: these forms are exactly the same as popover forms except lightbox forms darken everything else on the web page except the form itself.
4. Pop-Up: This type of form will open up your sign up form in a completely new window after a certain amount of time. These used to be much more common, but now most browsers will block them so they usually aren't your best option.

Reports & Analytics

There are way too many reports available to cover in detail here. However, you can get information regarding your accounts, such as: opens over time, clicks over time, revenue over time, etc. This is broader based, long term type of information.

You can also get reports with information about your specific lists. This information is really specific and can be drilled down to exactly which link each subscriber clicked and within which message in the follow-up series you sent. Basically any sort of information you could imagine regarding emails you can get from AWeber’s list reports.

List Options

One of the great things about AWeber is that you can customize every aspect of your lists.

Basic Settings

You are able to name each of your lists separately and give each one a unique description. You are also able to edit who and which email address your emails will be sent from. In addition, you are able to decide if you want to receive a notification email every time a new subscriber has been added to your list.

Personalize Your List

You can completely customize each of your lists with their own company name and logo, website URL, email signature. This is great if you are managing lists on behalf of multiple websites or companies.

Also, you can link each of your lists up to specific social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter. When you send out a broadcast it can automatically be shared within your social networks to expand its reach to more potential customers that may not yet be subscribed.

Global Text Snippets can also be integrated into your emails. These are really great if you include information in your emails that might change regularly, such as store hours or prices. Using these global text snippets you only have to change the information once and it will automatically change it everywhere else and in all future emails.

Confirmed Opt-In

Again, you are able to completely customize the entire subscription process through these customizable confirmation and opt-in pages. You are able to control exactly what your potential subscribers will receive and where they will be taken once they successfully confirm their subscription. This is great because it allows you to redirect them to a specific page on your website that is tailored to create further engagement.

BackUp & Export

Security and stability are always important. For this reason AWeber makes it easy to backup all of your list information as well as export it for use for external purposes.

App Integration

AWeber allows you to connect and integrate your sign up forms with tons of different third party services. Doing this can tremendously increase your subscription numbers. You can install apps to connect Facebook, WordPress, PayPal, Clickbank, and many more to specific lists within your account.

Click on image to see a full list of all possible app connections.

Who Should Subscribe To AWeber?

In my opinion, anyone who is looking to capture emails, build a list, and send out regularly emails or newsletters should seriously consider AWeber. I know tiny websites with tiny subscriber lists who use AWeber and I know of huge companies and organizations with tens of thousands of subscribers that use AWeber. It really is a great product that is useful for all sorts of purposes.

Is There Any Training Within AWeber?

Obviously, the primary purpose of AWeber is not to be a training platform; however, there are still plenty of resources to help you along. They have a variety of guides to get you started with all aspects of email marketing, an extensive collection of video tutorials, as well as prerecorded webinars to help you through some of the most common problems.

See also: Wealthy Affiliate University – Why It's My #1 Recommendation For Email Marketing Training

What Kind Of Customer Support Does AWeber Have?

As with the rest of this review, the support within AWeber is very responsive and helpful. I have had a few interactions with their customer service/support and have been satisfied with their response time, friendliness, and helpfulness.

How Much Does AWeber Cost?

The price of AWeber is surprisingly reasonable considering the breadth of services they offer. When you first sign up you will get the first month for $1. After that trail period it will cost you $19/month, $49/quarter, or $194/year. This is for the basic membership which includes up to 500 subscribers.

Once you have over 500 subscribers the cost of the subscription will increase with the number of subscribers in your account. (See pricing schedule below)

Discounts

There are also discounts available for students and non-profit organizations. Students will get a 20% discount on all costs as long as they can provide a valid .edu or .ac emal address. Nonprofits will get their first three months free and then 25% discounts on all costs from there-on-out.

My Final Verdict

My opinion is that AWeber is an essential tool if you want to be successful online, especially when it comes to list building and email marketing. I am willing to be that every successful email list builder, email marketer, etc. has AWeber in their arsenal.

I would highly recommend signing up for the $1 first month subscription and try it out. It’s only one dollar and I’m confident that you will be very happy with your decision.

Further Training

As I mentioned, AWeber does have some email marketing training available to its members. However, in my opinion, this training is lacking in many aspects compared to what else is available. If you are serious about building your email lists, or email marketing, than I would highly recommend checking out the email marketing classrooms within Wealthy Affiliate University. This is where I learned everything I know in regards to email marketing…and many other aspects of internet marketing as well.

See also:

• Wealthy Affiliate University – Why It’s My #1 Recommendation
• Jaaxy Keyword Tool Review – Your Best Source For Finding Great Keywords
• MyThemeShop Review – Responsive, Elegant, WordPress Themes

Please leave me a comment below if you have any questions, reservations, concerns about AWeber. Also, sign up to my weekly newsletter to stay up to date with my latest product reviews, tutorials, and other relevant information by using my handy AWeber created sign up form here: