Do You Really Need Aweber? Read This Review.

Aweber is arguably one of the most popular autoresponders utilized by both online/offline businesses. I’ve personally used it for a over 10 years and would like share my personal review of it.

I’ve been around the internet marketing world for quite a few years and have seen a lot of different autoresponders, some good and bad, others free or expensive. But I’ve only really tried and stuck to Aweber.

I’m not going to say its the best, but I’ve really had no incentive to move away from it because in many ways, this autoresponder provided me with everything I needed to handle my online business needs.

So if you’re currently thinking about getting Aweber, my review of it will be positive and recommended, BUT only for people who really need it, because you may be someone who thinks this is necessary, but it may turn out to not be true. So let me help you decide if that’s the case.

Let’s dissect Aweber, by first looking at it’s pros and cons:

Pros:

• Aweber is pretty simple to use.
• Excellent for complete beginners.
• Web forms are very easy to create and put up on your website.
• Features follow up sequence emails to stay in touch with your subscribers without having to monitor every tiny detail.
• Excellent support (Online chat + email).
• Features many ways to decorate emails.
• Contains analytics to help you better promote to your list/s.
• Allows broadcast emails to be send on whatever date/time you wish.
• Good/fair price compared to other competitors. Currently they have a 1 month free trial.
• No limit to how many subscribers/email lists you can have.

Cons:

• May be a slight learning curve issue. This varies among people.
• Not really a good idea to purchase an autoresponder if you don’t have any email list building plan in mind.
• You might even be in a position where you think you need an autoresponder, but in reality you don’t, so why spend that extra money?

Here are my experiences with Aweber:

Like I said, I’ve been using the program for a long time. I don’t really focus a lot on list building, but I experiment with different methods of building an email list like this.

Thanks to the cheap price offered by this autoresponder, I can not only test out different ways to build a list, but regardless of the many other autoresponders which have come out since this one, I still think Aweber is one of the best.

There were periods a long time ago where I had 10,000’s of emails collected on this program and I actually had to do away with them because I was being lazy and not messaging my subscribers enough. Never the less, I’ve never really had issues with this program and still think it’s highly useful.

My personal video review of Aweber:

Some clarification on what an autoresponder is and how it works:

Just in case you’ve never heard/tried autoresponders, let me quickly explain a few things that will better help you understand how this program/system works:

An autoresponder is a program which helps you collect emails. Sure you can ask people to email you on your website, but most of the time, they won’t, or you’ll have a difficult time keeping track of everyone. With an autoresponder however, you will be able to place a “sign up form” on your site to make this process much easier. 

Then as your email list increases in size, you will be able to keep in touch, notify leads of sales and other important events on your website/physical business and potentially have returning customers and re-occurring profits. 

Though you  can certainly do these things on your own, an autoresponder like Aweber makes life a lot easier because it’s basically a secretary who organizes and manages all the people who sign up to you and doesn’t bug you for a raise at the same time 🙂

Now like I have said there are autoresponders out there which could be as good if not better than Aweber, such as:

• Mail Chimp.
• Market Hero.
• And others.

But for the price Aweber is offered at and what it does, I think it is ideal for just about any email list builder.

Here’s some Aweber terminology you should know:

If you decide to buy it, you’re going to have understand the inner terminology of this autoresponder, and here are the most common phrases:

Web form:

A simple sign up box where people can enter their information and become a part of your email list. Usually I’ll give people a reason to sign up and maybe offer discounts, sale notifications, ect…

Follow up email: 

Follow up emails are basically prepared emails that will be automatically sent out whenever you want. I personally prepare 10 followup emails to be sent out every 7 days after a subscriber joins my list. This keeps in the information coming to them without me having to constantly monitor anything.

Some may argue that you can do followups yourself, but as your email list becomes bigger, I promise you that process will become more and more difficult, to the point of impossible. And I would not recommend using a free autoresponder (bad quality) or worse ones with prebuilt leads (overpriced scams!).

Broadcast:

What if you want to notify everyone on your list of an upcoming event/sale? A broadcast is what you’d want to do. It’s just a email that will be sent out to everyone on your list.

Through Aweber, you can pick the exact time/day you want it sent out. It can be when you’re sleep, on vacation, out of office, ect… and it’ll do it automatically.

How to use Aweber properly. What I personally do:

I have a number of different websites. The ones which are made to collect an email list follow the same process through Aweber:

• I first make sure I’m collecting an email list that is sure to buy.
• In order to do that, I target evergreen niches as well as niches that are hungry (they both convert well).
• Once I have a good niche, I’ll head over to Aweber and create an email list for my specific site/ niche.
• I make a few follow up messages to be sent out once every few days (No longer than 7 days apart though).
• I then create a web form for my particular list.
• Once the form is done, I just take the code Aweber gives me, paste it into the proper area. 
• And as long as I’m getting traffic to that page, it should collect emails. Again, this is the main list building strategy I use.

The Aweber process takes me about 10 minutes to do and everything else is pretty much automatic afterwards. If you already own an online business, these steps should be the same ones you’d follow if you decided to try this program too. I believe it’s the easiest approach and the way you can decorate/customize the web forms is something I have not seen in other autoresponders. They offer tons of different templates and customization options for seasons, holidays, ect…

Additionally Aweber also features a “spam radar” where they’ll rank your follow up emails/broadcasts on a 0-5 scale (example below), 0 being fine and 5 being spam. Depending on how you write up your email, the radar will rank it within this scale and let you know if it’s safe to send out. After all, what’s the point of sending out emails if they’ll all land in people’s junk folders?

The Support:

One of my biggest pet peeves with any kind of service is customer support.

With Aweber, it’s top notch. They even have people you could call (which I’ve tested and it’s true).

Among the obvious things such as FAQ’s, opening Tickets and Email support is also an online chat which is in my opinion the best feature of Aweber’s support system.

This is very helpful to me whenever I have to ask questions, which will happen from time to time, no matter who you are or how experienced you may be. 

Not every autoresponder out there has this feature.

Final thoughts: Should you try Aweber? Depends on your situation…

I can honestly keep going into great detail about what this program has to offer, but for most people, it’ll be difficult to understand everything so I’ll keep it simple. Here are some scenarios you may currently be in for which there is a YES (Get aweber) or NO (Don’t get Aweber) response.

1) If you own a business and are going to take it to the online world, you will need an autoresponder. Aweber will meet your needs. It’ll be easy to set up and get it running. Yes!

2) If you already have an online website/business, it’s getting visitors on a steady basis you and want to start building an email list from this, Aweber is perfect. Yes!

3) If you have a website, but don’t know how email marketing works, how to get visitors to your site, then you need proper training from places like Wealthy Affiliate. No.

4) If you don’t have any business, but are planning on starting one online, I’d recommend starting here & holding off on buying any autoresponders/collecting emails until you’re ready. No.

The bottom line is simple:

There is no point of getting any autoresponder if you don’t have key foundations in place: A website & traffic. If you already have this down, then get Aweber.

Aweber is ideal for pretty much every list building scenario and online businesses. It’s easy to use, it’s cheap and the support is great. I am personally very satisfied with it and highly recommend it. Currently, you can try Aweber here and see how it works out for you. Every month after that is $19.99 for every 10,000 subscribers. 

If you have any questions on this program, feel free to leave me a comment/question below and I’d be more than happy to help you out 🙂