Does AWeber Still Hold Up To Its Reputation?

Key Takeaways

hi guys Lewis here from Authority hacker and in this video I'm gonna give you a quick overview of Aweber which is a popular email marketing tool and one that first came about in the late 90s so it's very well established at this point let's start with segmentation and Aweber used to be only a list based platform but nowadays it actually has a tag system involved as well so thankfully you can use both lists and tags which means a lot more flexibility in terms of management and targeting though it does still count the same subscribers across multiple lists which was one of the things I never liked about any weather so let's go into manage subscribers and if I check one of these I can actually add a tag here which is really easy but of course tags are always best applied on the fly like on a form by form basis and through automations and both of these are possible with Aweber which is a big step up from what I remember available only a few years ago and I will say it's pretty basic as far as automated segmentation goes finally importing subscribers is a real pain you can do it quite easily through the add subscribers section of the tool here but what happens is when you when you upload a CSV it will ask to reconfirm those subscriptions so if you're bringing a list from another provider it will send out an email asking those people to confirm their subscription again which which doesn't put you in a good light it doesn't look very professional and it will confuse a lot of people now in a Weber's defense I was able to get this disabled I don't know if they do it on a case by case basis but as it stands I don't think that's a good move to force upon people like that alright so moving on to the automation stuff now any Webber calls these campaigns and I see there's not a whole lot you can do here so you can see we've got two triggers in active campaign this would be like a dozen triggers you could choose from and already it feels very very limited I'm gonna just do on subscribe and you see here I get this it's drag and drop so I can drag these in I can add a weight it's quite fast in that respect what I don't like is that it's linear which means there's no way to set conditions or if this then that automations there are some filters that you can add so let's go onto here I can add a campaign filter which would there's again not many options here but one of them is country so I can exclude people or include people from a specific country and really this is this is all you get in terms of automation so for me it's it's no more than a souped-up autoresponder and I know I'm not going to be popular with some people for saying that but that's that's basically what it is from my perspective okay let's talk about forms and honestly I'm just going to come around and say it the form builder is just old and ugly making changes to elements is actually quite confusing as you can see I've just click this and this pops out and I'm not quite sure what's going on here what extra options I can show I mean nothing really makes sense immediately and as for form templates they are up here they're kind of integrated within the Builder I can hide that if I want to but the templates themselves are they're quite old they feel outdated a bit like the Builder itself there's not many here that I would even think about using personally so really this is very run-of-the-mill not much to comment on and again I'm not really that impressed with it okay as for the email builder and email templates they offer applying text editor and a drag-and-drop builder like this this is what you're seeing here and this is what most people are going to use for me the interface of this builder is and is a slight step up from the form builder but again there are problems with it it still feels outdated to me and there are a problem when I'm when I drag in these elements well you'll notice is if I type some text in here it's just this is very there's not enough space things just feel really crowded and to add to that the styling options are quite limited as well especially for the text so what you'll need to rely on here I believe is the templates and you can you can add templates by clicking this button up here and it will bring up quite a good selection as I say a strong selection in terms of quantity but for me a lot of these I just would never use I think again very outdated for the most part there are a couple that I would possibly use maybe try and work with it there but I'm not too sold on these design what's interesting as well is that when you click one of these like this one for example that I have now it doesn't really it doesn't load up the template it's not really a template it's more of a theme it applies the color scheme and it's not some kind of background here but it's definitely not what I clicked on this on this template so these are more like themes than they are templates and I think that's quite misleading as well because none of these really are going to turn out the way that they look on the preview so overall again not too impressed with this aspect of a weather let's talk integrations and Aweber integrates with around 180 different apps and services which is definitely on the higher side in terms of email marketing tools it's also supported by zapier so that unlocks a whole slew of integrations just to contrast that drip has around 60 automations and drip is one of them more popular more modern email marketing tools so you know if people are happy with that then you should definitely be able to find everything you need here moving on to tracking and reporting and you can enable click tracking right before sending a broadcast email but Aweber traps the basics like opens and bounces automatically so you don't have to worry about that though you may not always want to enable tracking so it's not the best design in my opinion as for the reporting you get a quick stats dashboard which I think it's quite basic but really that's the point you also get access to 26 different of reports which is definitely not a bad number and you can see them on the side here these give you things like link links over time they subscribe a Burroughs follow up follow up stats honestly I do find the visuals a bit off it feels a bit like something out of Microsoft Word in the late nineties but it's not the end of the world it's just something that bugs me a little bit one of the problems I have is the very limited automation reporting so I'm going to open up one of the automation reports you actually can't access it from here you have to go into your campaigns which is again what Aweber cause automations and you'll see here I get literally two stats to look at which is opens and click so very limited in terms of the automations overall great for broadcast emails a lot of stuff to dive into but for automations not quite so good finally let's talk about support and Aweber has a number of support channels it has a knowledge base which is kind of reliable they do have a phone and chat support I find the chat support particularly good you can see this down here in the corner the woman I spoke to Megan she really knew a weber inside out she was really really helpful so good stuff on that front in terms of a Facebook group this is the one that I found I haven't actually joined it because when I tried to join it does ask me some account specific questions which I find it being true civ this is not something that I'm used to seeing when I join a group and and I'm not even entirely sure this is an official group I assume it is but it's not really clear from the copy I like these these Facebook groups a lot I think they're really really useful I can see that it has over 3,000 members but it's just a shame about these these questions on the on the front end so that's the end of the overview if you want to read more about Aweber I've done a full review on the authority hacker blog and I dive into this stuff in a lot more detail and I highly recommend you go and check that out so I hope this was helpful and I will see you in the next video