Overall Rank: 1 out 5 stars
Aweber is another one of the more popular email marketing services. They give you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of the number of contacts you can store under their basic plan. In my experience they have one of the highest delivery rates when compared to other email marketing services. However, I must say they are lacking when it comes to certain features.

Pricing – Ranking: 5 out 5 stars

Aweber is reasonably priced. The minimum pricing for 10,000 Contacts is $19.95. Compared to other services they offer more contacts for the price. They do not offer a free trial. However, they do offer a 30 day money back guarantee.

Basic Features – Ranking: 1 out 5 stars

Pros
Aweber has many of the basic features that other email marketing services have. You have the ability to mail merge your emails to personalize them with your customer's information. Additionally, they offer a RSS feed so that your customers can automatically receive updates each time you post a new newsletter.

Aweber's user interface is easy to navigate. You will be able to work with your messages based on the list you select. This is a great feature as it allows you to have separate emails for each list based on your customer's interests.

Cons
As with a few others, Aweber does not have a survey feature. If you business model incorporates receiving surveys from your client than you will be at a lost with this feature. However, with their custom form creation tool, you could do a generic question and answer email. Keep in mind that you will have to manually compile this information as the emails began to roll in. Also, Aweber does not have an image hosting feature. If you don't have web space to host images, once again, you will be at a lost with using this service.

Creating Messages – Ranking: 5 out 5 stars

Pros
As with many of the other email marketing services, Aweber offers a host of templates to choose from. This particular feature will definitely be a matter of choice when deciding which service has the best templates to fit your needs.

I've used many WYSIWYG editors and by far Aweber is one of the best. Their latest update to their system has made this feature even better. It is very easy to format your email through their online system. Now keeping with the notion that you want your email newsletter to have the same brand as your website, they also offer an option for custom HTML newsletters. One other thing that Aweber offers that I really like is the ability to add attachments to your email newsletters. So if you offer a free ebook, you can create an autoresponder to automatically send the ebook out when someone signs up for it. Pretty cool!

Cons
While Aweber has some really great message creation features, they do not offer the option to import your website. If this is important to you, then utilizing the custom HTML feature is the way to go. Just copy/paste your HTML code into the online editor and your website's branding is still in tact.

Reporting and Tracking – Ranking: 5 out 5 stars

Pros
Aweber has a comprehensive reporting and tracking feature. I think most reputable email marketing services realize that this is really important and ensure that this particular feature is up to par. They give you the ability to review reports in real time. This is really great when you are testing different ad campaigns and need to determine what's working and what isn't. You will also be able to track your ads as well. Aweber tracks items like number of emails sent, undeliverables, open rate, and click-thrus. These are all very important reporting and tracking features.

Cons
None

List Management – Ranking: 3 out 5 stars

Pros
Aweber's custom form feature is really great. They offer multiple ways for you to incorporate the forms into your website. You can use javascript code so that when you make updates to the form you don't have to replace the code on your website every time. This can really be a great time saver. Additionally, they offer the option to use straight HTML to incorporate forms into your website in the event you don't use javascript.

Aweber also offers you the ability to upload your lists in various formats. So if you currently have an email marketing service and need to make a switch, they make it easy for you. Another great feature to combat spam, is the ability to block email addresses and entire domains. So if you get lucky and know who that spammer is, you can block them from crowding up your email list.

Cons
The one thing that Aweber doesn't offer is the automatic duplicate removal feature. This being said, you will have to go through your list and ensure that you don't have dups manually. This can also be very time consuming.

Sending Options – Ranking: 1 out 5 stars

Pros
Another neat feature that Aweber has is the ability to schedule the date and time to send out your newsletter. This is a really important feature for your online business. You will be able to put your broadcasts on autopilot. Additionally, Aweber has been known to really take Can-Spam very seriously. You might wonder why this should be important to you. Well if you want to maximum reach, you certainly want to deal with an email marketing company that is Can-Spam compliant.

Cons
There are couple of sending features that Aweber fall short in. For one, they do not offer the ability to forward a message to a friend. This could dramatically decrease you readership. Although, your customers can use the forward button in their email program, it wouldn't be the same as using the forward to a friend feature in email marketing services. Each time forward to a friend is used, typically your email marketing service will log that activity. Additionally, Aweber doesn't allow you to send the same message to multiple lists. You have to recreate the message for each list you'd like to send to. This can be time consuming.

Support and Extras – Ranking: 5 out 5 stars

Pros
Aweber has some really great support and training features. Reaching technical support via phone, email or chat is pretty simple. The best thing of all is that they actually respond. They also offer some really comprehensive video tutorials to get you started with their service. Not only do they help you get started with your service, they have some of the best material about email and newsletter marketing in general.

Cons
None

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Keyeraines

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