AWeber vs. dotMailer

AWeber is an excellent email marketing solution for small to mid-sized businesses, especially those that are just starting with email marketing campaigns. AWeber is also good for bloggers. But it's not perfect for an affiliate marketer who wants to make a landing page on AWeber. Businesses that require advanced segmentation options may need to consider other email marketing platforms.

dotMailer is a great tool whether you are a standalone shop or a global company. I am not familiar with many other programs, but my favorite thing about dotMailer is the ability to have all of our constituents on the same account to share templates and ideas, as well as gauge our performance levels. To any colleague within our Group, I would 100% recommend dotMailer

• Aweber's email deliverability is among the best in the industry. I have used other email services and Aweber is superior in deliverability.
• It is easy to setup an autoresponder sequence, a series of time delayed emails delivered over a period of time. This makes it super easy to follow up with leads and customers.
• Aweber's blog broadcast features makes it easy to notify subscribers of new content on your blog. It can be setup to broadcast when ever you make a new post or summarize posts on a periodic basis.

Incentivized

• Segmentation by distance.
• RFM segmentation.
• Product recommendations.

Incentivized

• Double opt-in requirements. While I understand the rationale for double opt-in, I wish Aweber did not require double opt-in when importing email addresses from the client's existing client database as I feel we end up losing a good number of people who are existing customers and have given the business permission to email them but who either don't notice or don't take the extra step to confirm their subscription to the Aweber list.
• The user interface when designing and setting up html newsletters is not as clearcut and obvious as Constant Contact; it takes more time to get the newsletters to "look right" using Aweber's existing templates.
• I wish Aweber made it easier to embed a video message simply by inserting the video link or embed code into the email body. The process it seems to require (the last time I tried) was to create a screenshot of the video or insert the video thumbnail image and then link to the video in the right column link section .. it's a 2 step process and would be nice if it were a one click process. Not a deal breaker but I just feel like it could be faster and more efficient to embed video messages in an email.

Incentivized

• Updating contact lists can be cumbersome. It would be much easier if we could just make mass update to contact lists without having to export and re-import them. For example, if you upload a list of Joe's contacts and then want them to all be individually tagged with Jane instead, you would have to export the list, change everyone's rep to Jane, and then import the list again.
• The time zone on our account is set to London which creates challenges for the other cities (New York, Chicago, Seattle, Sao Paulo) that we send emails for. We definitely have to be cautious when scheduling out emails so that we get the timing correct.
• I would love to be able to view previous months' activities and expand the comparison tool to view trends over time.

AWeber is easy and intuitive for me use. I really like the simplicity and the structure of the work flow as it saves me time. AWeber also integrates with all the other programs, systems and gateways that I use on a daily basis (WordPress, Paypal, LeadPages, Facebook and more) and if I have any questions or have trouble the AWeber customer service technicians are very helpful.

Since this is used on a global scale and it is preferable to all of our brands, I cannot see us switching to a different provider. We have built years worth of contacts and templates within our current system, which saves our marketing team a lot of time when putting together future campaigns. All of them are mobile optimized which makes it even easier to work with

See previous answers ... the design / customization interface could be more intuitive and elegant .. for example, for me it has been difficult to easily figure out how to place pictures / images to the right, left or center of text.

Incentivized

I have always received prompt phone or live chat support that has resolved my issues on the first call in a competent, knowledgeable and friendly manner. By contrast MailChimp offers no live chat or phone support; they only offer email support and the response time for MailChimp is slow by comparison to AWeber.

Incentivized

MailChimp is a great "starter" email service, especially for consumer businesses. AWeber offers a bit more power and sophistication, especially for B2B companies, while still being easy to use and price competitive. Constant Contact had seemed to lag in features for a while though it has now largely caught up. However, it's got a more complex pricing model and is less attractive for users who send multiple messages per month to a smaller list.

Incentivized

DotMailer is built for eCommerce. Drip, ActiveCampaign, and Infusionsoft are not eCommerce platforms out of the box, though they can be tailored to that use case. DotMailer is especially geared toward retail businesses.

Incentivized

• Aweber has been a great way to introduce clients to the process of online marketing and publishing. Many of them have never used the web or email to truly nurture their customer relationships. The combination of dependable features and low price make Aweber a good "toe in the water" of internet marketing.
• Aweber has helped my clients raise awareness of their products and services through targeted email campaigns and regular publishing. It's a great way to deliver coupons and special offers directly to a customer's inbox.
• Awber has helped me teach my clients that a collection of names and email addresses is only worthwhile if you use it to communicate what matters to your customers. Many businesses collect contact information at live events or through other means, but rarely do they actually do anything with it. By using Aweber to reach out to their customer base, they are able to see through the analytics how valuable that conversation can be.

Incentivized

• Gave us more granular segmentation than simply pages visited or products purchased.
• Helped us segment local customers vs long-distance customers, and send different messaging to each.
• It takes a product feed, so enabled us to launch personalized product recommendations in emails.

Incentivized