Aweber Vs Mailchimp: Email Autoresponder Face-off

Aweber Vs Mailchimp: Email Autoresponder Face-off

Aweber or Mailchimp? – The biggest question when it comes to choosing the best email autoresponder.

Email autoresponder plays a crucial role in every internet marketers’ business. It helps them to stay in regular touch with their customers. This doesn’t mean that email autoresponder has to be used to send canned spam mails.

Email autoresponder in fact can be (and has to be) used to provide quality to subscribers.

Building up your subscriber list is a continuous process that needs effective planning. Retaining those subscribers by providing quality content is another vital part of the story.

Don’t even think about doing it all yourself (but sending quality emails). Email autoresponder is just for the purpose.

Here is a brief look on the features of both Aweber and Mailchimp to help you select the best email autoresponder for your blogging needs.

Design effectiveness

The user interface of the program is an essential factor for every email autoresponder. If the design and the codes are difficult to handle, most users will have to satisfy themselves with mediocre designs.

However, both Aweber and Mailchimp guarantee that this will not be a problem. Both the tools have a considerably efficient user interface. Aweber provides a more professional outlook to forms and emails. You can also set in special codes to customize your email.

It has a source view and preview tabs at the bottom of the page. You can add your own stamp and even digital signatures to the documents.

Aweber Mailchimp best email autoresponder

Mailchimp has a fun and very friendly interface. You can set out equally professional designs through this tool. It provides a GUI editor, which does your work and all you have to do is, feed in your choices.

You can upload viable images to your emails to strengthen your email marketing strategy. Mailchimp offers to host your uploaded images while with Aweber you have to host them on your own website.

Email autoresponder tracking rate

This is a remarkable aspect of any email autoresponder. Not only, can you launch a successful email marketing campaign, with these efficient tools, you can also track your progress in this regard.

Aweber comes out handy in this case. It has a built-in tracker that gets you real time records of accomplishment.

You can literally see the growth of your subscriber rate. You can also see their interest areas and compare the email hits, clicks, and what emails were opened etc.

Mailchimp does not have this feature. However, it comes with SiteAnalytics360, which in collaboration with Google Analytics, can give you a reasonably efficient tracking service.

Deciding if a subscriber is responsive or not is effective with Aweber. Mailchimp just puts some stars next to each subscriber which makes it difficult to decide (you may want to regularly clean up your list).

Delivery effectiveness – Aweber wins

Your complete email marketing campaign depends upon the timely delivery of your emails to the subscribers. Of course, the whole effort will be lost if the email autoresponder fails to deal with the spam filters and the emails are stranded in the spam folder for eternity.

Aweber has definitely proved its merit in this regard. Aweber promises a delivery rate of almost 99%.

Mailchimp gets a set back due to its manual subscribers’ list adding feature. Due to this feature, it fails to send in confirmation mails to the clients and recedes in spam filter efficiency.

Aweber sharply catches bounces and spam complaints (and reports that with every email campaign) but Mailchimp is blunt at this.

Email autoresponder list building feature

Both Aweber and Mailchimp have excellent list building features. There are loads of forms and designs available with both email autoresponder services. But when it comes to flexibility and professionalism, Aweber wins.

In case of Aweber, double optin confirmation is a must.

Both Aweber and Mailchimp allow you to manage multiple lists.

Categorizing the lists is easier with Aweber. Aweber forms the category based on clients’ activity tracks. Mailchimp categorizes the lists according to clients’ interests. However, this can sometimes lead to confusion when there are multiple coinciding interests and you can end up with some fake accounts in your list.

The price factor

This factor finds Mailchimp as the contender with an edge. It offers a free account feature. You can have up to 2000 subscribers in your list and send in up to 12000 mails per month via this free account.

Aweber does not offer any free services. You can take the trial service for 30 days with a money back guarantee. The trial service is activated with a $1 deposit to the email autoresponder account.

Mailchimp’s premium service and Aweber’s regular service after the trial period will cost you money. But Aweber becomes cheaper when we compare number of subscribers, features and other benefits.

If you want to make money with your list, Aweber MUST be your choice

Money is in the list. Email marketing is powerful and if you have a responsive list you can make money from it by promoting your own products/services or affiliate products.

If you want to do this, you need Aweber because Mailchimp’s terms doesn’t allow this feature. The sad thing is that Mailchimp doesn’t spill the beans and it is not clear if you can include affiliate links in your email campaigns or not.

I once emailed them to clear this up and their support said that if affiliate promotion is not my sole reason to send an email, I can include a link. But I know people whose accounts have been closed by Mailchimp (and they lost their list as well) for sending out affiliate links in their emails (on sidebar or footer).

I don’t think anyone can afford to lose their list for a term that’s not clear and I don’t think anyone can afford not to send any affiliate links in their email marketing campaigns.

My take on choosing the right email autoresponder serive – Aweber

I know, I know, its never easy to choose between the options available (and one is for free!). But I’ve given you the features of both Aweber and Mailchimp here. I don’t talk about other email autoresponders, coz I haven’t tried them.

I used Mailchimp first (just because it was free up to 2000 subscribers) but then when I wanted to professionalize my blog and everything, Mailchimp really couldn’t serve the purpose. Although, I personally love Mailchimp for what it does for free.

BUT I made my choice to go for Aweber after having used Mailchimp for about 6 months. And I strongly feel that I made the right decision.

If you think you’re on a tight budget you will tempted to go for Mailchimp but trust me, when your subscriber limit goes past 2000 (which soon or eventually will happen), then you’ll be paying more than Aweber and will be enjoying much lesser features.

I suggest you start using Aweber right from the beginning. Or if you’re thinking about moving now, there’s no better time than NOW to move to Aweber.

If you move from Mailchimp (or other email autoresponder service) to Aweber, you can seek support to export your list without going through the double optin again.

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