MailChimp and AWeber are two of the most well-known email marketing solutions available. Since these two tools have existed, there has been a constant debate going on about which one is the better one. While many businesses prefer MailChimp there are many that would rather choose AWeber. So how do make this decision? Honestly, it all comes down to the requirements of your business.

So before you even begin selecting an email marketing tool for your business there are various aspects that you need to understand. You first need to resolve questions such as: What are the requirements of your business? What are the features of the email marketing platforms that are best suited for your business? What is your budget? What do aim to establish by using these tools and what is email marketing tool and how will it help you? This latest marketing blog will answer all these questions and more. But first, let’s understand what are email marketing automation tools and why do you need them?

What is Email Marketing Software?

Email marketing is not only important for sending emails, but their purpose goes way beyond that. The software helps businesses establish a personal relationship with the existing clients and nurture leads for increasing direct sales. And, it doesn’t just stop at that, it also helps businesses create brand awareness every time a recipient clicks on your email. Sending emails in bulk could easily become a time-consuming and resource-wasting process. This is where the email marketing software comes into effect. It automates your manual workflows and much more. Read the following to understand the benefits of email marketing software.

  • It automates your processes and helps you save lots of valuable time
  • They provide a detailed and accurate post-campaign analytics
  • It helps you reach out to your target audience at significantly lower costs as compared to other mediums
  • It helps to nurture leads and establish customer loyalty
  • It allows you to track your campaigns metrics including open rate, click-through rate, and engagement level
  • It helps you connect to your social media pages
  • The A/B testing tool is available at a low cost

So now that you know why you need to get an email marketing tool for your business, let us take a look at the overview of the two best email marketing tools.

About AWeber

AWeber was founded in 1998 by Tom Kulzer and their email marketing services are used by more than 120,000 small businesses, content marketers, entrepreneurs and many more across the globe. AWeber refers to itself as “The Original Autoresponder Provider” and provides industry-leading deliverability.

With the help of this software, you can create a web sign up form, collect and manage subscribers, follow up with autoresponders and track the performance of your emails. You can even avail expert support every day of the week.

Features of AWeber | iTMunch

Best Features of AWeber

Hustle Free Signing Up

Signing up with AWeber is easy and hustle-free. It is pretty straightforward and all you need to do is click a button for a 30-day free trial. You need to fill in your basic details such as name, address and your credit card details and Voila! Your account is set up.

Easy to Start

After you have completed setting up your account, it just gets easier from there. AWeber has a welcome video that guides you through the first few steps such as account setup, creating your first list and customizing confirmation email. Following this, you are ready to start operating this tool.

Aesthetically Pleasing UI

AWeber’s user interface is neat and easy on the eye. If you start using this tool you will notice that their interface is pretty traditional. You will be able to view a horizontal primary navigation. This navigation contains key options like ‘messages’, ‘subscribers’ and ‘reports’. You can hover over the menu items to check sub-menus for important secondary options.

Different Types of Messages

Previously messages were called Broadcasts in AWeber. However, you will now find Broadcast term for only one type of message. The messages section can be divided into 6 main sections namely, Drafts, Legacy Follow Up Series, Campaigns, Click automation, Broadcasts and Blog Broadcasts.

Simple List Management

Another amazing thing about AWeber is that there is no restriction on the number of lists you create here. Every list that you create also gets its own follow-up series. Another advantage is that if you have multiple lists, you can set an automation rule to automatically subscribe or unsubscribe someone from one of the lists when they subscribe or unsubscribe to another.

Easy-to-Manage Subscribers

This feature allows the user to manage current subscribers and even add new subscribers. With its predefined filters and other provided field selections, you can easily manage specific users.

Easy Message Creation

The message creation process is easy and consists of three types; drag and drop email builder, plain text message, and HTML editor. Their message creation has a proper structure and an easy flow. They even allow you to store Drafts till you decide to send them out.

Plenty of Templates

What makes AWeber stand out is their largest set of e-newsletter templates. Although not all of their templates have an amazing design. Yet, the sheer volume of templates they provide is enough to make them stand out. They provide over 700 e-newsletter templates for their users which is more than many of their competitors.

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Disadvantages of AWeber

Is AWeber a perfect tool? No, but it does provide a lot of features that make it a strong contender. Yet, like many email marketing software out there, AWeber too has its downside as mentioned below.

High Pricing

As compared to other email marketing software in the market, they do offer pretty steep prices. Many may feel that the pro-features they offer do not justify the price.

Unjust Subscriber Count

Sadly one of their biggest downsides is that even the unsubscribed email addresses are counted in their monthly quota of pricing.

Annoying Editor

The editor panel may feel annoying occasionally as it sometimes jumps around the page when you try to edit your newsletter.

About MailChimp

MailChimp was co-founded by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius in the year 2001. This company was funded by various web-development jobs and initially was a side project. From 2001 to 2018, this company has transformed into the world’s leading email marketing platform. It employs about 700 people and has more than 14,000,000 users around the world.

This email marketing automation software helps you stay in touch with people and groups via email. It allows its users to send out newsletters to people who have signed up for their mailing list. MailChimp has helped many businesses enhance their email marketing efforts.

MailChimp- Email Marketing Software | iTMunch

Best Features of MailChimp

Simple Signing Up

This is probably the best feature and a characteristic that differentiates MailChimp from other email marketing software. They offer a free account for an unlimited time albeit with conditions of course. While signing up, the user needs to fill in his basic details such as name, address and company website. Another best thing is that they do not collect credit card payment at this stage.

Getting Started Guide

Once you’ve completed all the formalities you arrive at their landing page which is known as the Dashboard. The Dashboard is extremely easy to understand and you receive an invite to start using the software. You can find ‘Learn More’ prompts on each section. You will then receive an invite for their ‘Getting Started’ guide.

Clean User Interface

The one thing that you will notice about MailChimp’s UI is that they have got a very minimalistic interface. It is uncluttered and even navigating through the software is very easy.

Different Types of Campaigns

MailChimp refers to its messages as campaigns. They offer four different types of campaign, namely, Regular Campaign, Plain-text Campaign, A/B Testing Campaign and RSS Campaign. Together, they offer features such as designing and customizing content, sending the simplest form of email, testing campaign subjects, line, name etc. and automating email marketing.

Diligent Reporting

With Google Analytics integration this marketing tool allows you to find out information about everything like clients, geo-tracking and social media.

A Well Though-Out Freemium Plan

As mentioned above MailChimp offers extended free account. The good thing about their plan is that most of their tools are available on the free plan and a user is allowed to send out 12,000 emails to 2,000 of your subscribers. Which, to be honest, is a pretty sweet deal.

Powerful Editor

Do not be fooled with MailChimp’s simplistic design. Although the design is simple and free-flowing they have a powerful editor that can come extremely handy while connecting with your target audience.

Master List

This software allows you to have as many different lists as you wish to create. Yet the one good idea that they promote is to have one master list and then dividing it into groups and segments. This helps you keep your list more organized and structured.

Disadvantages of MailChimp

Lack of Visual Automation

MailChimp, unfortunately, hasn’t embraced visual automation like GetResponse. Visual workflows can be really helpful in the automation process.

One List at a Time

While starting a campaign, one of the important parameters you begin with is the list. Sadly, this tool allows you to choose only one list at a time.

Limited Email Automation

Autoresponders of MailChimp are pretty solid, yet they can be a disappointment when it is the question of more advanced automation.

Expensive Subscription Plans

MailChimp offers a pretty generous free plan. Yet, the prices can start feeling really steep when a user starts needing to increase his email, or subscriber, numbers etc.

AWeber vs MailChimp

Now that you are well-versed with AWeber and MailChimp on an individual level, we can finally begin comparing the two most powerful and well-known email marketing software in the market. In the AWeber vs MailChimp battle, both tools have their own pros and cons. Both are great companies that offer award-winning software for operating a mailing list. Both are leading in the market in terms of features and price. Both sound great so far. So how do you select the most suitable one?

Well, to answer this question we will need to dive deeper into their features, pricing, template design, and much more to understand the best tool for your business. Once you have completed reading the below mentioned, we hope you can make up your mind easily on which service will work miraculously for you. After all, you will be using these services for many more years to come.

Autoresponders

AWeber has a more straightforward autoresponder as compared to MailChimp. AWeber has a drag and drops editor making it easier to operate. Yet, for more advanced and complex tasks one may need to dig deeper into their drip sequences in their setting. MailChimp, on the other hand, does not have a drag and drop editor. Yet, their settings may seem fairly easy to set up for many.

Winner: AWeber

Design

Although AWeber has way more email templates as compared to MailChimp, MailChimp templates are simpler to customize. Users can style and customize the design to match their brand. Whereas, AWeber charges their users for customizing templates, which may not be an ideal situation for companies that prefer their design to reflect in the template they use.

Winner: MailChimp

Reporting

MailChimp and AWeber both offer built-in reporting that show open rates, engagement and click-rates. One of the major drawbacks is that AWeber doesn’t offer direct integration with Google Analytics for views or e-commerce. In order to make use of Google Analytics in AWeber, a user will have to use the Google URL builder every time you link to something.

Winner: MailChimp

Support

The good thing is that both these tools offer various online tutorials and help guides that can help users resolve any issues. Yet, AWeber has won several awards for their customer services. They offer support over the phone and live chat. MailChimp on the other hand only offers email tech support making the other software more preferable for it’s after sales.

Winner: AWeber

Affiliate Links

Depending on the way your businesses requirements, you may feel the need to add affiliate links in your emails. MailChimp sadly has very strict affiliate link policies. They have a long list of blacklisted domains that you may need to avoid. AWeber has no strict policies due to which if affiliate links are an important component of your business then this software is for you!

Winner: AWeber

SEE ALSO: Everything You Need to Know About Affiliate Marketing… And More

Analytics

Analytics is important for tracking how successful your marketing campaign was. Along with this analytics also allows you to send modified campaigns to subscribers who haven’t clicked on the previous emails. It helps you identify emails that bounced as well. Both platforms have an excellent analytics dashboard. However, what makes MailChimp better is it’s A/B testing setup which a lot easier to use than AWeber.

Winner: MailChimp

Ease of Import

When you are getting started, you will need to import your email subscriber list to the service of your choice. AWeber has simplified this process by allowing users to import from a variety of spreadsheets or text formats, email and much more from another app. MailChimp too allows you to import using a CSV file or an excel sheet etc. However, MailChimp’s process is easier to go through due to their focus on user experience.

Winner: MailChimp

Sign Up Forms

A sign-up form is the most effective way to get new subscribers. AWeber allows you to create a signup form with up to 25 fields of information. It offers various features such as embedding forms into your site, conducting A/B testing, and integrating with WordPress, Paypal, and Facebook. Meanwhile, MailChimp sign-up form requires users to have some HTML knowledge. It also requires you to take more efforts to embed HTML into your website.

Winner: AWeber

Email Templates

MailChimp definitely wins when it comes to designing your email templates. Yet, this email marketing software only offers a limited number of options. What makes AWeber vs MailChimp war interesting is that AWeber offers its users more than 700 email templates.  This feature distinguishes the earlier from later. Having so many options with AWeber will help you find the one that suits you the best.

Winner: AWeber

Pricing

Cost is one of the most important questions that matter. AWeber offers a simple pricing plan that starts at $19 per month for up to 500 subscribers. They also have a 30-day free trial. MailChimp has a free basic plan for an unlimited period that allows users to send 12,000 emails to 2000 subscribers. After crossing the 2,000 subscribers mark, users need to sign up their paid plans.

Winner: MailChimp

Integrations

The two email marketing software connects with a lot of other systems. Yet, MailChimp integrates directly with many platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento. AWeber, on the other hand, needs a lot of zaps from Zapier to integrate with other platforms.

Winner: MailChimp

Although MailChimp is better software in the AWeber Vs MailChimp battle, these two email marketing platforms are pretty close. They offer a range of features that make these two some of the best email marketing automation software in the market. You could really choose any of the two platforms and not regret it all.

Yet it all boils down to the requirements of your business. If you have budget constraints and are just starting out and want an easy-to-use platform then MailChimp is the right solution for you. AWeber is a better solution for large companies and agencies.

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