I used to use a free email autoresponder to build up my list and I spent a lot of time building up my subscriber base over a couple of years. However I got burned when the service became more and more unreliable.

My newsletters wouldn’t get sent out on time, many people weren’t receiving the ones that did get sent out. It was a complete mess. Plus there was no way to migrate my list over to another service. At that point, I decided to investigate other email autoresponders and that’s when I found AWeber.

AWeber Email Deliverability

Email deliverability is the single most important aspect of any autoresponder. If your emails aren’t getting delivered to your subscribers, then what’s the point, right? Aweber boasts 99%+ email deliverability rates because of existing relationships they have with ISPs to ensure your emails are not getting blocked and strong anti-spam policies to make sure things stay that way.

This is the main reason to subscribe to an autoresponder service like AWeber, and not run your own autoresponder server. While the up-front costs may be cheaper to do it yourself, it is unlikely you can get very good email deliverability rates yourself.

Based on my own results with using AWeber, I can say that AWeber’s email deliverability rates are excellent and you can easily confirm this yourself by reading any of the popular internet marketing forums.

How I Use AWeber

I’ve been using AWeber for my email marketing efforts for almost 3 years now. On this blog in particular, you can see I’m using it to power my Link Building Lab newsletter series where I share many of the link building strategies I personally use.

If you take a look at my squeeze page, you can see I’m collecting emails using an email opt-in form. The squeeze page is actually powered by OptimizePress which integrates with my AWeber form code to create a nice looking opt-in form.

Alternatively, I’m also using a lightbox popup script to get additional email subscribers as well. I’m currently playing around with two – Popup Domination and Pippity. Both offer nice looking popup templates and integrate nicely with my AWeber form code as well.

AWeber – Easy To Use

Where AWeber really stands out is its ease of use. Whenever you create a new list, you’re guided by an intuitive Setup Wizard which guides you through the process. As you fill out each field, helpful tooltips appear which tells you what you need to be entering. If you’re more of a visual learner, you can watch the videos they have for each step of the process.

Creating opt-in forms with AWeber is relatively simple. There’s a built-in form wizard that allows you to customize your own opt-in forms using a point and click interface. They also include a wide variety of form templates to start from and it allows people who don’t have any HTML or CSS experience to still create nice looking forms.

With that said, I’m personally not a big fan of the form editor. I’ve found that it just doesn’t offer me the amount of control I need to create my forms exactly how I like them. That’s why I rely on third party products like OptimizePress and Popup Domination to create nicer looking forms.

AWeber Email Marketing Features

Where AWeber can take your email marketing efforts to the next level is with its excellent split testing and email marketing analytics capabilities.

With each web form you create, you get statistics for each individual form showing you how many times the form has been shown and how many submissions it has received.

Not only that, but you can easily split test any number of forms as well. Just choose the forms you want want to include in your split test and you can specify how often each form is shown. This is the best way to test out various form styles and headlines and pick the best one that gets you the most subscribers.

AWeber can also provide you with some advanced email analytics if you install a snippet of javascript on your site. You’ll want to play around with this yourself, but one of my favorite features is the ability to track clicks through my own domain. I find this gets better click through rates when people see my joshkotsay.com domain in their emails instead of Aweber.com.

AWeber Pricing

Investing in an autoresponder is a long term commitment as switching services is not something you will want to do often. AWeber isn’t the cheapest autoresponder around, but its prices are more than reasonable. Like most other services, it features a tiered pricing structure based on the number of subscribers you have in your account.

For up to 500 subscribers, AWeber will cost you $19 a month. While a comparable plan from GetResponse might actually be a bit cheaper, once you get to 500-5000 subscribers AWeber actually becomes more affordable. So keep this in mind as you start accumulating more and more subscribers.

AWeber also offers a $1 trial for the first month and a 30 day risk free guarantee. So if you try them out and you don’t like them for whatever reason you can always get your money back.

Final Thoughts

If you do any research on autoresponders, you’ll find that AWeber consistently tops the list of the most recommended autoresponder on forums and by other bloggers. And for good reason too.

AWeber has become an indispensable part of my online business. It’s the foundation of my email marketing efforts and allows me to be able to reliably reach my subscribers and provide valuable content to them. In turn, this helps me to build up a following of loyal fans which improves my brand and helps me sell my own products.

So if you are in the market for a reliable autoresponder, then definitely give AWeber a try.