AWeber vs. Mapp Digital

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.

With this program, we're able to keep track of our marketing campaigns, as well as use additional features to enhance the product. A lot of the software's success may be attributed to its statistical capabilities. A large part of our company's growth has come from improving the product, which our staff does on a daily basis.

Incentivized

• 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

• API functionality, alongside reporting, is unparalleled in an environment where you may not have IT support to build out tools.
• The user interface is easy to understand, allowing users to have control over the creative delivery for MIME, HTML, text and mobile ads.
• It allows deliverability experts to throttle deliveries by selecting mailing domain and IP pairs, granting access to stats on these individual paired delivery tools.

• 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

• I have used Blue Hornet over the last few years as it is the selected email platform used by my content provider. I have never used a more glitchy platform! Every time I use it I run into broken links, glitches and kinks. Their tech team is very quick to blame your machine - but I have access to several machines on all major OS platforms, and I run into the same issues every time.
• The Blue Hornet user interface is poor and clunky. They have a great looking homepage - but you can tell that there focus is on selling and not on current clients. This is plainly apparent by the fact that the login button is buried at the very bottom of the page and difficult to find the first time you look for it. Not to mention the fact that the user interface itself is nowhere near as smooth and polished as their branded website is. Additionally, their reports are often inaccurate.
• I would suggest any serious marketer looking to execute an email campaign with Blue Hornet to look elsewhere. I have reached out to my content provider to ask that they provide support on a different system - and was kindly informed that they are working around the clock to make this happen due to the overwhelmingly negative criticism of Blue Hornet from their clients.

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.

Although BlueHornet offers helpful testing capabilities, the ESP is a bit outdated. There is a lot of room for aesthetics improvement as they are not appealing. The reporting tool is usually broken, and reporting either no, or wrong metrics. If this ESP were to update their design, as well as fix the reporting tool, I think this platform would be much better.

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

Once you start using the product a lot and are taught how it works, it's pretty simple. You just need that initial training and to use it a lot to get used to it.

They rolled out new feature requests quite frequently and always kept our team up to speed on what they were changing/adding to the system

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

Sometimes it was hard to get an initial response but after we started CCing more people, it became a lot better!

They made sure to go through anything and everything that we wanted

I wasn't there when they first got it, but when I got there there were only a few people that knew a little bit about it. There was A LOT that we didn't know. Then BlueHornet came and had some workshops and we learned a lot that we didn't even know existed. They were doing a lot of things wrong before BlueHornet came and showed up more about the tool

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

Mapp Digital offers a unique breadth of services which other software failed to offer. The AI based insights Mapp provides are very accurate and useful in order to create hyper-personalized re-marketing campaigns for our customers. Also, the customer experience analytics that Mapp offers are informative and helps us to take decisions based on those.

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

• BlueHornet has been a good entry-level platform. We have successfully launched scores of clients with limited email marketing experience onto this platform. Because it is easy to use, we have spent minimal effort needing to help these clients with problems.
• It is easy to migrate clients on or off BlueHornet, depending upon their needs. This is helpful because it allows our clients to be on exactly the right platform. Some platforms make it difficult to migrate off, essentially trapping clients on a platform that no longer meets their needs or business objectives.
• I wish BlueHornet were keeping pace with technology advancements in the industry. The gap between the biggest ESPs and competitors like BlueHornet seems to be growing.