AWeber vs. Yesmail360i

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.

If you are a smaller business I would not recommend YesMail. You really need someone who is analytical and can understand hard to use products to get the most out of this email service provider

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

• The biggest strength of YesMail is that it's good for churning out large amounts of emails. So if you constantly send out a lot of emails, newsletters, or promotions on a daily or weekly basis then YesMail is a good fit.
• The reporting for YesMail is also above average. You're able to look at all the main metrics such as open rates, click rates, bounces, unsubscribes, etc. They also have a click map so you can optimize your emails based on where people are clicking within the email and what content they're clicking on.
• YesMail also has a fairly good scrubbing process in place so if you have a lot of dead weight on your lists (email addresses that aren't active don't open, click or bounce out a lot) then YesMail will automatically remove these emails. For example if an email address has bounced 10 times in a row then YesMail will remove that email from its system.

• 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

• The Market Intelligence tool, while useful, and while it has a Deliverability Intelligence plug-in as well, is still a little rough. It's hard to sort through reports, and the location of different points of information between the "feed" and the list of marketers, is a little cumbersome to sort through.
• The metrics available could use some updating and some clarification. There are quite a few caveats to reporting that aren't clearly stated. Ex. the clicks reported on a "click thru" report are TOTAL clicks, while the clicks reported on a Delivery and Response report are FIRST CLICK ONLY, while also the dashboard reports might show unique clicks and "clicks" (total clicks) but those numbers might also not match with the other two reports because dashboard reports are behind by 2 hours whereas the specific reports are pulling straight from the CRM within the system, and the dashboards are summaries generated every couple of hours from the CRM. All of those details took me a while to figure out, and I had to ask a lot of questions. But my account manager was always easy to get a hold of, and if he didn't know the answers to my questions he was quick about tracking down someone who did.

Incentivized

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.

I do not have the buying decision to renew/change providers, but do have the ability to provide my feedback to those who do. Yesmail has a lot of kinks that need to be worked out. But, for those that just need to deploy emails, and house subscriptions, this is a decent platform to do so. Companies with more advanced campaign targeting/analysis needs should explore other service providers.

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

Overall it is easy to use but there's several different portals you must log into instead of having everything at your disposal in one place (reporting, emails, extracting data, etc).

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

Very easy to get a hold of an actual person and quick responses.

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

YesMail offers almost all of the "bells and whistles" that the other major ESPs offer, but at a much more reasonable price. IBM and SalesForce, for example, offer great platforms...but they outsource the setup and implementation, and they have a lot of add-ons that drive up the price of their tool. YesMail does the implementation and maintenance themselves, and while they do have their own add-ons, their "out of the box" platform is much more inclusive than the competition's.

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

• Increased our send rate from 20K/hour to 200K/hour. Previously with our in-house tool it would take days to send a campaign. Now it takes hours.
• Increased efficiency of our email marketing team. Having to work less with the data team now for list pulls.

Incentivized