Follow On TwitterMailChimp Vs Aweber – A Comparison Of Two Email Marketing Providers
As many of you who follow my email newsletter are aware, I recently switched my email marketing provider from Mailchimp over to Aweber and I thought that it would be interesting to compare the two services. For all of you who are not doing email marketing for your business, you really should consider doing so. Having an email list or newsletter is the best way to mobilize your audience to take action. It’s also a great way to maintain an active community of readers/customers for your site. In any case, this post is not about trying to convince you to use an email marketing provider, but if you are in the market for one, this review may help you out.
What Initially Attracted Me To MailChimp
Honestly, what attracted me initially to Mailchimp was that they offer a trial period in which their service is free for up to 500 subscribers. I know, I’m cheap. I can’t help it. The Asian in me always prevails. Even though all of the top bloggers use Aweber, I opted for Mailchimp because of the free startup cost. That and my buddy Sid Savara was also using MailChimp and highly recommended the company. Anyways, in using both email providers extensively and having learned the ins and outs of both services, I discovered the pros and cons of each which I’ll enumerate below.
Who Has The Better Form Design Tools?
If you are a half decent web designer, you’ll definitely prefer Mailchimp over Aweber in terms of form design. Mail Chimp let’s you either design your forms entirely from scratch or use their GUI to design a professional looking form. They have many templates to choose from, but if you want to do everything yourself, they also give you the raw code and you have full control over the look and feel of everything. I found that the design freedom that MailChimp provides was especially useful when designing popup forms.
Aweber on the other hand, seems to steer you towards using one of their pre-baked form templates. If you stray from their template, then you have to do a little bit of hacking to get things looking the way you want. For example, getting the popup signup form working on Aweber the exact way I wanted it to look took me several hours. I basically had to download the javascript from their site, figure out how their code was written and then tailor it to how I wanted it. Otherwise, I would have been limited to their templates which I didn’t really like. In addition, the Aweber popup code didn’t work properly across all web browsers and I had to fix this manually.
Mailchimp also offers a more flexible interface with which to design HTML emails and they’ll also host the images for you. Aweber does not offer an image hosting service as far as I can tell. Overall however, even though I like MailChimp’s interface better, their website is significantly slower than Aweber’s because of all of the graphical functionality baked into the UI.
Edge: MailChimp
Who Has Better Email Tracking?
When I first switched over from Mailchimp to Aweber, I immediately noticed how much better Aweber’s email tracking capabilities are compared to MailChimp. With Aweber, you can tell exactly who has opened your email and exactly which links that they have clicked on and when. With Mailchimp out of the box, you don’t have any of this information. Instead, MailChimp puts stars next to each of your subscribers which provides a vague metric with which to measure the quality and interest of your readers. In addition, MailChimp does not track users who sign up for your newsletter but don’t confirm their email.
Aweber is also better when it comes to tracking clicks within an email. Whenever you use a link in an email with click tracking enabled, Aweber displays the link using the exact same URL from your domain. Mailchimp on the other hand, uses a super long and obscure link which is then redirected over to your site. In general, readers are more hesitant to click on links with a super long and cryptic URL. With Aweber, the destination URL points straight to your domain and the click is still tracked. As a result, I’ve seen a dramatic increase in click throughs when I made the switch.
In addition to all of this, Aweber also provides conversion tracking if you sell products and you can also track how each reader traverses through your website from an email campaign. Overall, Aweber is much more powerful than MailChimp when it comes to tracking users.
Edge: Aweber
Who Has Better AutoResponders?
Both MailChimp and Aweber offer an easy way to set up a series of follow up emails. However, both have their pros and cons with the way their auto responders are implemented. What I like about Mailchimp is that you can setup autoresponders such that only a subset of your email list will receive your follow-up emails based on when they signed up for your newsletter. For example, if I only want recent subscribers from the last month to receive one of my autoresponders, I can simply specify this using MailChimp’s autoresponder interface.
With Aweber however, this is not that easy to do. With Aweber, each and every one of your subscribers is tagged with a message number which indicates which followup emails they have received already. To prevent a subscriber from receiving a specific followup email, you must set the subscriber’s message number to be higher than the email sequence number. For example, if a particular subscriber’s message number is 4, that means that that subscriber has already received follow-up emails 1,2 and 3. So if I have a 7 part follow up message sequence and I write a brand new followup email (message 8 in the sequence), there is no real way for me to prevent this subscriber from receiving message 8 unless I make his or her message number higher than 8. But if I do this, then that subscriber will never receive messages 4,5,6 or 7.
On the flip side, Aweber’s method of managing followup emails allows me to know exactly which subscriber has received which follow up emails and when. With MailChimp, I really have no clue who has or hasn’t received a particular email. Overall, I kind of prefer Aweber’s method of managing follow-ups but it is basically a wash depending on your preference.
Edge: Even
Who Has Better Support?
There is no contest here. Aweber has the better support hands down! Aweber offers both phone and email support during regular business hours. Mailchimp however, only offers email support. As a result, if you have a pressing issue or question, you will have to wait up to 24 hours to get a response from MailChimp. This is the #1 reason I made the switch from MailChimp to Aweber. Usually support doesn’t come into play unless something goes wrong. Here is my tale of woe.
One day, MailChimp decided to arbitrarily suspend my blog from using its service. I received a cryptic email out of the blue telling me that my email service had been suspended and they didn’t give me a reason. Since MailChimp doesn’t have phone support, I had to wait a day to receive a response. In fact, because I couldn’t get a human on the phone, it took me 2 days just to find out why I was suspended.
In the end, they told me that I had violated their terms of service because they classified my website as a get rich quick scheme. Long time readers of MyWifeQuitHerJob.com know that this blog is certainly not about getting rich quick. Plus, I don’t sell anything on my blog either so Mail Chimp’s reason for banning me was completely uncalled for.
In any case after a few emails back and forth, I found out that they basically didn’t like the title of my free ebook. Sure, I could have changed the title but I was not willing to make changes based on my email provider. As a result, I had to make a mad scramble to switch email providers right away. Thankfully, transitioning to Aweber was quick and easy.
Edge:Aweber
Conclusion
There are a few good things about MailChimp that I didn’t mention and should be considered as well even though most people probably won’t take advantage of these features. MailChimp has an interface that allows you to access your entire database of subscribers from an API. If you do a lot of coding or database manipulation, their API will allow you to easily manage your subscriber database in PHP or any popular scripting language. Overall, when it comes to design and programmability, Mailchimp is more powerful than Aweber.
However, once I switched over to Aweber, I realized how much more powerful their tracking and email management features were compared to Mailchimp. You only have to design your forms once but tracking is something you’ll be doing all the time. In addition, having phone support is priceless. That and getting suspended without warning by MailChimp left a really bad taste in my mouth. If they simply gave me an early heads up, it would have made my life much easier. Trust me. There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to get someone on the phone when something goes wrong.
In any case, I highly recommend Aweber overall. If you do decide to go with Mailchimp however, I would read their terms of service extremely carefully before signing up. One particular thing I want to highlight is that if you do any sort of affiliate marketing on your site, then I would stay away from MailChimp. After all, affiliate marketing appears to be against their terms of service. Any violation and you could be suspended without warning. It’s just not worth the risk.
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I use Ratepoint because they also offer a review (testimonial) widget I have posted on my site. Ratepoint has a promotion that offers free mailing list service forever if your list is 125 or less. Obviously most of us will want more than 125 folks reading our newsletters but it’s a good start. Good templates, tracking and definitely awesome support.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by mywifequit, Rajeev Edmonds. Rajeev Edmonds said: MailChimp Vs Aweber – A Comparison Of Two Email Marketing Providers http://su.pr/1TLqIN /via @mywifequit [...]
Thank you Steve so much for that comparison of MailChimp vs Aweber. Very insightful!
Yikes! Good to know. I’m using Aweber, but a lot of people ask me how MailChimp is. Now I have a second reference for recommending Aweber!
-Erica
Hi Steve,
I have used both, and I agree with your analysis. The great thing about MailChimp is that it lets you see the email in different clients. That is really the hardest thing about sending emails. However, you can use that service without doing everything else through MailChimp. Also, once you get the hang of it and develop templates, it no longer is much of an issue.
The great things about Aweber are support and ease-of-use. Their video library makes it easy to learn a whole new marketing strategy (email marketing). The thing I don’t like about them is the HTML editor. It is very quirky. But there are ways to get around it, so it is not a big deal.
Also, the click and conversion tracking is outstanding in Aweber, which is super critical for email marketing.
George
Hi Steve – thanks for the post. We recently started using MailChimp to keep in touch with our member base. I love features like the visual click tracking – I’m more interested in aggregates rather than tracking each individual subscriber though.
And the star-based member rating is quite good – the legend actually shows the people who don’t ever open your emails, which can be quite good for pruning a list!
My biggest grumble with MailChimp is the visual editor – it baffles the hell out of me, and I can’t see an easy way of getting under the hood to work with the HTML and CSS, which – for me – would be far more intuitive.
MailChimp banned me too. Said I was “real estate prospecting”
I also had to leave MailChimp. They didn’t like our non-profit organization. Because it was an association for financial professionals (they didn’t like the financial part). A non-profit, tax exempt national organization. They also got trapped in some spam filters in my tests.
Anyhow, we moved on. Thanks for the info on AWeber.
You forgot to mention their affiliate program which is much better than Mailchimps:
http://www.aweber.com/affiliates.htm
Be good to note that if you do use Aweber and are recommending it you can benefit quite a bit from their referrals!
Hi Steve, I think I might have been Asian in a past life. Lol:) Signed up with Mailchimp for the same cheapskate reasons as you. Finding it OK but always wonder what I’m missing as all the “pros” use Aweber. Can you tell me with Aweber are you able to manually look at people who signed up but haven’t confirmed and then send them a polite reminder? Mailchimp seems to be missing that and I always wonder how many people I’m missing because of that!
The book sounds good to me. Sorry that MailChimp acted like monkeys – they deserve to be dropped for that.
@Annabel
With Aweber, it is very easy to sort through your list to find out who hasn’t confirmed. But as far as I can tell, there’s no way to send out an automatic reminder. However, you can do this manually since you have their email address. Plus I believe you can tell if they’ve even looked at the confirmation email so you can sort out who you want to remind vs someone who is truly not interested anymore.
@Lynn Justin
Interesting, you two aren’t the only ones who have been suspended. I’ve received several emails from others with the same issues. Mail Chimp should issue a warning first before outright suspension of service.
@Gerard
That’s funny. I kind of liked Mail Chimp’s email interface. I always used the pure html mode of the editor since the visual editor adds all of this junk to the html. I believe CSS is more limited in an email as well. Did you try just using the html mode?
@George
I actually never tried that feature and I believe it costs money to use it. My emails are pretty basic and don’t rely too much on formatting. I guess if you are sending out an elaborate html email that this feature would be important.
HI Steve,
This comes at the perfect time. I was just checking the search engines the other day for a comparison of these two services. This is an informative read, thank you.
However, how do they compare to iContact and Constant Contact? They may not be used by bloggers much, but it seems that the retailers and other companies especially use Constant Contact… Any ideas?
Cheers,
Bruce
Steve, this was, far and away, one of the most lucid, thorough and useful web 2.0 product reviews I have seen…ever…anywhere.
You can look forward to seeing another subscriber to your email list in your AWeber account…my email address will be there as soon as I’m through submitting this comment.
Well done.
I had the exact opposite experience. In my opinion, mailchimp has far superior tracking – especially the a/b testing. And because they don’t allow spammers on, their IP addresses don’t get banned and your emails make it thorugh to the spam folder.
If you’re flogging some internet marketing ebook, then Aweber is the best option. But for serious startups, who demand performance you can’t really go past Mailchimp.
[...] MailChimp Vs Aweber – A Comparison Of Two Email Marketing Providers [...]
Well… I’ve also used both services… And I find Mailchimp faaar superior.
Thus, in my humble opinion what you said is not 100% correct nor true.
For instance:
1) There are many support options at mailchimp: Email, Google Groups,
their Ning social network (AKA “The Jungle”), their Contact Form, their
online chat, their DAILY webinars… Even their Expert Directory.
2) There’s not way that ESP in this world can track your email links if they don’t change the actual email links by one that first lands on their website and then
redirect you to the final URL. What I’ve saw Aweber sometimes
does is just show you the final destination in the email and linking it to their
tracking URL: A practice considered as dangerous as it could looks as
phising to some (many in fact!) email clients.
3) All metrics you mention are available at Mailchimp except Subscriber pending for confirmation. Most metrics are there for free too: Who open, when, where, how many times.
In addition to all these points, I find many other advantages of Mailchimp over Awever:
What about A/B Campaigns? What about RSS campaigns?
4) Its API it’s just a godsend. If you are a nerd, you will surely agreed with me. I read somwhere else: There are two kind of programmers: Those who love MC’s API and those you doesn’t know the MC’s API.
5) It’s Timewarp feature: If you have an international audience, located in different part of the globe, you will be pleased to know that all of them can get their emails at, say 8:30am (local time). It’s a HUGE converting factor.
6) It’s “social” friendly… Nah! It’s social’s fiance. Check out it’s latest social addons. It’s just waay ahead of any competitor.
7) It’s funny to work with. I think it worths to be mentioned.
9) You could geo-target your campaigns… even with info that you haven’t collected.
10) It’s highly integrated with most CRM and other third-party applications.
Anyway… I could keep talking here.. but I think I express my point of view.
Need I say more? IMHO MC Rules! (By the way… I haven’t been asked nor paid to write this comment.. I really feel every sentence).
All best,
Will
@Will
I respect your opinions, but perhaps you haven’t been using Aweber recently. I’ll address some of your points below.
1. Regardless of all the support groups, forums…etc… Aweber’s support is superior because you can get someone on the phone during regular business hours instead of having to wait for a response by email. Aweber also has forums and support groups as well.
2. Aweber allows click tracking without a redirected URL… There’s a little javascript snippet that you can insert on all of your pages that facilitates this. This was a feature introduced last June. So yes, it’s possible and Aweber has done this. If you would like, I can send you one of my Aweber emails and you can see for yourself.
3. In terms of tracking, Aweber can track exactly who opened what email in addition to exactly which other pages they looked at during their visit on a per user level. With mailchimp, you have to pay extra for this and they don’t provide the same level of tracking.
4. A/B campaigns and RSS campaigns are supported by Aweber.
In any case, some of your points you’ve expressed are valid and covered in my article such as the API. But Aweber has changed in the last 3-4 months alone. Perhaps you should give it another test drive.
Hey… Thanks for your reply!
1) You are right. Being an “offshore” customer, phone support is something I don’t miss too much (in fact, I don’t miss it at all).
2) Oh! Got it… But it only works for your own websites… If you are linking to URL out of your reach and you want to track them… it won’t work.
Anyway… It’s great to have options…
All best,
Will
I found this really useful I have been considering aweber for a while so good to hear someone elses experience. Would be interested to hear how aweber compares to 1 Shopping cart. Are they similar products or totally different things. Would be really interested to hear any views on this.
@Ali
Glad to know that this review was helpful. Aweber and 1Shoppingcart are completely different services. Aweber is for email marketing only and 1Shopping is an ecommerce solution that offers email marketing. In terms of deliverability, tracking and flexibility, I would tend to think that Aweber does a better job though I’ve never evaluated 1Shoppingcart for it’s email marketing alone.
Steve
Thanks for the outline of the difference between aweber and 1SC. Appreciate it.
Exactly what I was looking for, thanks ! I have one question for you: how easy or difficult was the switch over? Did you get to input your existing contacts easily into the AWeber database? Would you recommend starting out with Mailchimp and when I get more subscribers switch over to Aweber?
Thanks in advance
Sarah
http://twitter.com/sarahsantacroce
@Ali
I’m glad that is was useful!
@Sarah
It was pretty easy to transition over to Aweber. Basically you need to let Aweber know that you are switching from MailChimp, export your contacts to a CSV file and then cut and paste the contacts in. The only pain was recreating all of my forms and autoresponders…especially the popup. I would recommend just signing up for Aweber from the start and not having to deal with it later.
ok, thanks so much for this, Steve
Maybe MailChimp just upgraded their tracking, because if I send out a campaign (email) I can see who opened it and then drill down further and see what they clicked on, how many times, and when they clicked on it.
I can also look up an individual user and see those same stats, but over the course of several campaigns (emails).
An additional plus for tracking is that I use the Google Analytics 360 plug-in on my WordPress powered site and it allows me to drill down even farther and see how much time the user spent on my website, where they went to, what they clicked on, and so on.
So, some pretty cool metrics from MailChimp. I don’t use Aweber, so can’t compare.