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Based on weighted criteria below
Low Pricing icon

Low Pricing (weighted 11%)

AWeber

$19/month
for 0-500 subscribers

$29/month
for 501-2,500 subscribers,

$49/month
for 2501-5,000 subscribers

$69/month
for 5,001-10,000 subscribers,

$149/month
for 10,001-25,000 subscribers,

For more than 25,000 subscribers AWeber offer an enterprise package.

All of these pricing plans include unlimited emails and unlimited image hosting. They also have a 30 day free trial so you can check it out to see if it meets your needs.

It seems that AWeber also charges for unsubscribers when they calculate your monthly number of subscribers. This seems completely counter-intuitive, but it is their policy. If you don't want to get charged for unsubscribers, they say you should delete your unsubscriber list.

That can mess up all kinds of data that you may need to streamline your email marketing campaign. This is a pretty shady policy that is buried deep in AWeber's help section, so many people don't realize until they've already signed up.

Be careful when getting close to those subscriber limits. If you exceed the limit on subscribers, AWeber will go ahead and bill you for the next plan up.

Campaign Monitor

For a Maximum of 500 Subscribers:

Basic: $9/month
Basic allows you to send up to 12,500 emails per month.

Unlimited: $29/month
Send unlimited emails every month

Premier: $149/month
Send unlimited emails every month, and get other premium customer service features like email design consultants, online training, and a customer success manager.

For a Maximum of 2,500 subscribers:

Basic: $29/month
Send up to 2,500 emails per month

Unlimited: $59/month
Send unlimited emails every month

Premier: $149/month
Send unlimited emails every month, and get other premium customer service features like email design consultants, online training, and a customer success manager.

For a Maximum of 10,000 subscribers:

Basic: $89/month
Send up to 75,000 emails per month

Unlimited: $149/month
Send unlimited emails every month

Premier: $249/month
Send unlimited emails every month, and get other premium customer service features like email design consultants, online training, and a customer success manager.

Campaign Monitor will give you a custom quote for more than 50,000 subscribers.

There are no setup fees, and Campaign Monitor offers a limited free trial to test out their software.

Design icon

Design (weighted 11%)

AWeber

There are more than 700 templates in AWeber. The editor is much more flexible than Campaign Monitor.

If you don't want to use their templates there are a couple different options to choose from. You can create your own custom HTML template, which will obviously require some coding skills.

You can also contact the AWeber team to modify an existing template or create an entirely new one. They charge $29 for editing an existing template and $299 for creating an entirely new one. The new one may be a bit pricey, but editing an existing one is a pretty good deal.

AWeber's design features dwarf those of Campaign Monitor.

 

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor doesn't have nearly as many templates as AWeber. There are only 35 to choose from, but you can also import your own HTML file. This requires a little knowledge of coding.

That said, the templates offered are very well designed. They are very professional in appearance, responsive, and highly customizeable.

You won't have to worry about how your email will look on other devices. Campaign Monitor offers a preview of how your newsletter will look in all the major email clients.

The drag and drop editor gives you the option to add buttons, images, social share items, and dividers. This can completely change the overall look and feel of your layout and really make your email pop.

Frontend Features icon

Frontend Features (weighted 11%)

AWeber

AWeber has a pretty sophisticated autoresponder system. They allow you to send a number of follow up emails to your customers automatically.

There is also a very nice landing page creator in AWeber. This lets your customers fall on an attractive page that can easily convert them into subscribers.

The AWeber form templates are easy to navigate and you customers should have no trouble with the form's flow. There is no danger of frustrating a potential subscriber.

AWeber has a mobile stats app, for iOS and Android, that will help you view important stats for your list, broadcasts, and subscribers while on the move. They app only measures your stats though, so it is useful as a monitoring tool, but you won't be able to react to that information until you're back at a computer.

Campaign Monitor

The basic plan has access to a limited set of features. They have a drag and drop editor, sign-up forms, landing pages, autoresponders, limited inbox previews, and spam testing.

With the Unlimited plan you'll have access, to deliverability experts, unlimited inbox previews, and spam testing.

The Premier plan includes all of the features in the monthly Unlimited and Basic plans plus access to online training, an email design consultant, a customer success manager, and 24h support on weekdays.

Campaign Monitor's iOS and Android apps let you manage subscribers and give you real-time access to campaign and subscriber reporting when you’re on-the-go.

Backend Features icon

Backend Features (weighted 11%)

AWeber

AWeber has a completely redesigned modern and clean interface, that web designers will probably love the most.

At the top of Page, the current list you are viewing is displayed. You can toggle to other lists by tapping on the list name. Next you fill find links: Manage Lists, My Apps (where you can add your favorite integrations), and Help and My Account (where you can mange your account information).

Let's check out the main menu:

  • Home - which gives you access to the dashboard where Subscriber Stats, Scheduled and Recently Sent Broadcasts, and List Stats will be displayed
  • Messages - This gives you all the tools necessary for creating your newsletters, follow up, or broadcast messages.
  • Subscribers - manage, add new subscribers, and view you import history here.
  • Sign Up Forms  - This is where you can edit all of your sign up forms that convert visitors into subscribers.
  • Reports - Here is where AWeber deals with all of its analytics.
  • List Options - This lets you access your basic list settings, personalize your list by adding and removing custom fields, and setup automation rules like subscribe or unsubscribe users when they subscribe or unsubscribe to another list.

AWeber's backend is very nice to use. They make it easy and simple to set up all the common tasks associated with email marketing.

Campaign Monitor

The user interface is one of Campaign Monitor’s strongest points. With over 10 years of experience in the business, they have managed to create a user-friendly marketing tool that offers straightforward access to all its features.

Lets explore the items on the menu bar.

  • Overview - Here you'll find your dashboard where you'll see an overview of your recent activity.
  • Campaigns - In this section reports for every campaign you'll find reports for all of your campaigns.
  • Automation  The automation tab lets you streamline your workflow by automating common tasks. If you know what a macro is in computing, this is the same idea.
  • Transactional - Transactional email are treated separately in Constant Contact. The emails are triggered by your site or app when a user performs a certain action, like confirming an order or renewing their membership.
  • Lists & Subscribers - Under this section you have all the necessary tools for managing your subscribers and lists.

The avatar next to your name gives you access to your account and billing settings, your integrations, and your template library.

Campaign Monster's backend is well designed and maintained.

Reports & Statistics icon

Reports & Statistics (weighted 11%)

AWeber

You can track your sales through AWeber to see what email has been the most successful. The same basic analytics and reporting options (clicks, opens, unsubscribes, revenue) are available.

You can see exactly where they’ve clicked so you can build a picture of what content your customers like. It’s also really easy to see who has unsubscribed, and you can use this information to monitor what emails are causing unsubscribes.

AWeber gives you access to standard and more advanced analytics. They give you a wealth of data on clicks, opens, unsubscribes, revenue over time, subscriber growth, stats by location, area code, and market area. These stats may seem like overkill, but they can be really useful in making decisions about your email marketing effort moving forward.

Campaign Monitor

You’ll find your reports under the campaigns tab after sending out your first email campaign.

Clicking on a report will open an overview of the performance of your email marketing effort.

Campaign Monitor sticks to the basics when it comes to reports, but you'll still have a wealth of data on your email marketing efforts. That data is presented reasonably well, but there is some room for improvement. There are data on opens, clicks, social media shares, which email clients your customers use, and opens and clicks over time.

Flexibility icon

Flexibility (weighted 11%)

AWeber

With AWeber you have only two importing options: a manual text-based upload and a spreadsheet upload from XLS, XLSX, TSV, CSV and TXT files. Unlike MailChimp, AWeber doesn’t have third-party integration for importing contacts.

If you are planning to import contacts from other web services you have to export the contacts from the services first and use the spreadsheet upload feature. This is something that will make moving from any other email marketing system to AWeber something of a chore.

You may cancel your account at any time and the backup data feature allows you to export your list of subscribers as you leave.

Campaign Monitor

Importing data into Campaign Monitor is very easy, you can upload CSV, TXT or XLS files. You can also simply add subscribers manually or import data from you Outlook, Gmail or Apple contact list. Campaign Monitor is much better at this initial setup than AWeber.

Campaign Monitor can be re-branded to look like your own product, and if you have multiple clients you can give them access while still managing all of their subscribers from a single account. There is no limit to the number of clients you can add to your account. This is a great tool for freelancers.

Campaign Monitor allows you to give your clients access to almost everything. This allows for a great deal of flexibility.

You may close your account at any time, but Campaign Monitor also allows you to switch to pay per campaign billing. This way you will pay only when you send a campaign or run a design and spam test.

Automation icon

Automation (weighted 11%)

AWeber

Autoresponder emails are very easy to setup and each subscriber is tagged with a message number which indicates which followup emails they have received.

AWeber's solution to autoresponces is not quite as user-friendly as Campaign Monitor's "transactional" emails, but the system gets the job done.

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. This is a little byzantine. It is much less complicated to manage autoresponce emails in Campaign Monitor.

Campaign Monitor

Setting up autoresponders is easy in Campaign Monitor. Emails triggered by your own site or app in response to a subscriber's action are treated separately and called "transactional" emails. This lets you deal with these emails in a different environment from your other emails. Its really helpful to separate these because it de-clutters your workflow substantially.

Campaign Monitor allows you to send automated emails when somebody joins a list, is having a birthday, or any other custom event that is associated with a specific user.

If you want to compile a newsletter based on your recent blog posts, you can set up an automated workflow for site updates, and convert your RSS feed to online content.

Extensibility icon

Extensibility (weighted 11%)

AWeber

AWeber has more than 120 integrations with other apps. This is pretty good, but Campaign Monitor has a lot more.

You can connect your AWeber account to social media, landing pages, shopping carts and many more integrations like WordPress, RavenTools, PayPal, Shopify and many more. They have most of the major apps you are likely to use.

The AWeber team does allow you to create your own integrations if you have the coding chops.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor integrates with lots of survey, customer relationship management, and blogging apps.

There are 250+ integrations you can use including 3rd party apps like Salesforce, Magento and Wordpress.

It is much more likely that your favorite apps will work with Campaign Monitor. Campaign Monitor has a lot more integrations than AWeber.

Support icon

Support (weighted 11%)

AWeber

Aweber's live telephone support is a definite advantage over Campaign Monitor.

They also offer live chat and email support.
Live customer support is available 8AM-8PM EasternTime Mon-Fri and 9AM-5PM ET Sat-Sun (the hours for Awber's phone support are the same as their live chat).

There is a huge knowledgebase available including FAQ’s, video tutorials and live free webinars.

They also respond to user comments and questions on Social Media, especially on Facebook and Twitter.

A searchable collection of hundreds of articles on AWeber's features is at your disposal to help you get started.  They have excellent walkthroughs, troubleshooting, and explanations of their software.

Campaign Monitor

Although Campaign Monitor does not provide phone or chat support for Basic and Unlimited plans, Premier plan customers have access to 24-hour phone support from Monday to Friday. AWeber has phone support whatever your plan may be.

If not on the Premier plan, you may only contact support through the support form. Sadly, Unlimited and Premier users have priority over Basic, so if you have the Basic plan you may have to wait to get your questions answered.

They have plenty of helpful online user guides, forum discussions, and FAQs to help get you started.

All in all, Campaign Monitor's support is a bit sluggish and disappointing.

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