Email marketing is gaining popularity worldwide. It helps businesses generate leads, contact potential customers, and much more. You can run highly customized email campaigns using email marketing tools. Different email marketing tools have different features.
Some of these features are unique to specific email marketing software. Some basic features are common.
The main use of email marketing tools is to drive sales. They are used to send emails to potential customers thus helping to increase sales.
In this article, we shall compare select features of two excellent email marketing platforms. These include email templates, autoresponders, and pricing of two popular email marketing solutions. These tools are AWeber and ConvertKit. You can use our guide to arrive at a conclusion on which tool is right for you and suits your business needs.
AWeber vs ConvertKit – Email Templates Features
Templates help you design excellent emails. They are predefined formats. They don’t need you to know code to design or run them. They come pre-loaded along with the email marketing tool.
In terms of templates, AWeber has a wide variety of customizable email templates. It has more than 700 email templates. AWebers has templates for a variety of categories such as Blog, Celebration, Retail, and Corporate. The only issue is that AWeber templates come across as impractical and old-fashioned.
Using such templates may make them end up in the spam folders of the subscribers. The email templates of ConvertKit look minimalistic. There are just five types of templates that you can opt for. These templates are designed with very basic and simple features.
There are no options to add any extra columns. If you are in need to have a template with a design that’s more complex, then you may have to get it coded in HTML. Colors, fonts, and alignments can be customized.
ConvertKit has a simple email designer yet it is highly intuitive. It is not suitable if you want to load your emails with media. ConvertKit emphasizes delivery, efficiency, and conversion. Its templates lack elements of design and are not over-styled. This may compromise the email’s readability.
Taking all the above points into consideration, it may be difficult to say which one of the two is better than the other. AWeber has around 700 templates but are old fashioned. ConvertKit has just five types which are difficult to customize.
AWeber vs ConvertKit – Autoresponders
Autoresponder is a feature in an email marketing tool that helps you to mail subscribers in a specially defined manner. It automatically sends out emails based on pre-defined criteria set by you.
For example, you can program your email marketing software to do the following up by use of the in-built autoresponder. Send a welcome email within 10 minutes of a user signing up. Send the same subscriber a discount coupon after 7 days.
Promote a product to the subscriber after 2 weeks of signing up and so forth. This type of email campaign is called a Drip Campaign. The role of autoresponders is crucial in the success of such a campaign.
AWeber is excellent if you need to set up sequences for autoresponder, send broadcasts or even build lists for email. It is straightforward to use, cheap and reliable. Until sometime back AWeber’s autoresponders had the reputation of being the best for email automation. AWeber had gained popularity because of its email automation tool.
But all this has changed now with the advent of ConvertKit. With ConvertKit you can have tailormade email messages sent to your subscribers. This is as if you can talk one to one to them, taking into account the actions that they have done and their interests. This is the future of email marketing.
The days of making an email list and then sending out email broadcasts randomly hoping to find a target are gone. Today people get just too much email to read, and a major portion of these emails received are junk. So, to get your subscriber’s attention you have to personalize emails. You need to address the subscriber’s interests and needs.
The advanced automation tools present in ConvertKit set it apart from other email service providers on the market. It provides an automation builder that’s visual. This enables you to send targeted content and well-timed emails to your email list.
You can have a customized subscriber’s path based upon their actions that they perform on your site. You can also segment the audience based on customer journeys.
With ConvertKit it is simple to set up marketing automation without any hassle which that triggers emails. These are based upon the subscriber’s behaviors and interests. If you are in the process of a carefully crafted sequence of the autoresponder, you can decide the order. You would not like to break the flow in the middle.
You also don’t want to send more than one email per day to one person. All this can be easily handled in ConvertKit. You can set up the autoresponder to only send the email to those who are not in the autoresponder sequence.
Using the automation features in ConvertKit you can prevent sending duplicate emails. You can also prevent sending emails about products, new pricing, and discounts to people who have already purchased a product.
Once the product is purchased you can send newsletters about upcoming products or similar products the subscriber may be interested in.
Because of all these features in autoresponders, ConvertKit emerges as the clear winner.
AWeber vs ConvertKit – Pricing
Most platforms for email marketing have a pricing model that’s tiered when they offer particular features. These two email marketing tools are straightforward compared to them. ConvertKit comes in just two plans: Complete and Free. Most tools have limited functionality in their free plans, but the free option of ConvertKit is usable.
The Free Plan includes landing pages, unlimited emails, forms, and support for businesses and individuals for a maximum of 1000 subscribers. For greater needs, you can opt for the Complete plan which is at $29 per month. Monthly fees will increase as subscribers do. For more than 900,000 subscribers you can go for a custom plan from ConvertKit.
AWeber has a similar scheme of pricing. The entry-level plan that’s paid is cheaper; it costs $19 per month. Like ConvertKit the AWebers Pro Plans charges you based on subscriber numbers. No matter what plan you choose, you will have the access to all the features in the tool.
The free plan supports only 500 contacts and has limited sends for emails a month. The custom plan begins with the threshold being 25,000 subscribers.
You get more for your investment if you choose long-term subscriptions. ConvertKit offers a discount on monthly fees if payment is done annually. While AWeber is less costly if you opt for a quarterly or annual billing cycle. It seems that ConvertKit is more expensive than AWeber. Let us take a look at this.
Using ConvertKit you get more facilities that would help you increase the return of investment on your email marketing. AWeber charges for every subscriber that is on every list. Hence you end up paying for much more subscribers than you have. Compared to this ConvertKit charges only once per subscriber. AWeber charges for those who unsubscribed. ConvertKit charges for the subscribers currently on your list.
On the pricing issue between both these email marketing platforms, it is a close contest. Both AWeber and ConvertKit are priced similarly with ConvertKit being costlier than AWeber. Both also offer free email service solutions. Although AWeber is cheaper, its features and pricing strategies cannot be compared to ConvertKit. Both AWeber, as well as ConvertKit, offer full access and functionality in all their plans including their free ones too.
Conclusion – AWeber vs ConvertKit
Both these email marketing products are popular on the market.
AWeber follows a list-centric approach. People subscribe and signup for one or more lists for mailing. All email actions are based on the list memberships and not individual subscribers. This makes it confusing when you send different emails on different email lists. Someone being on several lists might receive a lot of emails at once, that too with different subjects. You may never get to know how many subscribers you have.
ConvertKit follows a subscriber centric approach. It works on a tagging system and not lists.
If you value a better reputation, price, and customer service, you should pick AWeber. But you will have to compromise on email template design. If your priorities are advanced options for automation, ease of use, cleaner interface then choose ConvertKit.
AWeber and ConvertKit represent the old and present generation of email marketing solutions respectively. If you are a content creator who is inexperienced in email marketing, then ConvertKit is for you. You can also check our article on AWeber vs GetResponse.