By Fahmida Y. Rashid

If businesses want to grow, they cannot ignore marketing. Thankfully, there are plenty ofemail marketingtools available to help even the smallest of smallbusinessesget started. AWeber (starting at $19 per month) is just such a choice, offering aneasy-to-use platform with no hidden surprises. AWeber's templates simplify the process for creating visually attractive email marketing campaigns and the reporting dashboard tracks the most important basic statistics. It can'timport contacts Gmail or other third-party address books, nor does it offer Google Analytics integration. For better third-party contacts integration and tracking, you should consider MailChimp and Campaigner, our two Editors' Choices for email marketingtools. For this review, I signed up for AWeber's basic plan.

How does AWeber compare against the competition? It would cost a small business with 2,500 contacts in its marketing database $29 per month to get started with AWeber, which is equivalent to what it would cost to use iContactandCampaign Monitor. Unlike Campaign Monitor, AWeber doesn't have any caps on how many messages can be sent in a month.

Pricingand Features AWeber offers month-to-month, quarterly, and annual plans for each of its tiers. The least-expensiveplan, for up to 500 contacts, is $19 per month, $49 per quarter, or $149 per year. AWeber adds $10 to the normal rate to expand the service to 2,500 users and adds $30 to increase the capacity to 5,000 users. AWeber also automatically sets you up for automatic billing. If you change your mind, the company offers a 30-day full refund.

Watch out for the $29 report on how to develop an email marketing strategy. It's really easy to click on the wrong thing when checking out and winding up with the report in your shopping cart.If do you wind up buying it by mistake or don't find it useful, AWeber promises to refund your money. There is no free trial or free version to test out the servicebut AWeber does let you try out the software for just $1 during the first month. That's agooddeal.

Creating aSubscriber List AWeber lets you manually add up to 10 contactssubscribersvia a form. Each record collects the name of the person, email address, ad-tracking value, and the name of the initial email message the person will receive. This can turn into a long and tedious exercise for a long list of names.The import tool is a better choice, as it has a textbox to cut and paste an entire comma-delimited list of email addresses. You can also upload a spreadsheet (.XLS and .XLSX), text file (.CSV, .TSV, and .TXT). Unlike Campaigner, MailChimp, and GetResponse, AWeber doesn't have Gmail or third-partyintegration forpulling contacts, which is disappointing.

You have to let AWeber know where your subscribers came fromwhether they signed up on a form, bought a product and opted to receive mail, or gave verbal agreement. AWeber also wants to know whether the list is being moved from another mail marketing provider. The goal is to verify you aren't spamming or buying lists. AWeber auto-creates a confirmation message, which is sent to contacts to verify their subscription. Unlike GetResponse, AWeber allowed all of my disposable Mailinator addresses. I wish more services filtered out those domains especially, you have a limiton the number of subscribers you can contact, and disposable email addresses will seldom lead to a response. I found the process for importing the contactsslowa text file of less than a dozen names took a full 24 hours to beverified by AWeber and displayed in my account. The names I added manually took about 15 to 20 minutes toshow up in my account.

When creating a list, you have the choice of using a pre-generated subject line, such as "Please confirm your request to subscribe" or creating yourown. However, creating yourown meansyouhave to wait one day for AWeber's team to verify it asa valid subject line. AWeber also has a wizard to walk you through creating signup forms. I was happy to see I could segment users based on custom fields or profile information.

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AWeber Email Marketing