AWeber is an email marketing and automation solution. It provides support for mobile-friendly HTML email newsletters, autoresponder campaigns, subscriber segmentation and management, RSS-to-email features, signup forms for websites or blogs, and more.
$0
Up to 500 subscribers & 3,000 email sends per month
Marigold Engage+
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Marigold Engage+ (formerly Cheetah Messaging or CheetahMail) is an email marketing platform. It is optimized for delivering segmented email marketing campaigns with security in mind. It also integrates with any third-party CRM software.
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Pricing
AWeber
Marigold Engage+
Editions & Modules
AWeber Free
$0
Up to 500 subscribers & 3,000 email sends per month
AWeber Lite
$14.99
per month
AWeber Plus
$29.99
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWeber
Marigold Engage+
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
AWeber offers a free plan up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 email sends per month. Pricing for the Plus Plan is determined based on the total number of subscribers in your account. Pricing starts as low as $29.99/month (or $20/month if billed annually).
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.
I think CheetahMail, being one of the main ESPs in the market, is a quality choice. However, I would suggest that it's really only valuable for a bit larger of an organization, generally having staff of 100+ and revenues in tens of millions -- this is mainly to justify the amount of investment required, so may be cost-prohibitive to some. You also need to make sure that you understand the entire "level of support" you will gain through your specific contract.... the key is understanding what types of resources are within your organization (who's doing the coding? who comes up with the next campaign? What's the overall strategy?) Depending on these questions and resources, may help determine your final needs from a services point of view. CheetahMail can provide a wealth of various services specific to needs (and changes over time as your business changes), but a clear understanding of what you have before you bring them on will really help getting up and running quickly. Also be sure to truly understand the costs for the initial integrations, setups, IP senders, etc.
List building: AWeber makes it easy to grow opt-in subscribers through customizable signup forms as well an integration with tools like Sumo and Hustle Pro.
List segmentation: with a little more information about each subscriber, it's easy to create custom segmented lists based on different criteria.
Deliverability: AWeber enforces opt-in rules to keep spammers out of its system and improve deliverability rates for reputable users. We rarely have issues with our messages from AWeber being routed to spam folders.
Double opt-in: AWeber makes it easy to set up double opt-in to make extra certain you have a high-quality mailing list.
Aweber would be even better if it had the ability to host landing pages. I have to use a tool like landingpages.net to do this if I don't want to create the landing pages as part of my client's website. If I manage their site, it isn't a problem, but it keeps me from using Aweber for clients who manage their own sites or dont' have one.
Aweber would greatly benefit from a more robust reseller program. Firms like mine have multiple clients and, with each client needing an individual Aweber account, it would be nice to have access to margin so that we could resell the services.
Along the lines of a reseller program, it would be great of Aweber allowed resellers to white label the interface and administrate multiple accounts from one agency account.
The organization of CheetahMail could at times be better, as you create more and more mailings, they just pile up in a long list. It would be useful to be able to create folders to store specific mailings in. (ex. editorial, newsletters, marketing, etc.)
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.
As I have begun exploring competitors, I've come to realize that every competitor offers so much more functionality and integration than CheetahMail does. When we first signed our contract, CheetahMail was much more innovative and at the forefront of email. Since being bought out by Experian, we've seen a huge decline in service and innovation. They have laid off much of their staff and moved their account representatives to Costa Rica. They also heavily rely on on third parties which you will have to pay large amounts of money for while other Email Service Providers have integrated new technologies into their platform. You will get more for your money going to a different email service such as Responsys, Silverpop, Listrak and the like,
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.
CheetahMail has a high learning curve to master and requires a lot of backend work with tech teams to set up. Navigation is not the best and everything that should be automated is still extremely manual.
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.
Account reps have a quick response time but a very slow resolution time. Because account reps do not have technical knowledge, there is a long long lead time between flagging a problem and tech team resolution.
We often use Canva to design our content and then export it as an image to upload into Aweber, as Aweber designs and limitations are too much of a hindrance to our needs. Canva is a brilliant tool for marketing and saves you a lot of time being able to adapt or change an existing template you create.
CheetahMail is very far behind these other providers. Specifically in Lyris we could build forms that automatically generated code connected to specific lists and be up and running in less than a few hours. With CheetahMail that would take days and developers at times.
The customer service team at CheetahMail was good and efficient. It is always a frustrating experience to call in when your stuck on something but the CS team did a good job of quickly and effectively helping us when we called them for support.
Compared to other ESPs that our employees support, this platform was quite easy to learn and the documentation provided often helped us figure things out without having to go and call CS.
