AWeber vs. ClickFunnels vs. LocaliQ

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.

Great for an all-in-one marketing package. From the web page to lead and email capture. Running ads to a sales funnel page to capture leads to a sale on a shopping cart page and the ability to up-sell and down-sell products with ease. Whether your business is face-to-face or online ClickFunnels has everything and more that you require to run marketing.

Incentivized

The forms of online marketing continues to grow and LocaliQ's associates have the relevant skills to keep up with this and recommend what is suited for our business. Geo fencing is another area that makes a lot of sense as people use their phones more and more for accessing the web. Through LocaliQ we can pinpoint physicial places where we can market to a group that matches our target audience.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The ease of building landing pages is incredible. It's just drag and drop, and still very customizable. It's simple enough that anyone can build a page, not just a designer. They have simple templates to start from and you can make a great branded page easily from there.
• It's great at generating leads. You can embed simple opt-in forms in webpages at the top of your landing page and integrate with your CRM and it also stores your leads in the system as well. Opting in can trigger a number of different actions, including a thank you page, a second offer, or trigger an automated email.
• ClickFunnels's biggest strength is sales funnels. Easily create a continuous set of pages that get someone from a visitor to a subscriber, and to a paid customer. You don't have to "glue" a bunch of different systems together like a page builder, shopping cart, eCommerce tool, email marketing tool, or CRM. It's all interconnected so you can churn out sales quickly, all automated.

Incentivized

• ThriveHive is a smaller marketing team dedicated to helping small to medium sized businesses perfect their marketing messages. ThriveHive is particularity good at understanding how Google, and other search engines work, and have been instrumental in helping my company to grow and evolve.
• With ThriveHive, you get a dedicated coach who is matched to your type of business. This experience with similar businesses gives your coach a better understanding of your business and the challenges your company faces.
• My coach is very good at responding to my needs within 1 to 2 business days. Email contacts are fluent and as often as I need, to discuss ideas or questions. I can only speak of my relationship with my coach, and I am very pleased.
• I feel that ThriveHive makes every effort to take excellent care of their clients, and makes you feel like you are their most important customer. I definitely believe that this is one of ThriveHives' greatest assets.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• End USER EXPERIENCE - OH. MY. GOODNESS. This software needs help in the design department. I don't like critiquing people or products, but in this case, you need to get someone to help you with design to really make your landing page look professional (this is attached to your brand image). A lot of direct response marketers use this platform for younger brands, so typically the designed landing pages on this software don't look great.
• User navigation - It's not necessarily user intuitive.
• The software has interior platforms for membership courses - But this is not a great user experience for your course. A micro-course, 7-day trial, or mini-course as an opt-in offer might work here, but COACHES, do not use this as the delivery system of your membership course. Go elsewhere for that, like Teachable, MyKajabi, or Thinkific.
• They need to make more room for templates. The basic plan of $99 only allows you to have 20 landing pages. According to industry leaders, you should have 40 per offer.

Incentivized

• LocaliQ could improve how it tracks and reports on customer journeys across those channels to provide a clearer view of ROI.
• The pricing structure is not fully transparent, making it hard to understand the true costs associated with campaigns. Breaking down the fees associated with LocaliQ would make budgeting easier.
• LocaliQ is able to provide basic ad creative, but there tends to be a disconnect between our brand voice and what is expected with creative. It would be nice to be able to get all design work within LocaliQ rather than have to use and outside designer all the time.

Incentivized

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.

I use the funnel on a daily basis and spent a significant sum to hire someone to set this up and design the funnel, there's no way I won't renew the funnel. It is easy to maintain, very cost-effective, and doesn't require a lot of my time to manage properly.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Very easy to use and manage. There have been a few times I have needed to make some edits or change the flow of the funnel, and even though I didn't do the initial setup, I have no problems figuring out how to make the changes on my own without their help.

Incentivized

Overall usability pretty good. If we would have gotten better return on our advertising dollar I would have continued with them - their dashboard was very easy to use and the recaps they provided were helpful. They try to put data in bite-sized pieces for the client that are understandable (unlike google's reporting page itself which can be a bit difficult to understand at times). Their team was friendly, semi-responsive, and provided explanations when requested

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I don't think you should have to wait for more than an hour or two to get in touch with someone when you need support. Because they primarily have overseas help, it's typically at least until the next business day until you get help. Then there is the language barrier to deal with. It's not ideal. I have contacted support a few times and have gotten answers. However, I consider myself much savvier than most in terms of understanding all the behind the scenes issues that go on with building a website and online marketing funnels. So if I were a beginner or not as familiar with how to code and create websites, I would think the support is terrible.

Incentivized

Yes, I highly recommend you hire an expert for this. While CF claims that anyone can set up a funnel, there's a difference between having a funnel and having a funnel that works. Between the design and the copy you use, unless you have a marketing background, hire an expert.

Incentivized

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.

I went with ClickFunnels due to recommendation by a digital marketing mentor. WordPress to me had too much maintenance in the background and it was more time consuming to build pages at the time. Mailchimp is an email marketing software with a website builder and landing page builder but the payment integrations where limited. Kajabi was simply out of my budget at the time and it had more features than i needed

Incentivized

I have investigated national services like American Eagle and also small market locally owned business like Red Shoes. Each year, I look into at least one other service provider to evaluate our service value. So far, no other company has come close to providing an all around service

Incentivized

There is always the challenge with practices that have multiple locations, trying to target a geographical zone that is sometimes to wide. But we have successfully navigated this issue when needed to target those who need the most added volume.

Incentivized

• Aweber delivers my email fast and reliably, never had a problem tech support could not handle (by the way, their support is great!)
• Since I have been with Aweber for so many years, I have an unlimited plan for a very affordable rate
• Aweber may not be a sexy as some of the new kids on the block, but it is a solid offering you should consider when choosing an autoresponder

Incentivized

• My clients make more money with it than without it
• Other builders aren't necessarily better...we've tried and keep coming back to CF
• If CF 2.0 (which launches around March I'm told) is anywhere near as impressive as Russell Brunson makes it sound, it will be a TOTAL game changer when compared to the current version...(which will still be available as well)

Incentivized

• It's hard to quantify but I know I've had at least 5 to 10 new clients in the last 6 months come from efforts related to my website
• Not having to work on my website myself also helped free up my time, I don't need to worry!
• Customer service is good, the team doesn't wait till there is a problem, they schedule check ins regularly

Incentivized