The 5 Best Aweber Alternatives For Ecommerce Businesses

Email marketing is a key part of any savvy digital marketer’s ecommerce strategy, and your email marketing tool can make or break that strategy.

Aweber is a classic email marketing tool that has been used by professionals for years. However, with more sophisticated digital marketing needs emerging as our customers become more demanding, it may be time for an upgrade.

Here are the top 5 Aweber alternatives you can use to give your ecommerce email marketing strategy a much-needed facelift.

#1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation platform built specifically with ecommerce in mind. Providing an easy-to-use drag-and-drop visual email builder, you’ll be able to create beautiful emails in a snap. While email marketing lies at the core of Omnisend, this tool can do so much more.

In particular, it provides sleek automation workflows that allow you to automate messages from several channels such as email, SMS, push notifications, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, and many more.

While other email marketing tools may allow you to automate email marketing, with Omnisend, you can combine channels within the same automation workflow. This allows you to create an immersive customer experience and provide an always-relevant message, regardless of the channel.

Features:

• Visual Email Builder: With Omnisend, you can build emails with a user-friendly visual editor that comes with a ton of pre-built templates that are 100% customizable.
• Smart segmentation: Target your customers based on profile data, campaign engagement, or shopping behavior to send ultra-relevant messages.
• Omnichannel marketing automation: Add several channels into the same automated workflow to create a more immersive omnichannel experience.
• Email capture: Use dynamic popups, landing pages, or gamified Wheel of Fortune email capture forms for easy subscriber list building.

Pricing:

• Free Plan: Omnisend offers a free plan for basic email marketing that allows you to send up to 15,000 emails per month.
• Standard Plan: The Standard plan allows you to tap into Omnisend’s powerful automation starting at only $16 per month. This plan also allows for add-on modules so you can customize it with what you really need.
• Pro Plan: Omnisend’s Pro Plan unlocks the full capabilities of this platform, allowing you to use all the channels available, and starting from $199 per month.
• Enterprise Plan: For larger companies with more specific needs, the Enterprise plan, starting from $2000 per month, allows for a dedicated account and deliverability manager.

#2. MailChimp

When we think of more modern Aweber alternatives, Mailchimp is among the top names that come to mind. Easy to use and basic enough for anyone to get started, MailChimp makes email marketing pretty easy.Also offering a visual drag-and-drop editor, creating emails in MailChimp is simple. They also offer the possibility of creating ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google directly from within the app.

While they also offer automation, it’s certainly more of an afterthought than a cornerstone feature for Mailchimp. There are many tools on this list that do automation better, though Mailchimp’s will certainly be easier to use for a first-time email marketer.

*Note: It’s important to note for ecommerce marketers using Shopify that Mailchimp does not offer native integration with the ecommerce platform and is potentially not the best choice for those using Shopify.

Features:

• Visual Email Builder: Very easy to use visual email composer that comes with pre-built templates for you to use.
• Ad creation: You’re able to create ads across Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
• Email capture: Use embedded forms, popups, or landing pages for email list building.
• Basic automation: Create simple email automation workflows for basic drip campaigns

Pricing:

• Free plan: Mailchimp offers a free plan that allows up to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month.
• Grow plan: Dependent on the number of subscribers you have, Mailchimp’s grow plan starts off at $10 per month.
• Pro plan: $199 plus the amount for the number of subscribers you have (Grow plan).

#3. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is another good alternative to Aweber. This tool has great features that can help you deliver your beautiful emails at the right time to the right customers.

On Campaign Monitor platform you will find pretty good segmentation and personalization features. They will help you to handle and apply your rich customer data to well-targeted campaigns.
Also, they offer a great visual journey designer to create automation workflows. Although it isn’t perfect for advanced triggers, some popular marketing automation can definitely be launched.

However, by using Campaign Monitor you won’t be able to include text messages, Facebook ads or any other channel into your communication workflow. Campaign Monitor is only about email marketing. If you feel like you’re not ready for more advanced omnichannel marketing, this tool may be your choice.

Features:

• Visual Email Builder: This tool also has a great email builder plus a bunch of beautiful email templates.
• Visual Journey Designer: Campaign Monitor has a great tool for marketing automation beginners. It’s very easy-to-use and helps you to better understand the automated communication flow with your customers.
• Personalization: Easy to personalize the campaigns according to the customer data you have.
• Efficient email delivery: One more personalization feature worth mentioning separately. You are able to deliver emails at each individual subscriber’s optimal time.

Pricing:

• Basic plan: Unlike previous tool recommendations, Campaign Monitor doesn’t offer any plan free of charge. Also, this tool is more expensive. Basic plan starts at $9 for up to 500 subscribers. If you have more, the price for basic plan increases.
• Unlimited plan: Starts at $29/mo for up to 500 subscribers.
• Premier plan: The plan that unlocks advanced segmentation starts at $149/mo.

Constant Contact is a solid platform with great deliverability rates. Due to its plethora of features and great reputation, we can call it an upgraded alternative to Aweber.

First of all, in this solution, you will find a standard set of features that you need for email marketing: visual email editor, a bunch of newsletter templates, customer segmentation, marketing automation, a wide range of signup forms, etc.

On top of that, Constant Contact provides companies with added value features like live events, online surveys, coupons, and donations.

When it comes to marketing automation, this tool rises to the challenge. It can definitely offer great, comprehensive workflows that will help you reach customers on time.

Perhaps all these benefits make the Constant Contact one of the most popular email marketing tools among marketers. I see only one limitation – a lack of additional communication channels.

Features:

• Visual email editor: Like the vast majority of email marketing tools, Constant Contact offers visual email builder as well.
• Email capture: You will find a wide range of signup forms and flexible customization.
• Marketing automation: Constant Contact offers automated workflows based on customer engagement with your emails, welcome series, abandoned cart emails only for Shopify merchants.
• Integration with other channels: You can use your data for Facebook ads.
• Added value: Event marketing tools, polls, coupons – these in-house features will make your life easier.

Pricing:

What’s great, Constant Contact offers the first month for free. It’s twice as long as other tools on this list.

• Email plan: The price is based on the number of contacts. But it starts at $20/mo.
• Email Plus plan: This plan unlocks event marketing tools and advanced ecommerce features. It starts at $45/mo.

#5. Mailjet

I wouldn’t say Mailjet is the best alternative to Aweber if you want to upgrade your marketing. Let’s say, it might be the choice if you are looking simply for something else than Aweber.

In Mailjet you will find all the standard email marketing offer, including a visual email builder, ready-made email templates,and customer segmentation. This tool doesn’t provide tools for email capture. So you might need to look for a third-party provider.

Also, you can automate your marketing messages in MailJet. You can choose from welcome emails and recent customer interactions with your emails or according to imported data from other sources.

With all that said, it seems that Mailjet has a set of great features but lacks overall comprehensiveness. On the other hand, many things can be done via API and third-party solutions. So this tool might be the choice for a marketer which is capable to integrate and customize tools and features by himself.

Features:

• Customer segmentation: Here you can find some basic customer segmentation on campaign behavior and profile data.
• Marketing automation: Quite basic automated workflows based on the recent customer engagement with your emails, plus welcome emails.
• Marketing channels: In addition to email, Mailjet offers SMS channel to approach customers.
• Collaboration: Mailjet solution allows several accounts to work on the same files and designs real-time.

Pricing:

• Free plan: By using this plan you can send up to 6000 emails per month, 200 emails per day for free. This plan is only for sending bulk newsletter campaigns.
• Basic plan: The price depends on the number of subscribers. It starts at $8.69. For this value, you can send up to 30 000 emails per month. The list of features you get is very short.
• Premium plan: Starts at $18.86. This plan reveals the best feature set.
• Enterprise plan: Customized solution for high-volume senders. The price is the object for negotiation.

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By wrapping things up, I will let myself to give you a piece of advice. Think forward.

Expectations of the customers for superior user experience are growing every day. Even if today you think that omnichannel marketing is way out of your league, tomorrow it will be something you must have to survive.

So while looking for a new email service provider, pay more attention to the tools that can reach your customers via multiple channels. Don’t limit your business potential by approaching your customers just by email when you can do it on channels they’re already using to engage with brands.