Does anybody have experience with both Aweber and Mailchimp? I currently use Mailchimp but a few podcasts have mentioned that they use Aweber and it sounds like it makes a few things easier to do (drip emails) than Mailchimp. Worth switching?
I personally use Campaign Monitor (used by people like 37Signals) and I’m very happy with it. Worth a look.
I use both, for historical reasons and for different reasons. MailChimp feels more modern, but actually they both work excellently. You could toss a coin to choose.
I use MailChimp exclusively, so can’t compare.
You are correct that MailChimp’s autoresponders are fairly limited. If you want more control, I would advise you to take a look at Mandrill, their transactional e-mail service. If you send using Mandrill, it will also show up in the user records in Mailchimp. Which is very nice.
Also their API’s, documentation and support are top notch, even if you are on a free plan.
I didn’t even know about Mandrill. That looks like a great replacement for SES if I ever move my servers off of AWS.
Another (more fiddly/longer setup) to consider might be http://customer.io. It’s way more flexible than Mailchimp/Aweber/Constant Contact, but also, as stated, requires way more setup/thought/messing with. It does open up some pretty neat possibilities, though.
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If you have a large(isn) mail list and are looking to cut costs, check out self-hosted email newsletter platform, which is self-hosted LAMP application for sending out newsletter. While it’s self-hosted, it uses Amazon SES for email integration, which can cut the spend of sending out 10,000 emails down to something like $1.
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Every time I sign up for a list powered by Mailchimp, I get an email asking me to confirm my email, and then I get another email confirming that I’ve confirmed my email. It brings out my inner George Costanza, like something out of ‘Modern Seinfeld’
I don’t know whether that’s something you can change, but it seems all MC lists I’ve encountered behave this way.
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@makery, yes that final welcome email is optional.
The default mailchimp signup experience isn’t great. It is possible to improve it though if you can write a little javascript. I wrote about how I did that here.
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I’m a fan of mailchimp (and mandrill).
Keep your signup form short . . .
Aweber works but feels really dated.
The second welcome email is optional.
Interesting thread.
You know, G2 Crowd (disc: I work there) has a comparison of MailChimp and aweber (g2crowd-dot-com/compare/aweber-vs-mailchimp). If you go through the tabs, you should see a specific comparison for email list management.
Hope this helps! Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.
BTW, Modern Seinfeld is GREATT!!!
I recently started transitioning from MailChimp to ConvertKit. I have high hopes!
Since this thread reopened I thought I would mention what I have since done. I was using Mailchimp for a while but found a few things fairly cumbersome. I have since switched to Drip and love it. They are still building out features but it makes drip campaigns very easy and is generally more intuitive for me. I spend less time using if/then statements as I can have many separate signup sequences for the same mailing list.
globalwj, that’s awesome, thanks for the update.
I considered Drip strongly before going with ConvertKit. One of the features Drip offered that ConvertKit does not is the done-for-you content writing. Have you made use of this part of the service?
I have not…yet. I need to spend a bit more time on a content strategy and then might take advantage of that. Great onboarding offer for them imho.
It really is. That one feature is what had me hemming & hawking over which platform to use. In the end, my first product ended up being a book, and ConvertKit is highly-optimized for executing Nathan Barry’s book-selling game plan, so I went that way.