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Sendlane vs Aweber: Which Email Tool Should You Use? (2023 Comparison)
Trying to decide between Sendlane vs Aweber for your email marketing needs? Wondering which email marketing software best fits your criteria?
Sendlane and Aweber are two popular email marketing tools, but they are designed for different audiences. Unless you know which one is right for your business goals, you may never be able to leverage the power of email marketing.
This is why I will be comparing these two email marketing services against a host of features such as deliverability rates, templates, marketing automation, and analytics to help you decide the right one for your business.
Before you begin, note that Aweber comes with a 30-day free trial while Sendlane offers a 14-day free trial.
Aweber also has a free plan to support up to 500 subscribers.
Table of Contents
What Is Sendlane?
Sendlane is a cloud-based email marketing and automation platform designed to help digital marketers and businesses bring targeted traffic to their websites/landing pages, stay on top of their marketing lists, analyze metrics to enhance traffic with personalized offers, boost conversion rates, and more.
What Is Aweber?
Aweber is an email marketing and automation platform that has been in existence since 1998. It comes with a host of features such as autoresponder campaigns, HTML email newsletters, creation and maintenance of subscriber lists, sign-up form builder for websites/landing pages, audience segmentation features, and more.
Who Is It For?
Sendlane is well-suited for digital marketers, eCommerce business owners, small businesses, and agencies that cater to the marketing needs of small and medium businesses. It also supports affiliate marketing.
Aweber, on the other hand, is ideal for solopreneurs, bloggers, and small businesses that want to use email marketing to promote their products and services. With more than 700 templates and an easy drag-and-drop editor, it works well for novices as well.
Key Conclusion
Go for Sendlane if you,
- Want a visual email marketing automation builder that is intuitive and easy-to-use
- Require advanced reporting and analytics to get a better idea of your audience and the performance of your email marketing campaigns
- Prefer to have well-designed landing pages, some of which are free
- Don’t mind paying extra for more features
On the other hand, go for Aweber as your email marketing service if you,
- Are on a budget or just starting off
- Require a large and responsive support team to help you learn quickly
- Need a wide option of standard templates to quickly create emails
- Prefer an experienced company that has been around for more than 20 years
Before we get into the actual comparison, let’s briefly dwell on some of the important features to consider while choosing an email marketing platform.
How To Choose An Email Marketing Platform?
Here are some factors to consider while choosing an email marketing platform.
Ease Of Use/Support
As mundane as it may sound, choosing an email marketing tool that is easy to use saves a lot of time and effort.
You can start your marketing efforts right away and do not have to hire competent technical resources to handle the platform.
Further, good customer support across many channels can add to your ease of use.
Cost
If ease of use is one side of the coin, your budget is the other.
You will have to strike a balance between the features available and the cost to get the best value for your money.
Website Integration
Another key aspect is that the email marketing solution must integrate with your existing website/landing pages or service, so it is easy to collect email lists, manage them, and run the analytics to understand the performance.
Email Marketing Features
Alongside ease of use and cost, the features offered by the platform will be another big determinant.
To cater to today’s audience, you will need advanced features such as marketing automation, segmentation of lists, advanced analytics, and more.
These are some of the aspects to consider while choosing the right email marketing platform.
The good news is both Sendlane and Aweber meet the above aspects given that they are feature-rich, enable website integration, are easy to use, and are cost-effective.
To help you choose the appropriate platform that will complement your business, we will compare these two platforms in depth.
In-Depth Feature Comparison
Here is a detailed comparison of Sendlane and Aweber.
Getting Started And How Easy Are The Platforms To Use?
Creating an account is easy on both platforms and takes just a few minutes.
However, the start-up process is fairly long in Sendlane and requires more time and effort, typically at least one business day, depending on your contact list.
With Sendlane, you will be sent to the company’s approval page to verify your email address. In particular, you have to verify if your contacts are active on other email lists. Sendlane calls this a “permission” to access them.
That said, this is a good thing too as it cleans the system from spam emails that could affect the credibility of your business. Also, it imports only the active users to save time and effort.
Besides, Sendlane also gives detailed instructions on how to import contacts and is even willing to do this migration for a fee, especially if you have more than 10,000 contacts.
Aweber’s setup and import process are a lot simpler as you can simply move contacts from CSV files.
But Aweber doesn’t do a clean job of separating active and inactive users, though you have the option to choose within date ranges to pick the active users.
In all, Sendlane is more accurate and effective though it can take a little more time and effort to set up.
Email Automation
Email automation is a key aspect that differentiates the two platforms.
Sendlane leverages modern technology to enable you to create workflows and accordingly, segment users based on their actions. You also have the option to choose other criteria for segmentation.
You can apply tags and triggers to every user, and the platform performs custom actions based on them. A good example would be to move users from one list to another based on a specific action that they take.
A unique feature of Sendlane is email retargeting, where you can set up a workflow or a campaign based on the nature of the interaction of a subscriber on your website. In particular, this feature helps with personalization, and through it, increases your sales and conversion rates.
It can also be very helpful for reducing the rate of cart abandonment.
Aweber is not so intuitive with email marketing automation because many features such as tagging were added later as technology became more mature. In this tool, you can manually tag users or contacts, and can even assign them on individual forms when needed.
It also comes with advanced segmenting and sequencing tools for getting more out of your lists.
Overall, Sendlane is better in email automation because they were created along with the software while in Aweber, they were added later.
Email Deliverability Rates
When it comes to email deliverability, Sendlane handles it in-house with its infrastructure. As a result, you have greater control over the email deliverability rate and can maximize it to ensure that your emails go to inboxes and not to spam folders.
You can do this by getting access to premium IP addresses that are not blocked by email clients.
As for Aweber, it has a much lower deliverability rate simply because it doesn’t have a robust infrastructure and no premium IPs.
Sendlane is the better choice here.
Email Builder And Templates
One of the areas where Aweber scores over Sendlane is the sheer number of free templates that it offers. Also, it is categorized across industries, so it will be easy for you to quickly find a relevant template.
That said, many of these free templates are not conducive for modern-day businesses because they look archaic and don’t fit well into sales funnels.
However, Aweber has an improved drag-and-drop editor and responsive design elements to build custom email templates. Otherwise, you can always subscribe to a third-party template design company for custom and beautiful templates.
In comparison, Sendlane’s templates are more modern and offer intuitive elements like countdown timers, product boxes, video, and graphics. Its drag-and-drop editor is also well-designed and makes it easy to customize templates to match your requirements.
A highlight of Sendlane is its scheduling option called Optimized Sending which allows you to send emails just when your clients are likely to open them, so you have a higher conversion rate.
Form And Pop-Ups
Both Sendlane and Aweber support building forms fairly easily, though it may take some extra time to find this option in Sendlane as it is hidden among the integrations.
Also in Sendlane, you can’t have overlays (pop-ups that open in the same window), pop-ups, and slide-ins (opt-in forms that slide from a corner to avoid any intrusion to your reading experience), and there’s no drag-and-drop editor.
Aweber has many form templates that are well-categorized and hence, easy to find. It supports pop-ups and can be activated based on a user’s action or after a specified interval.
When you compare the two, Aweber’s functionality is better though its templates are outdated.
Reporting And Analytics
This is one area where Aweber scores over Sendlane as it generates 26 different reports and tracks a ton of parameters. However, this information is not displayed in a visually appealing way, but still, this is a wealth of information to improve your marketing campaigns.
Aweber has a mobile version as well, so you can track statistics even when you’re on the go.
As for Sendlane, it doesn’t track such an extensive number of parameters but displays them on an appealing interface. Moreover, this tracking is in real-time, so you can make quick decisions as needed.
In all, Aweber has better reporting and analytics capabilities than Sendlane.
Integrations
Aweber integrates with a ton of apps and services, and you can also easily find these integrations on Aweber’s site. It is also categorized industry-wise, so you can pick the ones you want.
Sendlane’s integrations are not as extensive as Aweber, but it integrates with Zapier, which in turn, connects you to many apps.
Also, both platforms have APIs for custom integrations.
Both platforms are more or less the same, though Aweber has more native integrations.
Customer Support And Community
Aweber has many customer support options such as 24/7 chat, live phone support from 8 AM to 8 PM EST Mon-Fri, and email support.
Sendlane, on the other hand, has 24/7 support, chat, and an online form.
In terms of the community too, Aweber has a larger presence than Sendlane, especially in terms of active Facebook groups and followers.
What Tools Are Available On Sendlane And Not On Aweber?
The tools available on Sendlane, but not on Aweber are:
- Optimized Sending to schedule your emails for higher open rates
- A VIP migration offer where the import function is provided by Sendlane’s executives
- Imports only your active users to get more value
- Retargeting to boost your conversion rates
- Countdowns and grids in your templates
What Tools Are Available On Aweber And Not On Sendlane?
The tools available on Aweber, but not on Sendlane are:
- Phone support
- Webinars, FAQs, and videos for comprehensive guidance
- More integrations
- More templates are categorized across industries to make it easy to find
- Forms that pop up based on users’ actions or at predetermined intervals
Pricing
Sendlane offers three pricing plans, namely,
- Growth ($100/month or $1000/year) – Up to 5,000 contacts
- Professional Plus ($275/month or $2750/year) – 10,000+ contacts
- Starter Pack ($497) – Six months service to experiment.
It offers a 14-day free trial on all plans.
As for Aweber, there is a free plan that supports up to 500 subscribers.
The Aweber Pro plan has advanced features and is priced as per the number of subscribers.
- 0 to 500 subscribers – $19.99/month
- 501 to 2,500 subscribers – $29.99/month
- 2,501 to 5000 subscribers – $49.99/month
- 5,001 to 10,000 subscribers – $69.99/month
- 10,001 to 25000 subscribers – $149.99/month
Conclusion
Sendlane is undoubtedly a more modern and advanced service when compared to Aweber.
Choose Aweber if phone support and integrations with custom services are your priorities. In all other cases, choose Sendlane.