AWeber vs MailChimp: Email Marketing Service Battle

Having trouble nailing down which email marketing service provider to use for your business? Two of the most popular, AWeber and MailChimp, each have their devotees (and detractors).

On the first inspection, they seem to offer a lot of the same features, with the exception that MailChimp has a free forever plan. We dug deeper into these rivals to see how their differences could affect your ultimate choice.

Visit AWeber’s Website | Visit MailChimp’s Website

	AWeber	MailChimp
Customer Support
Design Tools
Deliverability
Automation
Tracking & Analytics
Pricing
Features
Overall Winner

Customer Support

AWeber has the clear edge on customer support, although both services have good online tutorials, FAQs and other resources. Neither service offers 24/7 customer support hours. AWeber provides phone, live chat and email support seven days a week. MailChimp has more limited hours for email and live chat support, and they don’t offer phone support.

Winner: AWeber

Design Tools

Both AWeber and MailChimp offer responsive templates, meaning they’ll automatically look good on any device — a must in email marketing these days. AWeber has 700+ ready-made templates (many more than MailChimp), but if you’re looking for more customization and design capability, MailChimp is the better option. MailChimp even provides you with raw code to help you build your own email templates.

Winner: MailChimp

Deliverability

You want to make sure your emails are getting where they’re supposed to go in the first place. Who’s better at this? AWeber has a long history of having one of the highest deliverability rates in the industry. MailChimp’s deliverability rate is well in the 90th percentile — an encouraging percentage rate compared to a lot of other email marketing services.

Winner: AWeber

Automation

If you’re running an email campaign and want to send follow-up emails to certain customers based on their response to your previous emails (i.e. thanking them for signing up on your website, or making a purchase), AWeber and MailChimp come out about even with their autoresponder functionality.

So, where do they differ? MailChimp makes it easier to target a subset of your email list with its autoresponder interface — choosing subsets with AWeber is possible; it’s just much more cumbersome. On the other hand, with AWeber, it’s much easier to manage and track your follow-up emails to see who has opened them and when. MailChimp falls short on its autoresponder tracking capability.

Winner: AWeber & MailChimp (Tie)

Tracking & Analytics

Both AWeber and MailChimp provide extensive email tracking and analytical tools to help you gauge who’s opening and clicking through your emails. You can monitor subscriber activity, bounces, unsubscribes, click-throughs and generate revenue reports.

Where MailChimp comes out ahead? MailChimp provides Google Analytics integration; AWeber does not. If you’re running social media campaigns along with your emails, MailChimp tracks your social sharing efforts; again, AWeber does not.

Winner: MailChimp

Pricing

As you can see, MailChimp has the clear edge over AWeber with its free and lowest tiered plan, but AWeber does offer a 30-day free trial. Once you go over 500 contacts per month, however, they offer nearly identical pricing tiers. We give MailChimp the nod here because it does offer some identical plans for less money.

Winner: MailChimp

Features

	AWeber	MailChimp
	AWeber	MailChimp
Template Selection	700+	Hundreds
Template Editor	WYSIWYG & HTML	WYSIWYG & HTML
Responsive Design
Image Hosting	Unlimited	Unlimited
Contact Manager/Import
Newsletter Archiving
Social Media Marketing
RSS Feed Integration
Autoresponder
SMS (Texting)		Integration Only
Surveys	Integration Only
List Segmentation
Allows Attachments	Up to 1MB
Google Analytics
Spam Score (Checking)
Reporting/Stats
Private (Dedicated) IP Address
Split A/B Testing
Trigger Based Messaging
Developer API
Customer Support	Live Chat, Email, Phone	Live Chat, Email

MailChimp edges out AWeber for the overall set of features you get with your email marketing service. Not only does MailChimp have more advanced features, but they also have far more integrations available to give you the ability to do almost anything imaginable with your email campaigns.

Winner: MailChimp

How Does An Email Marketing Service Build Relationships?

Email marketing is an excellent way to build and maintain relationships with your customers. Check out the following video by Michelle Schneider for tips on using email marketing to engage your customers.

Overall Winner

Based on our in-depth reviews, MailChimp comes out pretty far ahead of AWeber. MailChimp gives you more tools, and it’s easier to use than AWeber. MailChimp also has a clear edge with its free plan. If reliable customer support is important, then AWeber is the way to go. Of course, your decision depends on the specific features you’re looking for with your email marketing strategy.

Winner: MailChimp

What About Other Email Marketing Providers?

How do AWeber and MailChimp stack up against their competitors? Check out our coverage of the top email marketing companies for an in-depth analysis of more than 20 of the top players. There you’ll find key features, pros and cons, pricing and even our “best for” picks for different business types and needs. You can also compare all companies side-by-side with our large comparison table.

Are you leaning towards AWeber or Mailchimp (or someone else)? Let us know in the comments!