Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your customers and grow your business.
If you have a business that sells via email, you’re probably already familiar with this powerful marketing tool. In fact, it’s one of the most popular ways businesses connect with their customers.
According to Statista, it’s estimated that by 2027, email marketing will generate over $17 billion in sales.
To succeed in your business niche, you need a strong marketing strategy and a strong email list. Fortunately, there are many email marketing platforms around that can cater to your needs.
Aweber and Sendlane are two email marketing service providers popular with small businesses, startups, and digital marketers.
Aweber was founded in 1998 and has over 500,000 customers.
Sendlane is a bit newer. It was founded in 2013 and opened up for business in 2015. At the moment, over 40 million emails are sent on the platform every day.
If you’re running an email marketing campaign, you’ve probably come across both Aweber and Sendlane.
Both of these email services offer a suite of functionalities that can be used to run email campaigns. Both of them are easy to use, but which one should you choose?
In this post, we will put Sendlane against Aweber in a tussle and then compare them in terms of their features, pricing, resources, pros and cons, and more.
Before we proceed with this Sendlane vs Aweber comparison, let us take a look at the overview of each of these platforms.
What Is Sendlane?
Sendlane is a marketing and automation tool for building and growing businesses, creating, and boosting customer retention.
It allows you to customize marketing strategies, set up a customizable mailing list, and also provide valuable statistics, including the number of visitors and clicks, and much more.
With Sendlane, users can track web visitors, create tailored marketing campaigns, landing pages, and newsletters, and monitor the number of leads generated and marketing outcomes.
What Is Aweber?
Aweber is an email marketing tool for creating mailing lists, designing newsletters, automating email marketing, and viewing and analyzing email marketing statistics.
Notably, Aweber has been around since 1998; it is credited with creating the auto-responder for generating an automatic response.
It is an easy-to-use email marketing software that lets users create fast and responsive landing pages and design newsletters quickly, send customized emails, and perform other functions without being a tech-savvy individual.
Aweber has over a million users and integrates with more than a thousand software solutions to deliver seamless email marketing operations.
Now, let’s see how Aweber and Sendlane stack up against each other with regards to some important features.
Smart designer, drag and drop landing page tool, template library, campaign automation, AMP for email & more, AWeber gives complete control to your email marketing.
Templates
Aweber offers over 600 mobile-responsive HTML templates for you to use for your emails. You can add your own logo or choose one of their 600+ free stock photos.
If you want a custom template, you can submit a request for Aweber to design a template specifically for your business. They can also customize an existing template.
Sendlane, on the other hand, only has 50+ premade templates. If you create your own template, you can save it for future use.
Email Editor
Aweber has three editors:
- Drag and drop
- Plain text
- HTML
The drag and drop editor is pretty easy to use. You can drag sections from the left-hand side of the page.
Available sections include:
- Headline
- Paragraph
- Article
- Image
- Video
- Button
- Product
- Social links
- Coupon
- Logo
- Signature
- Social sharing buttons
- Dividers
- More
Sendlane also has a drag-and-drop editor, with the ability to customize emails by changing the length, width and color of images, buttons, and text. However, they have fewer sections.
Available sections at Sendlane include:
- Text
- Title
- Image
- Button
- Divider
- Spacer
Under the “Sections” tab, you can also add formatting blocks to your emails, including:
- Full width blocks
- Halves
- Thirds
- Quarter/three-quarters
- Three-quarters/quarter
- Signature
Forms and Landing Pages
Aweber has many pre-made forms that you can use or customize. They are basic in their designs but do their job. You can also host the forms on a special URL so that they act as landing pages.
Sendlane also has a form builder that you can use. However, what’s really of interest to us is their landing page builder.
Sendlane’s landing page builder has over 50 templates and allows you to create beautiful landing pages straight from your Sendlane account.
This landing page builder can match any third-party builder or plugin in terms of design and features. It uses a drag-and-drop editor to allow you to customize the background, text, headers, images, links, countdown timers, and anything else you want to use.
The editor also has a feature that allows you to view how your landing page will appear on different devices.
Smart designer, drag and drop landing page tool, template library, campaign automation, AMP for email & more, AWeber gives complete control to your email marketing.
Automation
Aweber offers decent autoresponder and automation features. You can set up email lists for emails to be sent automatically to new subscribers.
You can also set up campaigns where subscribers have tags applied to them based on their actions, such as whether they click on a link or open up an email. These tags can then act as triggers for further actions.
Sendlane also has very robust automation features. You can easily create various workflows and segment users based on actions or other criteria.
Subscribers can have certain tags and triggers applied to them, and you can segment them as well so that custom actions, such as being switched to a different list, are applied to them.
Sendlane has an additional feature: Email retargeting. This allows you to set up workflows and campaigns based on a subscriber’s interactions on your website.
A code will track users’ behavior on your website, and you can send them emails accordingly. A great example of how this would be useful is for reducing cart abandonments.
Reporting
Aweber has decent reporting features. You can get overall open and click rates, data for specific emails and specific types of emails, as well as activity from specific users.
You can access demographics data, such as which countries your subscribers are coming from. There are also some more in-depth data points available, such as how long it takes on average for users to verify their emails.
Sendlane also has robust reporting features. You can see details such as the top links clicked on and which subscribers opened the most emails.
You can also see data for spam complaints, unsubscribes, bounces, successful deliveries, open rates, click rates, and much more.
With event tracking, you can add a pixel to your website to track the performance of every step in a workflow. You can see detailed data about page views, adds to carts, email leads, conversions, and more.
Sendlane also integrates with Shopify to collect deep data about your customers and their interactions with you. You can then set up workflows and campaigns accordingly.
Integrations
Sendlane integrates with over 30 platforms, such as Miva, BigCommerce, Zapier, ClickBank, Facebook, Shopify, Woocommerce, Clickfunnels, OptimizePress, and JvZoo.
Aweber, on the other hand, integrates with way more platforms. There are over 90 integrations supported in the CRM software category alone, and there are another 11 categories.
Customer Support
Aweber has great customer support options.
You can send a support request at any time during business hours, and you will usually get a reply via email pretty quickly. Live chat is available 24/7 to help customers around the world.
Live phone support is available between 8AM-8PM EST. There are toll-free US and international numbers you can call.
Sendlane also has 24-hour customer support, but you can only contact the support team by sending a comment through an online form or via the chat in your account.
Sendlane vs Aweber: Pricing
Sendlane is an affordable marketing option for users with less than a thousand contacts. However, Aweber is a more affordable option for small businesses with less than 500 contacts.
Aside from subscription fees, both Sendlane and Aweber do not charge contract, training, or setup fees, unlike other competitors, and you’re free to cancel your subscription while you’re within the trial period.
Smart designer, drag and drop landing page tool, template library, campaign automation, AMP for email & more, AWeber gives complete control to your email marketing.
Sendlane offers users a 2-week trial period, while Aweber has a free version with a 500 contact limit and not more than 3,000 emails per month; however, you will have to subscribe to Aweber’s Premium plan to enjoy access to more tools and features.
Except for the lowest plan, Sendlane is more expensive than Aweber.
- Aweber offers 5,000 contacts for $46.15/month when billed annually; at Sendlane, it is $83/month
- At Aweber, 10,000 contacts will cost you $66.15/month when billed annually; at Sendlane, it will be $229/month
Sendlane vs Aweber: Pros And Cons
Sendlane Pros
- It has a user-friendly interface for easy navigation
- It has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor for creating high-converting landing pages and email contents
- Sendlane integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, ClickBank, Zapier, and more.
- It offers excellent customer support
Sendlane Cons
- It gets more expensive as your contact list grows above a thousand
- No onboarding process for first-time users
- It has a steeper learning curve
- Migration process is manual
Aweber Pros
- Aweber has more than 700 HTML newsletter templates
- You can import HTML templates to Aweber
- Its drag-and-drop editor tool can be used to design newsletters and create landing pages.
- You can create images for use on Aweber with Canva
- Aweber has an advanced list management tool that lets you segment subscribers
- It integrates with over 750 third-party software and services
- Its RSS feature allows you to broadcast blog posts to subscriber mailing lists
- It offers 24/7 LiveChat and phone support
- Users can build unlimited landing pages with Aweber’s free plan
Aweber Cons
- Aweber charges based on the number of subscribers on your list
- Unsubscribed email addresses are counted as part of your monthly quota
- Aweber needs to work on its email delivery rate
- Aweber needs to improve its automation features, spam, and design testing abilities.
Aweber vs Sendlane: Similarities And Differences
Similarities
- Both Sendlane and Aweber are marketing automation tools
- Both can be used to create landing pages and newsletters
- With either Sendlane or Aweber, you have access to marketing outreach and analytics tools
- Both integrate with a number of third-party apps and services
- Both have an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor
- Both Aweber and Sendlane have support form creation and pop-up building
- Both platforms support A/B split testing
Differences
- Sendlane first-time subscribers enjoy a 14-day trial period, while Aweber offers its first-time subscribers a 30-day trial period.
- Sendlane does not have as many templates as Aweber in its template repositories.
- Sendlane has more expensive plans compared with Aweber
- Sendlane’s support team is not as responsive as Aweber’s
- Unlike Aweber, Sendlane does not track extensive parameters
- Sendlane has more advanced automation, editing, and analytics tools compared with Aweber
- Sendlane was established in 2015, while Aweber was established in 1998, making it one of the oldest automation tools in use
Smart designer, drag and drop landing page tool, template library, campaign automation, AMP for email & more, AWeber gives complete control to your email marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is Sendlane a CRM?
No, Sendlane is not a CRM. Sendlane is an eCommerce marketing and automation tool that can be used to build landing pages and design newsletters. However, you can integrate Sendlane with other CRMs like Konnektive.
2. Is Aweber free to use?
Yes, Aweber is free to use as long as your contact list does not exceed 500 contacts and 3000 emails monthly. However, users can get more out of Aweber by subscribing to Aweber’s Pro plan.
3. Is Aweber a CRM?
No, Aweber is basically not a CRM; however, Aweber offers integrated CRM cloud services and also integrates with other CRM platforms like Agile.
4. Is Aweber good for email marketing?
Yes, Aweber is good for email marketing. It is one of the oldest and most well-known email marketing platforms that has been in existence since 1998.
5. Is Sendlane good for small businesses?
Yes, Sendlane is good for small businesses. The platform has a range of advanced tools, including automation, reporting, analytics, and editing tools for promoting the growth of small businesses.
Conclusion
Which one you choose depends on what you are looking for. Aweber is cheaper and offers more templates, a better editor, and better customer support.
Sendlane, on the other hand, offers better landing pages, better automation features, and better reporting.