One of the first things that companies outsource is their email. I started outsourcing my email to Aweber about 13 years ago. When you have a few hundred emails it seems pretty easy to do it yourself. Even when I had a few thousand emails, I had a nice system for emailing myself and it worked like clockwork. That was until I was black listed. If you have ever heard the term RBL or Realtime Blackhole List, this is a business owners worst nightmare. You don’t even need to do anything wrong and you can end up there.
What being blackholed does is put you on a list that most of the major internet providers check periodically. If your address is on the list, your emails aren’t going to their customers. For a small business its a nuisance but usually easily recoverable within a few days. For a large company or a state government, this can be a nightmare. I’ve seen this happen more than once.
Email List Hosting
Aweber was introduced to me by a friend years ago and I’ve continued with them for more than a decade. Ever so often a new provider comes out and I will check their pricing and features but so far I haven’t found anything that I would be willing to switch for. If anything, I know of a competitor which does a lot more promotion than Aweber, has an extremely high customer turnover rate. You might even refer to it as churn. I don’t know what Aweber’s retention rate is, but I’ve never found a reason to switch. And this is coming from someone who has been with 4 different web providers. Aweber continues to grow and offer new functionality such as landing pages.
I have worked with some clients that have other email providers and I regularly ran into integration issues with them on websites. Just because you can use them for free doesn’t always make them a good deal. Aweber has a free option, but you will probably want to upgrade to the paid services before long.
I would love to say that I use all their features, but I have about 3 that I use pretty frequently and they work like clockwork. With newer themes like Divi, there are built-in integrations for Aweber and others that work really well.
While I would gladly recommend them for free, for full disclosure and to make the lawyers happy, the link below is an affiliate link. So if you like them enough to become a customer, they reward me as well. I think you will be very happy with Aweber.
https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/vjqvtvm1y5
AWeber Free: Email marketing for free. No credit card required.