What is AWeber?

Tom Kulzer is CEO of AWeber Communications and he recently took a few minutes to chat with Bryan Haines.

Bryan: What does AWeber do?

Tom: AWeber enables small businesses to easily create email sign up forms and deliver email newsletters to customers and prospects using permission based email marketing.

Bryan: How does AWeber differentiate itself from the other email marketing firms? What makes you stand above the others?

Tom: Founded in 1998, we've been helping small businesses with email marketing long before most other companies were even a thought. We take that experience and build it into our continually evolving toolset along with outstanding customer solutions. Where others may offer support via email or live chat only, we offer all of that plus unlimited live phone assistance with extended hours and a highly trained team that can help you with any of your email marketing needs. Whether that's initial campaign setup guidance via our proactive account setup, or ongoing needs, our team of experts is here to help.

Bryan: Why did you start AWeber?

Tom:I started AWeber in 1998 due to a lack of tools for effective email follow up. Sales experts around the world touted that it was key to follow up with prospects at least 7 times to gain a mind share with prospects and build the trust necessary to earn their business. At the time there was no product that would help business owners accomplish this online via email, so I created one which became the initial foundation that AWeber was built on.

Bryan: Why should an online business use email marketing?

Tom: Email marketing has an ROI over $40 for every $1 spent. (source: DMA) It's one of the most cost effective ways of communicating with customers and prospects, not to mention being eco-friendly since there are no trees, stamps, or postal trucks running around to deliver old fashioned postal mail.

Bryan: How does AWeber help build a responsive following?

Tom: By staying in touch with recipients on a regular basis and providing value thru the information that is communicated, you're more likely to earn future business. For instance, in one example a business might have a blog, yet most visitors to that blog have no idea what RSS is, nor will they manually check back to the blog website regularly. With a simple email subscriber form on the blog and AWeber's blog broadcast feature a business owner can automatically send new blog content to those that have requested it without any additional time spent creating content. Those who are interested get updates automatically and the business gets a large influx of visitors from each post that are passionate about their topic.

Bryan: Everyone hates spam. How does your company prevent your users from becoming “spammers”?

Tom: Spam prevention is done thru numerous avenues. It starts with an education base from our Education team that creates the content posted on our blog geared towards small business owners. We also conduct multiple live educational webinars for everyone from the raw beginner at email marketing to the most seasoned expert.

Beyond education, our tools are also built to help double check what someone is doing so they don't make inadvertent mistakes that could lead to later problems. Once actively using AWeber we also have a host of internal metrics and tools to identify potentially problematic accounts so we can reach out and provide guidance to correct the issue before it becomes more serious.

Tom Kulzer is CEO of AWeber Communications and he recently took a few minutes to chat with Bryan Haines.