Entrepreneurs could always use a transactional email system that allows them to send invoices, receipts, reminders, and notifications to their customers. Unfortunately, there’s no “one size fits all” option.  

All of the transactional email services will do virtually everything that you’ll realistically need. That’s why it is essential to make an informed choice and a thorough understanding of what email marketing platform could benefit your business the most. 

Two of the most popular email marketing tools today are AWeber and SendGrid. In this review, we will compare their features, benefits, and pricing. At the end of this review, you should know which is the best program for your business. 

What is AWeber?

AWeber is an email marketing platform that aims to help businesses deliver automatic newsletter messages to their subscribers. With that in mind, AWeber is an excellent choice for the following people:

•     Bloggers who want to be updated with their audiences
•     Store owners who want to notify their customers of new discounts, restocked items, suggestions, and more
•     Any business owner who realizes the value of long-term business-customer relationships

The end goal of email marketing is to increase your ROI, improve conversion rates, and drive sales. AWeber allows you to do that very quickly due to its convenient tools and rich functionality. (READ More: Everything you need to know about AWeber)

Key Features of AWeber

Here are some of the best features offered by AWeber to give you a better idea of how well AWeber can suit your needs. 

Templates

AWeber has two ways for email composition: manually through the drag-and-drop editor and the customizable pre-built templates. 

The email library of AWeber contains more than 700 mobile-responsive templates, and with this provides access to over 600 free stock images. 

AWeber also has an elegant feature that turns your RSS feed into an e-newsletter. 

 AWeber works with AMP for Email to create engaging emails. AMP for Email allows you to send emails in which recipients can take simple actions such as making an appointment.

AWeber Autoresponder

Since AWeber is one of the first email autoresponders, it offers solid autoresponder functionality. It allows you to set up follow-up emails based on time. For instance, you can have AWeber send an introductory email immediately once someone signs up and send a promo code three days later. With AWeber, setting up time-based emails is very easy.

The next essential feature of AWeber is campaigns, which allows you to determine what and when to send to users based on the actions they perform. You may also separate subscribers into different groups by using tags.

When creating a campaign, AWeber provides you with two kinds of triggers – the On Subscribe and Tag Applied. On Subscribe engages when someone is added to your list while Tag Applied triggers when you add a tag to a subscriber.

Split Testing

If you are subscribed to AWeber Pro, it has a split-testing feature. This feature allows you to send variants of emails to a portion of your mailing list. You can then monitor the performance of each and choose the best variant. The split testing functionality of AWeber allows you to test up to 3 variants of emails.  

Reporting

AWeber Pro also provides you with a rather impressive reporting functionality. Among the things that you can track with AWeber reports are:

•     Total open and click counts over time
•     List open and click counts over time
•     Revenue over time
•     Daily, weekly, and monthly new subscribers
•     Subscriber methods

AWeber’s reporting functionality is pretty strong in terms of data. You are getting all the important things to make your email marketing better. 

AWeber Pricing 

AWeber offers two simple pricing plans for its packages. 

AWeber Free

This plan allows for 0 – 500 subscribers.  

AWeber Pro

This plan allows for 501 – 2,500 subscribers. It is priced at $16.15/month, which is billed annually. 

(READ More: How much is AWeber?)

What is SendGrid?

SendGrid is an email marketing software application with unique features. 

It provides SMTP APIs with a flexible web, which can integrate easily in any cloud-based email infrastructure. An SMTP service allows you to set up your own email sending process for your business. In this way, you don’t have to rely on the limited email sending mechanisms of regular email service providers such as Gmail. 

With SendGrid, your transactional email will start to run in minutes. 

SendGrid supports several languages, frameworks, and applications, which is also the best way to focus on business without worrying any more about email delivery. 

SendGrid also gives assurance that each email gets to a recipient’s inbox and not the spam folder. 

SendGrid gives great support to its clients by providing a way to integrate into any app to improve their email delivery rates. It can also recognize email campaigns with real-time analytics, and you can track the statistics up to the email address level. 

SendGrid was initially built for developers. However, it is now used by several big and small companies and enterprises. 

IT professionals and developers are the primary users of this tool. Other renowned partners of SendGrid are Pinterest, Scoutmob, Foursquare, Uber, etc. 

Key Features of SendGrid

Below are some of the powerful features of SendGrid. 

Transactional Email

SendGrid is composed of a transactional email delivery system, which is entirely reliable and scalable. It has other features such as email authentications, outbound spam monitoring, ISP feedback loops, IP reputation scoring, and more.

Email Analytics

A user can now easily see the performance of email campaigns using real-time analytics. It uses an Event Webhook with a statistics dashboard that provides every information they need. Developers or users can track deliveries, spam reports, email requests, bounce rates, unsubscribe, clicks, opens, and more. 

You simply have to go to the dashboard and check the real-time click-through rates with bounce rates. The complete view of your campaigns with its effectiveness and recipient list will be seen. A user can now create customized reports based on ISP geography, timeframe, device-type, and email category.

Advanced Deliverability

SendGrid provides its users with exceptional deliverability of promotional and transactional emails for an integrated platform. This process saves more time and also removes the part to deal with vendors. SendGrid supports common email types, such as promotional campaigns, trigger-based notifications and alerts, newsletters, and email marketing campaigns.

SendGrid verifies email senders, and this is also one of the ways which ensure the highest level of email deliverability. It also works to protect any spam type so that emails don’t get erased or disappear in between. 

Email Marketing

With SendGrid’s email marketing feature, you can design your email marketing campaign. It has pre-designed templates to help you to overview the campaign look. Furthermore, the tool also provides its users with a drag-and-drop editor to make some changes in your campaign. 

SendGrid Pricing

You can send up to 40,000 emails free for 30 days, then send 100 emails every day free forever. No credit card needed. 

Essentials Plan

This plan costs $9.95 per month and has the following features:

•     Emails/month included in plan- 40,000
•     Price per extra email- $0.001
•     APIs and webhooks
•     DKIM customization
•     SendGrid Marketing Campaigns 

Pro Plan

This plan costs $79.95 per month and has the following features:

•     Up to 100,000 emails/month
•     Price per extra email- $0.0085
•     Dedicated IP
•     APIs and webhooks
•     DKIM customization
•     SendGrid Marketing Campaigns
•     Sub-user Management 

Premier Plan

This plan has custom pricing with the following features:

•     1.5+ million emails/month
•     Custom price per extra email
•     Dedicated IP
•     APIs and webhooks
•     DKIM customization
•     SendGrid Marketing Campaigns
•     Sub-user management
•     Customer Success Manager- 5 million+
•     Prioritized support- 5 million+ 

The verdict 

AWeber is among the most balanced email marketing tools on the market. It’s affordable and has solid functionality. It also provides its paid members with the same feature set regardless of their list size. 

Meanwhile, SendGrid is also an easy-to-use platform that makes work simple. It has unique features that make it more attractive, and there’s no requirement of any deal to vendors.

If your lists are not too large, we recommend AWeber for you. 

(ALSO READ: GetResponse vs SendGrid)