This week has been a huge week for Aweber. They are stepping up their game and making a run at the marketing automation space with their latest product unveiling. Also, a serious question about whether or not ConvertKit is a bonafide contender for ActiveCampaign.
Introducing Aweber’s Campaign Builder
At their annual conference Ascend they unveiled their biggest product update since launching in 1998 and it’s called Campaigns.
Aweber now provide a visual representation of your follow up sequences and allows you to build them fairly easily with their Drag N Drop interface. The biggest addition in all this is the ability to tag contacts now natively in Aweber.
Anyone familiar with marketing automation knows it’s impossible to automate any type of marketing without the ability to tag contact’s actions. This is now possible with Aweber at a very basic level as you can see in the screencast below:
In fact, Campaigns in general are a very bare bones implementation right now. I spoke with a few amazing reps from Aweber at LeadPages’ Converted conference this week and they all assured me that this is just the foundation that they plan on building more on top of.
Looks like Aweber is the first to add true automation to their platform to start differentiating themselves from the competition like MailChimp, GetResponse, iContact, and the likes.
In my opinion this puts them in the same league as Drip and ConvertKit and NOT ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft. I would classify this as more of a move to advanced email marketing more than I would say marketing automation. Nonetheless, this is a well needed step in the right direction for Aweber.
Hello ConvertKit
If you haven’t heard there is a relatively new player on the automation block. ConvertKit has been getting a lot of buzz among bloggers as the next step up from Aweber or MailChimp.
A quick visit to their site and you can’t help but miss their headline “Email Marketing for Professional Bloggers” clearly targeting bloggers. Which I think they should. They are in no means attempting to be a full marketing automation platform, and I don’t know if it’s smart for them to attempt to be.
For a while bloggers have wanted more dynamic tagging abilities like Infusionsoft without the hefty price tag. ConvertKit has now made that possible and is a huge leap ahead of Aweber.
I was able to catch up with both Pat Flynn and the CEO of ConvertKit Nathan Berry this week and talk about the platform and I walked away from both conversations pretty impressed. You can catch a full video walkthrough of the app from Pat Flynn below:
Bottom line, ConvertKit is a huge upgrade for Aweber, Mailchimp, and GetResponse users who are bloggers. Although I could see them stealing some market space from ActiveCampaign and Infusionsoft but not much. There is more than enough need for an advanced email marketing solution for bloggers and I think it has arrived in ConvertKit.
Thoughts, questions, and comments welcome below.
See ya next week!
