You’re in the body-gripping seat of a powerful sports car, knuckles squeezing the leather steering wheel, the engine roars with anticipation. Your foot lowers onto the accelerator and… *gasp *gasp *choke.

Littered alongside the internet marketing highway you’ll find plenty of similarly sputtering email campaigns. Limping along not from lack of persuasion or rapport but from a cut-rate email service…

I’ve been there and here’s how I made sure it never happens again.

To drive home a winning email marketing campaign you’ve got a lot of choices in front of you when it comes to the software or service you use to deliver those client pulling emails.

You may be using the email marketing service that came packaged with your website or maybe you send out emails through your CRM.

Because having the right tools is importsant, I just want to point out the service I use and why.

My Choice For High Performance Email Marketing

One word: Aweber.

Why Aweber?

Since I first started using them in 1999 they’ve added a bunch of tools and features that actually complement the service, not add bloat. They do one thing – email – and they do it very very well.

• Deliverability – with other services I’ve received as much as 15% non-deliverable emails. Pretty crappy when your business depends on reaching your subscribers. Obviously, this is a big deal. With Aweber the highest my undeliverables have reached are 1.8%. Excellent.
• Blog Newsletters – this is one of my most favorite features. Basically, you can automagically have Aweber email your latest blog posts to your email subscribers (ditch Feedburner’s email, please!). Point Aweber at your feed and it will grab your RSS and send it out instantly, hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. Pretty killer automation.
• Unlimited lists and emails – you can have any number of lists you want (investors, buyers, sellers, partners, prospects, clients, etc) and send out as many emails as you want. Many services restrict your email lists or charge you extra for the expanded capabilities that Aweber provides by default.
• Autoresponders – not only can you send out you broadcast messages and blog newsletters, you can also use drip campaigns with the autoresponders. Oh yeah, no extra charge here, either.
• Personalization – you have the ability to personalize your email with any bit of info you have from your subscriber – city, state, name, address, phone, dates, and any custom field you ask them for.
• Scheduling – whle you’re off playing around (or working) you can have your emails sent out according to a schedule you determine. very cool and automated.
• Analytics – Aweber has some stellar tracking and reporting features. Of course, you can track which links are clicked in your emails, but you can also:

• split-test different versions of your email to see whcih works best
• test which subscription forms work best
• what time of day your subscribers are most active
• send emails only to specific subscribers
• and more

Now, the question may come up…

Why A Paid Service?

I get ya, I totally do. There are free alternatives out there. Heck, you probably have email marketing bundled in with your web hosting if you have a template site.

But, here’s what it came down to for me:

• A large part of what I do all day involves email marketing (for myself and my clients). I can’t afford a service that doesn’t get the message delivered… Aweber does that better than any other.
• Spam is so much a problem that many ISPs simply blacklist entire email providers. Aweber works with all the major ISPs and email clients to make sure they’re not blacklisted – so my legitimate email gets through.
• Since email is all they provide, their resources are focused solely on that – not on creating new templates, hosting, web design or anything other than email.
• I can actually call them up, speak with someone, and say “This isn’t working. Fix it.”

So, there you have it. Granted, there’s a lot of options out there but since I keep talking about the How and Why of effective email marketing I thought I’d best shine a light on why Aweber is the service I turn to.