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Mark M., New York

I used to use AWeber for email marketing. You can set up an automated schedule for email follow-ups. I’d use this for enrolled students so that, in addition to whatever other period newsletter messages I might send, I could send them a series of introductory messages after they began lessons. I wrote the messages once, put them in the AWeber system, schedule them each to go out at a particular schedule after sign-up, and everything was automated.

If I’d wanted to, I could have managed a separate prospective student list there as well, with a different set of automated emails, as you’re suggesting here. I never chose to do that. I always managed prospects separately.

I eventually gave it up not because it’s a bad idea but because there wasn’t enough benefit to me for the amount that it cost me each year. I switched to MailChimp, which has a free tier up to a certain number of names in the database. With MailChimp, I get just a single welcome message right when people join the list.

At least a few years ago when I was looking into this. AWeber and Constant Contact were the “Coke and Pepsi” of the email marketing world, offering very similar services at very similar costs. There were a handful of reasons why I thought AWeber the superior service, but I could imagine why some might have felt otherwise. There are definitely other competitors out there offering similar services as well. If you would use a service like this for prospecting in addition to anything else, it would probably be very well worth it.