Weebly Promote Review 2024 – Not What You Might Expect

Is Weebly Promote Really the Right Solution for You?

For Weebly customers, Promote seems like a simple solution to your email marketing needs. You can add Promote to your Weebly account in seconds and start marketing your website right away. What more could you want?

Convenience can be tempting, but the easiest option isn’t always the best choice for your business. As a digital agency owner, I know that finding the right email marketing platform is critical – and a simple add-on is rarely as effective as a dedicated email marketing service. Email marketing add-ons often have restrictive sending capacities, limited functionality, and less-than-ideal deliverability.

So is Weebly Promote a good choice for you? If you’re a satisfied Weebly user, you’ll appreciate how easily you can integrate your website with your email marketing efforts. For example, you can send newsletters and announcements to e-commerce customers, and streamline your process with basic automations. However, Promote isn’t ideal for everyone.

Weebly doesn’t offer a free trial of Promote, so you have to pay to use the platform. But the cheapest plan (Build) is so basic – it lacks scheduling, segmentation, and automation – that it’s hardly worth trying. So I tested out the midrange plan (Grow) to see whether Weebly Promote would be powerful enough for a small business owner or if a dedicated email marketing service would be a better investment.

Weebly Promote Offers Basic Features but Lacks Advanced Capabilities

Weebly Promote has many basic email marketing features covered. With the Grow plan, you can create email newsletters, marketing automations, audience segments, and subscription forms.

However, Weebly Promote lacks some common features, even if you purchase the most expensive plan (Accelerate). For example, it doesn’t have A/B testing, personalization, subscriber tagging, or visual workflows.

In addition, Weebly Promote doesn’t publish deliverability rates, which could affect how many of your emails land in subscribers’ inboxes. If you want an email marketing service with a high deliverability rate or a dedicated IP that gives you more control over your efforts, Promote won’t cut it.

Email Campaigns

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Whether you want to send a monthly newsletter or a time-sensitive announcement, you can choose from Weebly Promote’s 15 email templates. All layouts feature relatively minimal designs that align with the Weebly aesthetic, and you can easily modify any layout using the drag-and-drop editor. You can also embed YouTube videos and Instagram posts.

I was glad to see that I could also build a layout from scratch using the drag-and-drop editor. However, I would have liked to be able to import layouts or create HTML templates, too.

With Promote, you can schedule email campaigns to send at specific times, as long as you choose the right plan. The cheapest (Build) plan doesn’t allow scheduling, while Grow and Accelerate do.

Automated Emails

The Build plan lacks automations, but the Grow and Accelerate plans include a few simple automated workflows. For example, you can send welcome emails, birthday messages, and thank you notes. If you have a Weebly e-commerce store, you can also set up purchase-related automations.

Although I was glad to see that Promote’s automations support several steps – essentially drip campaigns – I was disappointed that the configurations were so limited. For example, I could send an automation after receiving a new signup or selling an item in my e-commerce store. However, I couldn’t create a workflow with more than one branch or integrate it with other apps.

Can marketing automations really get that much more advanced than what Promote offers? In my experience, there’s a ton of room for improvement here. For instance, GetResponse has more than 40 automation templates, along with the option to create your own custom workflow from scratch. GetResponse also provides a visual map of each automation, which I’ve found really helps with seeing how all the triggers and steps work together. And, importantly, unlike Promote, you’re not limited on any GetResponse plan1 by how many email campaigns you can send a month.

Subscription Forms

Weebly Promote does make it easy to grow your list, thanks to its user-friendly pop-up forms. You can design a form in a few seconds, publish it to your site with a single click, and start collecting subscribers immediately. However, I would have appreciated more signup options, such as a standalone landing page I could link to in digital or social media ads.

Audience Segments

Weebly has a decent customer relationship management (CRM) tool where you can collect subscriber contact info and write internal notes. However, Promote doesn’t allow you to tag subscribers manually or automatically.

Segmentation is pretty limited, too. For example, you can create segments for customers who have purchased from your e-commerce store or signed up as members of your site. You can also create segments for contacts who have filled out certain forms. But you can’t use other common segmentation methods like creating groups for customer interests or geographical locations.

Is it really worth looking around for better segmentation options? I’d say if you really want to get maximum value from your list, then using a service with more advanced segmentation is a must. Fortunately, I’ve found that you don’t necessarily have to make a big investment to access this important feature. For instance, on Sendinblue’s Free plan1 you can create segments based on subscriber interest and activity level. This option would be great for retargeting and converting your most engaged contacts.

Weebly Promote Earns High Marks for Its Intuitive Interface

Weebly Promote is remarkably easy to use, as the interface is minimal enough that you can’t really get lost. You can access emails, automations, forms, and contacts from the left-hand menu. Alternatively, you can scroll through the dashboard to access most options.

Saved Styles

Adding your business’s branding to every email can be annoying and time-consuming, so I was glad Weebly Promote let me save my style choices. After choosing a font, logo, two brand colors, and social icons, Promote automatically added these settings to all my campaigns.

Integrated Blog and E-commerce Content

Because Promote is linked to your Weebly website, adding content from your site couldn’t be easier. If you add a Blog content block to your email, the interface prompts you to choose a post to feature. If you add an Item content block, Promote urges you to select a product from your e-commerce site. I can see how this functionality would save a lot of time and eliminate the risk of adding incorrect links.

Suggested Emails

The Email tab on the Promote dashboard shows more than just the emails you’ve drafted, sent, or scheduled. It also recommends emails to send, such as promotions for upcoming holidays. This could be helpful for email marketing beginners who need suggestions to get started.

Linked Popups and Automations

The automation options available with Promote may be limited, but I appreciated how easy they were to access. For example, as soon as I published a new subscription form for my website, the Weebly Promote interface prompted me to create a linked automation to welcome new subscribers.

Weebly Offers Disjointed but Relatively Comprehensive Analytics

To access all the analytics for your email campaigns, you’ll need to navigate to both the Weebly and Promote dashboards. The former tracks performance over time, while the latter shares data for individual campaigns.

Some marketing platforms make it difficult to export data for storage or further analysis, but I was glad to see that I could download any report from the main Weebly dashboard. I would have preferred more file type options, but Weebly only offers CSV exports.

Promote Analytics Show Campaign and Automation Insights

In the main Promote dashboard, you can see a general overview of your email marketing performance. Then you can click on an email or automation to view analytics.

You can check the delivery rate, open rate, click rate, and unsubscribes for each campaign. You can also view a list of recipients and see which links your contacts clicked. However, I was disappointed that this reporting interface didn’t include e-commerce analytics, as that’s a key element of many marketers’ campaigns.

Weebly Analytics Reveal Performance Over Time

When you want insights that go beyond the Weebly email marketing analytics, go to the main dashboard. There, you can get data on how your emails or automation performed over time, including clicks and opens. If you have a Weebly e-commerce site, you can also review sales metrics.

Marketing Insights Let You Gauge Your Impact

To get a better idea of how impactful your email strategy was, you can click on the Marketing Insights tab in the main Weebly dashboard. There, you can see summaries of your email marketing analytics.

I was glad to find that I could compare select email campaign metrics, such as page views and sales, but I would have preferred to compare the results from different campaigns, too.

Weebly Offers Decent Support Options – but Expect a Wait

When you add Weebly Promote to your website, you don’t receive additional support. Instead, you get access to the same support that comes with your Weebly website builder account.

If you have a Free or Personal Weebly account, you get chat, email, and community forum support. The Professional Weebly plan adds phone support, while the Performance account includes priority support.

While live chat or phone support is certainly the fastest way to get help, you can only access these options during business hours. Weebly’s customer success team is available Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

First, I reached out to live chat support for help uploading a Word document containing my contacts. The chatbot warned me that the wait might be long, but it only took about 10 minutes for a representative to respond. Although they told me I couldn’t upload a Word document, I was pleased that they quickly suggested a workaround. Altogether, live chat support took about 20 minutes to resolve my issue.

Next, I sent an email asking how to avoid the spam folder or Gmail’s promotions tab. The confirmation informed me that I’d hear back “soon,” but that turned out to be a bit of an understatement. Over a week later, I was still waiting for a response.

Finally, I searched the Weebly Community for help with personalizing my emails. I couldn’t find an answer, so I posted my question in the forum.

I chose this option because I thought I could get an interesting workaround from another user. However, a Weebly moderator replied and informed me in about 48 hours that personalizing Promote emails wasn’t possible. Despite the waiting time, receiving a response was valuable to me.

Weebly Promote Pricing Looks Affordable – but It’s a Bad Deal for What You Get

Weebly Promote pricing isn’t great, no matter which level you choose. There’s no free option, so you’ll have to pay a monthly fee if you want to use this email marketing solution. Weebly accepts PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover, and Promote offers discounts of about 25% for annual plans.

Unlike most dedicated email marketing solutions, Weebly Promote plans aren’t scalable. Each plan includes a different set of features and an email quota, and there are no pricing tiers for various sending limits. Essentially, if you need to send more emails with Promote then you would need to upgrade to the next plan.

However, the cheapest plan (Build) is so limited it isn’t even worth considering. With this plan, you can only send five campaigns totaling 2,500 emails per month, and you can’t use automations or segments. You can’t even schedule emails on the Build plan, so you have to send them manually.

The midrange plan (Grow) includes essential features like scheduling, automations, and segmentation. It also lets you send up to 20 campaigns totaling 50,000 emails per month. But each email can only include 2,500 recipients, so this plan wouldn’t work for marketers with larger lists.

The most expensive plan (Accelerate) lets you send 250,000 emails per month and even lets you purchase extra credits if you go over your limit. This plan is priced relatively reasonably for the sending capacity, so it might be sufficient for marketers who only need simple automations and segmentation.

However, I wouldn’t recommend Accelerate or any Promote plan to marketers with more advanced needs. For the same price, other platforms like Benchmark offer behavior-based emails, advanced segmentation, live engagement reports, and over 1,500 app integrations. Benchmark offers a generous free plan1, and after that its cheapest paid plan is only $0 per month. That means you could do much more to grow your business without increasing your budget.

Weebly Promote Offers a 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Although Weebly Promote doesn’t have a free trial, the platform’s 30-day guarantee basically lets you try it out for a month. You can request a refund via live chat or email within 30 days of signup, and Weebly will give you your money back. I asked for a refund via live chat and received confirmation within 10 minutes.

No matter when you close your account, be sure to download your lists of contacts and unsubscribers so you can upload them to your next email marketing service. Fortunately, Weebly doesn’t delete your account right away. You can still access your account and data until the next payment renewal date.