AWeber: email marketing service launches design contest with Tuts + Premium

If you’re an email marketing service looking for some new email templates, what better way to freshen your look than source the new designs from your customers?

That’s what Huntingdon Valley-based email marketing service AWeber decided to do after it updated its email editor with new a “drag-and-drop” feature in March. The 11-year-old company partnered with design and technical e-library Tuts+ Premium to create an email template design contest that concludes April 20.

“We wanted to make sure designers not only heard about this major upgrade, but had a chance to try it for themselves,” said senior business development manager Hunter Boyle. “What better way to let them test the system then by designing their own templates?”

Click here to submit your design before April 20, 2012.

The contest, which kicked off at the end of March, will be decided by a panel of AWeber marketers and winner stand to win prizes in the form of Tuts+ Premium and AWeber services, according to the press release.

AWeber can best be understood as the private version of Constant Contact, the public email marketing giant. To compete with its super-sized competitor, Aweber offers its customer base, which now numbers over 110,000 according to the company numbers, a high level of personal support, Boyle told Technically Philly.

“Our service is designed to help make email marketing accessible to people who may not have design teams or a group of developers. They have to do a lot themselves, and often there’s a learning curve, so we help make it easier for them to succeed.” Boyle said.

[Full Disclosure: Aweber is a sponsor of Philly Tech Week presented by AT&T]

AWeber, which was founded in 1998 by CEO Tom Kulzer, has seen a lot of excitement in the past year. In addition to the contest and the editor upgrade, they released an open source API a little over a year go, then added a WordPress plug-in, PayPal plug-in, and Facebook plug-in in quick succession.

“As an 11-year-old tech company, we’ve continued to innovate throughout rapid growth, a company move, economic changes and the ever-evolving tech industry,” said Liz Cies, a company spokeswoman.

With 75 full-time employees, AWeber is looking to grow even more, says Boyle. They are currently hiring software engineers and developers.

Despite talk of social media spelling the “end of email,” spokeswoman Liz Cies says AWeber’s growth suggests the opposite.

“Although social media has radically shifted the marketing field, email is far from dead – and is, in fact, quite social,” Cies said.

Despite a global customer base with a strong presence in North America, Boyle said the company would like to see more growth is in the Philadelphia area.

“Although we were founded here in 1998 and have been in the greater Philly area ever since, we’re still something of a best-kept secret around the Philly area,” Boyle said.

If you’re a designer with an idea for an email template, click here to submit your design before April 20, 2012.