In Aug 2018, I built a micro birthday promo mailing list service called BirthdayBeep for Malaysian urban dwellers — I wrote about my experience here.
BirthdayBeep was built in a weekend with Wordpress and Mailchimp. As an exercise, I decided to try to rebuild the same idea with ConvertKit.
To be fair, this is not one of those ConvertKit vs Mailchimp articles because I was using Mailchimp a few years back and there might be features that was available now but not then.
ConvertKit is on a mission to help creators earn $1B using our SaaS email marketing platform (which includes features like landing page and form builder, email automation and a well praised subscriber segmenting.)
BirthdayBeep consists of 3 main components:
- The landing page with embedded subscription form
- The mailing list that’s organized by 12 birthday months
- The birthday promo email itself
First, building the landing page
I am on a Free account. The first thing I saw when I signed in was the immediate options to build either a form or landing page. I went with Landing page.
I like how ConvertKit lets me get things done fast and no fuss:
- The loading speed: Totally love the speed of how fast things load — or rather the lack of noticeable “loading…” lag and how things are just there is awesome. This is especially noticeable in preview generation, as the “generating preview…” is general behaviour in many apps, the lack of it is just delightful.
- Simplicity of layout: Learning pretty much any new softwares always overwhelms me with the features and buttons — not to mention again, the loading lag of each feature — and ConvertKit has been great at keeping things simple and fast. The effectiveness of such simplicity can also be seen in the ease of setting up Google Analytics / Facebook Business etc.
- Publishing url: The landing page is immediately assigned an URL for my landing page that I can use to share to my followers or social circle if needed. Again, the lack of a proper publishing process makes thing seem effortless and immediate, love it.
Things that could be improved:
The Non-sticky Editor Panel
From the screenshot here, the editor panel is not sticky — so when I scroll down to configure my backgroung overlay colors, half of my landpage preview cannot be seen, and the footer that takes up so much space doesn’t help either.
Lack of Indicators on Completion of Action
When I have completed and saved my landing page, I was kinda lost and not sure what to do:
- Do I have to press “Publish” somewhere?
- Where can I see my landing page (okay this is before I figure out a landing page URL is auto assigned to me)?
- What should I do next?
I believe small UX tuning like a “Publish” button or simply adding the live URL to the message alert (like screenshot below) would help users feel rewarded psychologically for completing something and feel comfortable to move on to the next actionable item
Slow loading of Built-in Unsplash Library
I like and was surprised by the Unsplash library, but the search and image loading speed were less than ideal and noticeable much slower; especially when put side by side with ConvertKit’s overall non-existent loading lag. From what I can see, this could be a problem from Unsplash tech stack — but at the end of the day it is still part of ConvertKit user experience.
Creating the 12 Mailing Lists for 12 Birthday Months
I only come to realize how powerful the ConvertKit tag feature is here — because the 12 mailing list has already been auto-created (auto-tagged)!
That was mind blowing for sure.
Crafting the Actual Birthday Alert Email Template
I was puzzled to be shown an WYSIWYG editor at first — only then I recalled ConvertKit is designed for online creators rather than businesses. And, Nathan (ConvertKit’s founder) has always advocated that a well written text based emails would bring better engagement in most online creator cases.
I agreed with this as I found myself spend more time opening and reading emails that I know are a long paragraph of texts than a well composed HTML email.
Anyway, I didn’t continue further to create the email but I am sure this is still technically possible to create with ConvertKit. Just that it is not designed for this purpose.
The site is lived here: https://creative-author-2068.ck.page/birthdaybeep
While this is not a full replication of BirthdayBeep, it’s pretty cool actually — considering this is done within 1 hour with a tool I have zero previous experience with.
As a final note, I am pleasantly surprised at how easy ConvertKit is. I have been putting off trying it for a long long time mainly due to a resistance to pick up new tool as well as the lack of free plan (it has a Free tier now!). The whole process above took me an hour or less, and considering this is my first time using it without going through proper tutorial, I would highly recommend it to anyone.
From a product UX perspective, I experienced today how the lack of loading process creates the impression of speed.
Teleport, don’t run.
If you are interested, checkout ConvertKit here.
