Is it a good idea? Yes, but not all the time. Some email marketing software is better for bigger businesses than others.
Who Needs to Use It? Marketers who don’t want to pay for features they won’t use. It’s good at everything it does. The only bad thing about it is that it doesn’t have as many features as other email platforms.
Prices range from $0 to $250 per month across 5 tiers. I have almost 20,000 subscribers and pay $179 per month for them. I get a discount every year, so I pay a total of $1,611.00 per year.
TL;DR: In short
ConvertKit does enough to give me a big return on my subscription and has great deliverability. It doesn’t have as many features as I would like, but many people like it that way.
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Email marketing brings in 30–40% of my monthly income, so to say I take it seriously would be a huge understatement.
People saying things like “email marketing is dead” or “email marketing doesn’t work for me” hurt my feelings. I know that email marketing works for almost every online business if it’s done right.
Every day, the results of my email marketing remind me of this.
As you may have guessed from the headline, I do my email marketing with ConvertKit.
Here’s why I still use it even though it’s not the best.
What ConvertKit Doesn’t Have
Most reviews start (and often end) with the pros of a product, but I think it’s fair to start with the cons.
Here’s what I have against ConvertKit:
#1: A/B testing is only done on the subject lines of emails in broadcasts. I would love to be able to test both the body copy and the subject lines of the emails in my follow-up automation sequences, but ConvertKit doesn’t offer much in this area. This is annoying because you should be able to test more than just the subject line. Most don’t let you test things inside of automations but it is possible.
#2: There isn’t much reporting. ConvertKit doesn’t give you nearly as much information as other programs like ActiveCampaign.
You’ll have to do it yourself if you want to see a simple timeline with your broadcasts, open rates, etc.
ConvertKit Pricing Prices start at free and go up based on the size of the list you bring over (my bill is over $400 a month, but I have over 42,000 active subscribers).
If you’re not sure, just remember that email marketing software is one of the best investments you can make for your online business. If you use it right, you should be able to make at least $1 per email subscriber per month.
I spend more than $1 per email subscriber each month on email marketing. Every month, I pay my ConvertKit bill without batting an eye.
If you’re not ready to join or switch to ConvertKit right now, just save this article and come back to it when you are.
If you use different marketing software, some of this article will still be useful, but where things are and how to use them will be a little different.
The ideas I’m going to talk about here can be used with any marketing software. What will be different from platform to the platform are the technical parts. Using Convertkit will make everything much easier to understand.
Comparing ConvertKit to other email marketing platforms
At the time this post was written, there were a lot of different email marketing programs available.
ConvertKit is, in a sense, the “new kid on the block.”
It’s new, but it’s all there.
Most Internet marketers have heard of a few well-known software programs.
Some of these are Infusionsoft, Aweber, Drip, Get Response, and many others.
I have used Aweber, Infusionsoft, Drip, Actionetics, and Mailchimp a lot in the past, either for my own business or for clients’ businesses. Most marketers can’t say they’ve seen this many different platforms from this angle.
From what I’ve heard about the ones I haven’t tried, it’s safe to say that none of these software “suck.” All of them send emails in some way.
When you stop just sending a few email blasts and start taking your email marketing seriously, that’s when you’ll see the value.
But it’s important to choose a provider that will work well for you. There is no one best solution for everyone. Even Convertkit might not be good for your business.
Here are some reasons why Convertkit works well for me and why you might want to think about it, too (after all, if you read this blog, we probably have a lot in common in terms of the types of businesses we run).
#1: ConvertKit is easy to use and has a simple design. I think that most brands should focus on sending emails with more text than banners and graphics that stand out. ConvertKit makes it easy to avoid the things that might distract you on platforms that are more complicated. I don’t think it’s necessary to have a lot of these things.
#2: ConvertKit is powerful enough to do everything I need it to do. Even though it is “minimalist,” you can still do a lot to get real results. Even though I’m an advanced ConvertKit user who builds pretty complex sequences and very targeted user segments, I don’t feel like I’m missing any important features.
#3: ConvertKit works with all of my favorite tools from outside my company. I can’t use software that doesn’t work with my other services, like Clickfunnels, which has its own email marketing feature. Zapier makes it easy to connect to almost any other service I might want to use (Gumroad, Stripe, PayPal).
The ConvertKit interface in a Nutshell
Different from other email marketing software, ConvertKit is easy to use. I think of ConvertKit as the email marketing software version of the “80/20 rule.” It focuses mostly on the 20% of features that are responsible for 80% of the results.
Don’t get it wrong though, it’s not completely bare. The ConvertKit still has a lot of horsepower under the hood.
If you’re a small business or blogger like me, you shouldn’t bog yourself down with too much software that leaves you confused and less effective in the long run.
A lot of the email marketing tools available are way too much for people like you and me.
From my experience working with new marketers, I’ve found that most of the time, they aren’t even close to using the basic features that would make their email marketing more successful.
Now, I don’t recommend ConvertKit if you’re on a big team and have a full-fledged marketing department. Large-scale software like InfusionSoft (or ConfusionSoft, as Russell Brunson of Clickfunnels, calls it) should be worth the investment.
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Many companies have jobs just for people who know how to use Infusionsoft (and they pay well compared to basic marketing jobs).
Forms from ConvertKit
Opt-in pages have forms. In exchange for email addresses, these can send lead magnets, which are things that make people want to sign up.
You can use the ConvertKit program to make either landing pages or boxes.
This is what a simple box form looks like. In the demo, the opt-in is shown on a separate page, but in reality, it would be shown in your blog posts.
You can add these to the end of a post or anywhere else in the post using short code, Java, or HTML codes if you are using the ConvertKit plugin.
ConvertKit Sequences
Sequences, which used to be called Courses, are automated email series that are sent when a user does something, like fill out a form.
Broadcasts and Subscribers from ConvertKit
I have to talk about tags and segments at the same time because you can’t send broadcasts if you don’t know what they are.
Broadcasts are emails that you send to a group of subscribers that you choose (tags, segments, and more).
ConvertKit makes you keep these email broadcasts as simple as possible. When you use ConvertKit, you pay more attention to the text than to flashy images, headers, etc.
Using subscribers to build an audience for a broadcast
We make our audiences by putting together identifiers.
We can use logic to add or take away some subscribers based on how they are found.
Your email marketing success will depend on how well you know how to send the right emails to the right subscribers over and over again.
If you send users too many emails or emails that aren’t relevant to them, the number of people who unsubscribe will go up, and the number of people who open and click on your emails will go down.
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Rules and Visual Automations for ConvertKit
One of the more advanced things about ConvertKit is that you can make your own automation with it.
With this automation, you can be strategic about your list and make sure you’re always getting the most out of your work.
Yes, I know I said ConvertKit was easy, and this may seem confusing at first, but there are a few things you need to know.
These aren’t things you have to use right away. It’s fine to keep things easy.
You don’t have to use a lot of automation. I have about ten, and I couldn’t be happier with them.
I can’t talk about every kind of automation, but here are two that I think are the best.
Integrations with ConvertKit
Most of ConvertKit’s power comes from the fact that it can connect with other software.
Summary
I’ve tried a few paid email marketing services, and ConvertKit is the best one for me. The price is the best in the industry, the customer service is great, and it has just enough power to help you reach your goals without making things too hard.
