Introduction
If you’re a blogger, an eCommerce store owner, or a creator of a digital product such as an online course, you’ll no doubt be in search of an email marketing tool, if you don’t already have one.
But there are dozens of tools out there so, you have to choose the one that best suits you and your goals.
As bloggers ourselves, we’ve tested a few of these platforms out and, ended up choosing the one we’re using today for this very blog.
As you can probably tell from the title, that platform is ConvertKit and in this post, we’re going to tell you all there is to know about this platform to help you figure out if it could be the right one for you as well.
ConvertKit Overview
It calls itself the “email marketing tool designed for creators” and the platform was designed to allow these creators more time to create and less time using the tool.
This means, and we can testify to it, that ConvertKit is extremely user-friendly, and with all the templates and courses it offers, it truly aims to make email marketing easy and less time-consuming for creators.
They divide their platform and their tools into three phases that are a part of any creator’s journey:
- Grow your Audience
- Connect with your Fans
- Earn a Living
Let’s dive into each of these phases and take a closer look at what they mean and the tools they offer.
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Grow Your Audience
This is where it all starts. Whatever business/website you have, the first step is to get people into your website and interact with your business. These are the tools included in this phase:
- Landing Pages
Landing pages are an essential part of a campaign and, if you don’t have a website, they’re your only way of showing your services and presenting yourself to your potential customers.
ConvertKit offers over 50 landing pages templates you can use to build your landing page.
All of these templates are somewhat customizable, but you’ll always be constrained by the template’s design. If you know a bit about coding you can use the custom CSS section that’s available on every template to change some extra features, but you’ll still never be able to fully customize your landing page to your taste.
However, you’re almost guaranteed to find a template that works just fine for you out of the large gallery of templates available, so this probably won’t be an issue for you.
It’s also worth noting that all of ConvertKit’s landing pages are fully responsive so you don’t need to worry about how they’ll look on different devices.
- Email Sign Up Forms
Another great tool on any creator’s belt is sign-up forms. You can spread them all over your website as a way to get people to interact with your content and obtain some leads that you can later turn into loyal customers.
With ConvertKit you can create 4 different types of forms: a pop-up form, a slide-in form, an inline form, or a sticky bar. You can use all four types on your website as long as you do it thoughtfully.
Much like with the landing pages, ConvertKit has many templates of forms you can use to create your own and they integrate with all the major CMSs like Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, among others, so you can easily implement them wherever you want.
They don’t have incredible customizing capabilities either but again, you might be just fine with one of the form templates the platform offers like ours:
- Integrations
We’ve touched a bit on this but let’s get to the nitty-gritty of integrations. What’s awesome about ConvertKit is that it offers quite a few integrations making it a seamless experience for you regardless of the CMS or platforms/tools you use.
ConvertKit offers integrations with all the major eCommerce platforms, surveys and quizzes tools, scheduling tools, giveaway tools, CRMs, and much much more.
Connect With Your Fans
Once you can proudly say you have a good list of people interested in your website/business, it’s time to connect with them and start building your relationship with your potential customers.
- Email Marketing
ConvertKit’s email marketing software couldn’t be easier to use. From simple broadcasts to email automations, which we’ll get into in a bit, you can connect with your audience with virtually no hassle.
By allowing you to organize your audience into tags or segments, ConvertKit helps you send different and somewhat personalized emails to each segment, making sure you don’t spam your subscribers with content they may not be interested in. You can also schedule emails or send them right away if you prefer.
What’s very cool about this platform is that due to its reputation with email providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc), emails sent out from ConvertKit have a 98% deliverability rate, meaning that you are very unlikely to end up in someone’s spam folder.
- Email Designer
The email designer tool allows you to edit the look of your emails.
It, of course, offers templates for you to use, and it also offers the option to write a blank email with no design. These blank ones tend to work better than fully-designed emails anyway, so this can be a great option and you won’t have to worry about the design aspect.
Again, all of their templates are completely responsive, so no worries there!
If, however, you happen to be code-savvy and want to have a fully customized email template for your brand, you can also upload your Html template to use in your emails. There’s an option for everyone!
- Automations
Now comes the most fun part, in our opinion – automations. With these, you can make your email marketing almost completely hands-off and have it working for you in the background.
What automations essentially are is a way to create email flows that are sent when a specific action is triggered. For example, if a user subscribes to a form on your website, you can set a whole email sequence to go out to that subscriber.
You can set days or weeks between emails and have several fully automated email sequences going out based on different triggers. This is the best way to engage with your audience and start the process of turning your subscribers into loyal customers.
Earn a Living
If you have a digital product you want to monetize or you own a store, you can use ConvertKit to sell your products to your now engaged audience.
- Commerce
ConvertKit makes it easier to sell your products directly from a landing page or email by integrating with Stripe.
If you have an ebook you’re trying to monetize, you can add a purchase form on your landing page and create a “buy now” button that allows your customers to buy directly from the landing page.
There’s also the awesome “tip jar” feature. If, for example, you want to ask your subscribers to contribute to helping you create content you can add a “tip jar” to your newsletters or emails where users can select the amount of tip they want to give you.
ConvertKit Pricing
ConvertKit’s pricing depends on two factors: the plan you choose and the number of subscribers you are aiming to have.
This is to give small companies or creators with a short email list a fair chance and pricing. As your account grows, so will your monthly costs with ConvertKit.
The two plans available are Creator and Creator Pro. There aren’t too many differences between the two except for a few features like Advanced Reporting, Facebook Custom Audiences, Newsletter Referral System, and Subscriber Scoring that Creator Pro offers on top of the features already available on the Creator plan.
That said, this platform does offer a free account for up to 1000 subscribers, but of course, you only get basic email features such as broadcasts. You do, however, have access to all the landing pages and forms ConvertKit offers. This is great if you want to test out the basic features of the platform before committing to a plan.
Their pricing for paid accounts begins at $15/month for up to 300 subscribers for the Creator plan and, as we said, goes up depending on the plan and the number of subscribers.
ConvertKit: Pros & Cons
Now that was a lot of information above! So let’s quickly summarise this platform by weighing its pros and cons.
Pros:
- User-friendly interface
- Easy to organize and manage subscribers
- Easy to build automations
- Integrations with all major tools
- The price depends on the number of subscribers
- Monetize your products directly from your landing pages and emails
Cons:
- No drag and drop builder for landing page, form, and email design
ConvertKit Alternatives
As far as alternatives go, there are plenty available and you’ve probably heard of a few, or even tried them out.
Let’s take a look at three of the most popular alternatives and see how ConvertKit compares to them.
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ConvertKit vs Active Campaign
| ConvertKit | Active Campaign | |
| Features | Email marketing, Automations, Landing Pages, Forms, Commerce, Email Designer, Integrations, Templates, Analytics | Email marketing, Automations, SMS, Drag and Drop builder, Sales CRM, Landing Pages, Forms, Chatbots, Integrations, Templates, Analytics |
| Starting Price (for 1000 subscribers) | $29/month | $30/month |
| Free Trial | Yes | Yes |
| Free Account | Yes | No |
Active Campaign is more than just an email marketing platform. It’s a very complete platform that offers features like SMS and Chatbots as well.
While Active Campaign offers more features and includes a handy drag and drop builder (that we would love to see in ConvertKit), it offers more basic integrations than ConvertKit.
It’s all about figuring out what your needs are and choosing the platform that better suits them.
ConvertKit vs MailChimp
| ConvertKit | MailChimp | |
| Features | Email marketing, Automations, Landing Pages, Forms, Commerce, Email Designer, Integrations, Templates, Analytics | Websites, Email Marketing, Landing Pages, Digital Ads, Social Media, Postcards, Forms, Templates, Automations, Integrations, Analytics |
| Starting Price | $29/month for 1000 subscribers | $23/month for 1500 subscribers |
| Free Trial | Yes | No |
| Free Account | Yes | Yes |
Mailchimp doesn’t call itself an email marketing platform. According to its website, Mailchimp is a full-blown marketing platform. This makes sense because, as you can see, they offer features like website creation, ads, and social media.
We used Mailchimp before switching over to ConvertKit and, let’s just say, there was a reason we made the switch. It was lacking very basic features that were essential for a blog and the platform itself was not at all user-friendly, in our opinion.
However, back then Mailchimp wasn’t what it is now, it was simply an email marketing platform. But it seems to have changed now so if you’re looking for an all-rounded marketing platform, you might want to give Mailchimp a try.
ConvertKit vs Campaign Monitor
| ConvertKit | Campaign Monitor | |
| Features | Email Marketing, Automations, Landing Pages, Forms, Commerce, Email Designer, Integrations, Templates, Analytics | Email Marketing, Drag and Drop Builder, Automations, Analytics, Integrations, Forms, Client Dashboards |
| Starting Price (for 1000 subscribers) | $29/month | $29/month |
| Free Trial | Yes | Yes |
| Free Account | Yes | No |
Campaign Monitor is a great platform with a clean design, and it’s very similar to ConvertKit in the features it offers.
We would say that this platform is more suited for agencies due to its client dashboard feature. It allows for different email campaigns to be run for different clients.
So, if you’re not an agency, we don’t recommend Campaign Monitor over ConvertKit because, even though it’s a great platform, it offers way more features than you’ll need and that might become confusing when trying to navigate the platform.
Stick to what you need!
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Our Final Thoughts
ConvertKit is a great tool, especially for beginners without much experience in email marketing.
It has every feature you could need as a creator or small store owner, and even though it is a little limited on the design or customization aspect, it offers dozens of templates to make getting off the ground easy.
We truly love ConvertKit and we believe that its user-friendly interface and easy-to-navigate platform will surely win you over as well, and make you choose ConvertKit as your email marketing partner no matter what phase of your creative journey you’re in.
If you found this post useful, you may also like the 5 Best eCommerce Landing Page Builders.
