Convertkit Review

What Is ConvertKit?

ConvertKit is a company that provides email services (ESP). It's a technology platform that allows you to send email campaigns to a list of subscribers. ConvertKit is one of hundreds of email marketing platforms available, and it's the one we favor and use at SPI.

Despite our prejudice, we'll go over the features, benefits, and drawbacks of ConvertKit as we perceive them in this piece to help you decide if it's the perfect ESP for your company.

Email Marketing Strategy: Why You Need an ESP

You may already be aware of what an ESP is and why you require one if you are reading this. However, if you don't have one, an email service provider (ESP) is the most critical piece of technology to support your email marketing plan.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to develop relationships with your audience while also marketing your products and services. Let's have a look at why this is the case.

Email marketing, in its most basic form, entails delivering emails to a group of individuals who have chosen to hear from you by “subscribing” to receive your emails. You could possibly accomplish this using a simple email software like Gmail, but we don't encourage it because it will rapidly become insufficient (and your personal email account would be flagged as spam if you send too many emails from it!)

As your company expands and more people sign up to receive your emails, you'll want to be able to do more advanced things with your email marketing, such as tailoring the emails individuals receive based on their interests and analyzing reports and analytics to see what's working well or not.

You must also ensure that you are not invading people's privacy or spamming them. An email service provider also assists you in complying with regulatory rules around the world, such as the CAN-SPAM legislation in the United States, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, and the Anti-Spam Law in Canada (CASL).

Without the assistance of a dedicated email marketing platform, things can easily spiral out of control. That's where a service like ConvertKit can help.

Let's delve into the details of ConvertKit's functionality now!

Want to learn how to develop your email list and use effective segmentation and automation tactics so your company can function on its own? Take a look at the course Email Marketing Magic.

ConvertKit Features

These are ConvertKit's most important features, categorized by how you'll use them.

Sending Emails

Drip campaigns/autoresponders Send a series of prewritten emails to a segment of your list's subscribers in response to a given event or action, with the goal of encouraging them to do a specified action.

Send out mass emails. On a given date, send conventional announcements or one-time emails to your subscribers.

Compliance with CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL. CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL are regulations that establish standards and requirements for commercial email messages, as well as giving recipients the ability to request that you cease sending them emails—so adherence is essential!

Email content that is dynamic (personalized). Depending on your client segmentation, different text or graphics can be displayed in your email content.

Ready-to-use email templates as well as the opportunity to construct your own bespoke templates are available in responsive email templates. ConvertKit formats your landing pages for a variety of devices, including desktop PCs and mobile phones, automatically.

Email editor with a WYSIWYG interface. While you're drafting your email, you can preview how it will look with your template's styling applied using the built-in email editor.

Collecting New Subscribers

Customized landing pages for mobile devices. Create a landing page to collect email addresses easily with the supplied tool. ConvertKit formats your landing pages for a variety of devices, including desktop PCs and mobile phones, automatically.

Forms that can be embedded. Drop a Javascript or HTML form, or use the WordPress plugin, anywhere on your website to collect email subscribers.

Product sales are important. ConvertKit allows you to create a landing page and collect payment for one-time or recurring products.

Automations that can be seen. You can use if-then logic in ConvertKit to establish rule-based routes so that when a subscriber does a specific action, you can send them pre-defined emails or assign them to a segment.

Learning about Your Subscribers

A/B testing is a method of comparing two options. ConvertKit allows you to compare several subject lines for your emails and automatically chooses the best one based on open rates.

Reporting/analytics/reporting/reporting/reporting/reporting/reporting/reporting Find out how frequently your subscribers open your emails, click on links, and take other activities.

Segmentation/tagging. You can send them emails that are better targeted to their needs and interests by segmenting your subscribers into multiple groups (similar to but more powerful than other applications' "lists").

ConvertKit Pricing

For a long time, ConvertKit was exclusively available as a premium service. However, if you have fewer than 1,000 subscribers, the company introduced a new free tier in December 2019.

As of 2021, ConvertKit's price choices are as follows:

ConvertKit Free Plan

• $0 /month for up to 1,000 subscribers

The Free plan includes:

• Unlimited landing pages & forms

• Send email broadcasts

• Sell digital products & subscriptions

• Email support

ConvertKit Creator Plan

• $29/month for up to 1,000 subscribers (paid monthly)

• $25/month for up to 1,000 subscribers (paid annually)

• Tiered pricing up to $2,299/month paid monthly (or $1,916/month paid annually) for up to 400,000 subscribers

The Creator plan includes:

• All the features of the Free plan

• Free migration from another tool

• Automated funnels & sequences

Convertkit Creator Pro Plan

• $59/month for up to 1,000 subscribers

• Tiered pricing up to $2,599/month paid monthly (or $2,166/month paid annually) for up to 400,000 subscribers

The Creator Pro plan includes:

• All the features of the Creator plan

• Facebook custom audiences

• Newsletter referral system

• Subscriber scoring

• Advanced reporting

We'll keep this post updated with the most recent ConvertKit pricing, but you can also go to the ConvertKit pricing page.

Let's dive into why we enjoy ConvertKit now that it's out of the way!

Benefits of ConvertKit

SPI Media's email marketing has been powered by ConvertKit for numerous years. We've found it to be the appropriate ESP for our purposes throughout that time. From our vantage point, ConvertKit's power is divided into two categories: user benefits and audience benefits.

ConvertKit Benefits from the User’s Standpoint

First and foremost, ConvertKit includes everything a business owner requires to get up and running quickly:

Emails can be collected.

To collect emails, you can create a basic landing page.

You can make money by selling items (one-time purchase or subscription).

These characteristics enable someone to begin selling even if they are in the process of establishing a website elsewhere. It also makes one of the core teachings in our Smart From Scratch course, using selling as a critical stage in the idea-validation process, simple to put into practice.

Second, the ConvertKit team built their platform to evolve with the user's level of complexity. You'll probably merely want to collect email addresses and send emails when you first start. However, as your business expands, you'll want to start customizing your messaging and segmenting your audience. At that point, you can use automations and dynamic content to your benefit. ConvertKit grows with you as you get more complex, so you won't have to switch to a different email service provider in five years. This distinguishes ConvertKit from other ESPs, particularly Mailchimp.

Some individuals find ConvertKit intimidating (see Drawbacks below), but we think it's very approachable if you're tech-savvy. ConvertKit's automation builder, in particular, is user-friendly, allowing you to develop automations in a basic, linear manner.

For a year, we used Infusionsoft and found its automation builder to be smart but intimidating. You have to be familiar with how automations function and the numerous symbols used by automation builders. ConvertKit's automation builder, on the other hand, makes it simple to connect automations in a complex fashion.

ConvertKit's approach to subscriber management is also appealing. There are no lists with ConvertKit; all of your subscribers are thrown into one giant pool. Instead, subscribers can be divided into groups by utilizing tags and custom fields to assign them attributes. These allow you to treat your subscribers as individuals with distinct demands; not every subscriber is the same.

ConvertKit Benefits for Your Audience

ConvertKit allows you to personalize your messages for your target audience. You are free to create as many forms and landing pages as you like. There are no limits to how many tags, custom fields, or segments you can have. You can be as precise as you want while speaking to your audience.

As you learn more about your audience, you may start segmenting subscribers so you don't send them messages about items they don't care about. ConvertKit makes it simple to gather information about your audience along the way, and unlike a list-based email platform, you aren't penalized for it by paying more.

Drawbacks of ConvertKit

Of course, no solution is ideal. Here are some of the problems that we, as well as other ConvertKit users, have discovered.

The learning curve is moderately steep. For a beginner, the interface can be a little daunting. Using all of ConvertKit's capabilities, such as segmentation, tagging, and automations, requires considerable training (and potentially coding). By watching their Getting Started video series, you can cut your learning curve in half.

There will be no list-based organization. Although we enjoy how ConvertKit organizes subscribers using tags (and unlike some ESPs, it doesn't charge you for duplicate subscribers), the lack of a list-based categorization system can be perplexing if you're coming from another platform. However, we believe you'll find this solution to be more versatile over time than managing lists.

Email and landing page templates with no frills. To construct custom sophisticated email templates and landing pages beyond the included options, CSS coding is required. The email design tool, according to some users, can be buggy.

The analytics may be more comprehensive. ConvertKit's free version lacks the same extensive reporting features as the Creator and Creator Pro versions, which makes logical but can be inconvenient for some users.

Thankfully, one of ConvertKit's prior flaws, the lack of a free option, is no longer an issue! In fact, ConvertKit's free tier puts it on par with other prominent ESPs like Mailchimp at the entry level.