ConvertKit Review & Tutorial: Is it the Best Email Service Provider?

1 How ConvertKit Works

Just like any other email marketing service, ConvertKit requires you to sign up to start using the service.

When you have signed up, you will get to the dashboard of the platform that is made in UX design, making it easy to use. ConvertKit provides you with three forms and four landing page templates at the beginning.

The templates can be customized by changing the headlines, colors of your main content as well as adding images.

However, you cannot move the templates’ elements around. For users looking for a platform that is more customizable, it is recommended for you to incorporate inventions such as Leadpages or Thrive Leads.

ConvertKit offers users automation similar to InfusionSoft but it is more affordable as compared to InfusionSoft. Unlike InfusionSoft that is complex and hard to learn, ConvertKit is very easy to use.

This email marketing platform allows you to send broadcast emails for product promotion or even announcing a webinar you are creating.

To get started with your broadcast, you should first select the kind of subscribers you want to send the broadcast to.

ConvertKit works differently from other email marketing services such as Aweber. For most email marketing services, all your subscribers are gathered into one huge account list.

On the other hand, for ConvertKit all your subscribers are gathered into different lists. The email marketing platform provides you with great flexibility by allowing you to categorize and divide your subscribers.

The main difference between ConvertKit and other email marketing platforms is that ConvertKit’s autoresponder series are referred to as Sequences.

The user can divide leads subscribed to certain Sequences, Tags or Forms. You can also divide the leads based on Date.

The platform features a pre-made filter to exclusively aim at your cold subscribers. After dividing your subscribers, you now need to write your email.

ConvertKit doesn’t have a drag and drop features thus creating email newsletters can be time-consuming. Nonetheless, it is still easy to create HTML emails as well as simple text.

Sending an email to a small list of subscribers who are interested in that kind of information helps eliminate the risk of sending the email to people who are not interested thus avoiding spam complaints, unsubscribing or any other common indifference to your emails.

2 How to Use Tags to Personalize Emails

ConvertKit uses tags to help you identify and categorize your subscribers based on their interests.

This feature gives you the ability to segment subscribers within emails making it easy for you to neatly send different emails to different groups of subscribers within your list.

The only challenge with this is that it uses syntax which is like programming thus it could look complex for people without the skill.

Take an example whereby you want to give a discount of 20% to customers that are regular users of one of your product, but only give a discount of 10% to new or other customers.

When sending the email, your regular customers will see the email that offers them 20% discount while the other customers will get an email that offers them a 10% discount.

You can also group your subscribers as buyers and non-buyers. ConvertKit makes this possible since it has incorporated some common shopping carts such as Gumroad, Shopify and SamCart.

You can also use ConvertKit’s Zapier support to integrate the shopping cart of your choice.

When the shopping cart has been integrated, you get an additional trigger referred to as “Purchases a product”.

With the trigger, you can easily tag users based on the product name to make it easier for you to know which subscribers have already bought your products.

3 Auto Resend Broadcasts Feature for Unopened Emails

When you send broadcast emails, it is common for some of your subscribers not to open the emails. This could be because maybe your email heading was not interesting or persuasive enough for the subscribers or maybe they were busy and did not get time to read your email.

ConvertKit has a feature that allows you to re-target subscribers who did not open your email for the first time.

For you to be able to do this, you need to click on any former broadcast emails. You will get to the statistic page where you will see a button “Resend to Unopens”. Click on the button to go over the broadcast email workflow targeting the unopened subscribers.

This is a very useful and unique feature that is hard to find in other email marketing services in the market.

4 The Lead Magnet Double Option Feature

Lead magnet double option feature allows you to gather more leads. Since ConvertKit has a double option, it is easier for subscribers to double-opt.

Instead of your visitors seeing the regular double option email, they will see a unique double-opt email when they subscribe. ConvertKit spontaneously confirms subscribers’ requests when they click the download button to get their lead magnet. This results into better optin-rate.

5 ConvertKit Email Automation

Email automation is one of the features that make ConvertKit unique. Automation allows you to divide your list of subscribers into groups of subscribers with the same interest.

This lets you send more targeted broadcast emails and/or programs that gratify a smaller subgroup of your subscribers.

6 ConvertKit Prices

The pricing of ConvertKit is a little bit higher than other email marketing service providers in the market today.

The pricing of ConvertKit starts at $29 a month for a list of upto 1,000 subscribers. When your list increases from 1,000 but less than 3,000, you will be required to pay $49/month.

For more than 3,000 subscribers but less than 5,000 subscribers, you will be required to pay $79/month. You can contact the ConvertKit team if you have even a bigger list size for customized price.

It is important for you to note that ConvertKit reckons a subscriber on multiple courses as a single diverse subscriber. This avoids you getting double or triple billed for a single subscriber on multiple lists like it is the case in Aweber and Mailchimp.

There is no free trial plan service for ConvertKit. They only offer you a full 30-day money back guarantee so if the service doesn’t match your business, you can get a full refund of your money.

7 ConvertKit Performance Compared to Other Service Providers

When compared to other service providers, ConvertKit performs much better than other service providers.

For service providers such as MailChimp, there are some great limitations such as a restriction to a single option form for each list. That means it’s a big pain if you want to add multiple content upgrades to your site. With ConvertKit, this is dead simple.

ConvertKit also has higher automation capabilities than most service providers in the industry. The visual automation editor in ConvertKit is one of the best in the market. The main difference between ConvertKit and other service providers is the capability and the ease to use the service.

ConvertKit has a distraction-free interface which makes it easy for you to effectively use the platform. This platform provides you with unrestricted flexibility with making different workflows.

Users can make simple two-step workflows, or more complex ones for cart desertion or list lopping. It also offers more triggers and activities. You not only get flexibility with ConvertKit’s automation but you also get one step workflows.

8 Pros & Cons

Pros

• ConvertKit is specifically designed for bloggers, podcasters and other businesses that build audiences.
• The platform provides you with three forms and four landing page templates at the beginning.
• Users can customize the template by changing the headlines, colors of your main content as well as adding images.
• ConvertKit allows you to group all your subscribers into different lists providing you with great flexibility by allowing you to categorize and divide your subscribers.
• This email marketing service helps you divide leads subscribed to certain Sequences, Tags or Forms or even based on Date with the help of a pre-made filter feature that exclusively aim at your cold subscribers.
• Sending an email to a small list of subscribers who are interested in that kind of information helps eliminate the risk of sending the email to people who are not interested thus avoiding spam complaints, unsubscribing or any other common indifference to your emails.
• Users can group their subscribers as buyers and non-buyers since ConvertKit has incorporated some common shopping carts such as Gumroad, Shopify and SamCart.
• When you send broadcast emails, it is common for some of your subscribers not to open the emails. ConvertKit has a feature that allows you to re-target subscribers who did not open your email for the first time.

Cons

• It does not provide any free trials.
• It is certainly more expensive than other email service providers.
• No drag and drop functionality makes it a little hectic for a complete newbie to adapt to the system.

9 Final Verdict

ConvertKit is a great email marketing tool that can help you send an effective email to your subscribers and convert the subscribers into potential buyers.

This email marketing platform has great features that help improve your experience and make your email creation process easy and effective.

It might not be the cheapest option but, it certainly deserves all the applause for its features and functionalities it provides.

You can consider ConvertKit as more of a professional email service provider which would certainly help you achieve your email marketing goals and generate more leads for your business.