In its most simple explanation, ConvertKit is a marketing tool using emails designed to be used primarily by content creators and marketers. This includes professional bloggers, course authors and curators, and writers of various materials.
However, this is not all that ConvertKit does. It can be used to build specific landing pages and sell your services and products using its automated emailing systems.
This ConvertKit overview will reveal services that are often compared to some of its competitors, like MailChimp and Infusionsoft. Still, it does have some differences which help it stand out.
If you want to try ConvertKit, it offers a free trial, so you can set up the most basic version of the service without investing any money.
This article looks into what ConvertKit can be used for, and how effective it is at achieving this, and it should help you determine if this service is right for you.
If you have questions about what ConvertKit is used for, keep reading!
Table of Contents
What Is Email Marketing?
While social media marketing has gotten much attention recently for how novel it is, email marketing is more profitable and offers a larger return.
Email marketing is primarily used by writers and bloggers who want to maintain a loyal relationship with their readers and those who consume their content. The best way to do this is to have them on an email list to remind them of what your content offers.
Some creators do not like the idea of email marketing due to some negative connotations with the medium of email. Still, if you recontextualize this as keeping in contact with clients and consumers, you start to understand the appeal.
Email marketing allows you to tell a more detailed story than marketing and communication made through social media posts and this is what makes it such a profitable tool. By automating the process with a tool like ConvertKit, you are taking a lot of the time and effort out of maintaining this.
Some of the most popular tools to maintain this are MailChimp, Infusionsoft, and Aweber. Still, these can all be quite difficult to use and inaccessible, an issue that ConvertKit aims to solve.
What Can You Do With ConvertKit?
So while some of the features listed in the earlier sections of this article might sound helpful in the grand scheme of email marketing, for some potential users, it is easier to put ConvertKit into perspective by giving common examples of how it is often used.
By doing this you can see if these common uses of ConvertKit are something you would want to do yourself, and then you can see if you ConvertKit feels like a viable choice.
Grow Your Emailing List With ConvertKit
By using ConvertKit, you can aggregate a list of email subscribers through either a form or a landing page.
The forms which are needed to make these lists can be embedded into posts on a blog or into a similar webpage to match their look, and they can be placed anywhere to spur new people on to subscribe to an email list.
Once a form has been embedded, you can simply create a welcoming email for any new subscribers which will be sent by ConvertKit automatically to any new subscribers you join your mailing list.
Using ConvertKit you will be given code that can be easily put into your website to embed your form, but you can even use a different type of this code to make a button that can achieve a similar purpose.
If you have a WordPress website, you can also use the plugin option which will put the ConvertKit form underneath your posts to make it easy to integrate into your content and duplicate it to match everything.
And because of the large base of ConvertKit users, if you get stuck with anything, some people can help you solve your problems.
ConvertKit also does a great job at tracking who has signed up for your mailing list and how successful these pages are.
These analytical tools are incredibly useful if you want to make your posts profitable.
Promote Posts With ConvertKit
Of course, in theory, it is nice to hope that all blog posts will do well as soon as they are posted, but the best way to ensure that your readers see a post is to promote it with your mailing list.
Just posting a link to content on social media is one thing, but an email is much more direct and is often much more effective at getting someone to consume your content.
With ConvertKit you can adapt how much your readers receive your emails about your content with either email for every update, or just a weekly or monthly check in with all the updates from a certain period of time like a newsletter.
ConvertKit even allows you to resend any emails to people who did not open the first one and even change details about the email like the subject or the content of the email.
By just resending emails to those who did not open the first ones you will be drastically improved the rate at which your readers interact with your content.
Deliver Upgrades Using ConvertKit
You can use ConvertKit to offer content upgrades. These content upgrades are bonuses that you can offer to your readers or consumers which are opted into when signing up for your mailing list.
These content upgrades can take a massive variety of different forms from a book chapter to exclusive videos, and even productivity resources.
ConvertKit allows you to easily send these specific upgrades to people who have opted in with their expert filtration tools.
Email Using ConvertKit
A great key feature of ConvertKit is the ability to set up an email sequence which makes it so when someone clicks a link from one email or a certain page, that a follow up email can be sent after a certain amount of time for various reasons.
This means that when someone clicks a link they are being entered into a sequence of emails and this can significantly aid in your ability to email market to your consumers.
These emails can be used to re-incentivize readers who have not interacted after a certain period of time or make sure to keep avid readers active with your content.
By using ConvertKit, all of these steps become automated with all you need to do is enter the copy and make sure to check your automation systems.
You can quickly check the response rate using the analytical tools, and ConvertKit does this at a price point much cheaper than its competitors.
Host Landing Pages With ConvertKit
Another useful feature that you can use with ConvertKit is the variety of templates for landing pages which are included with the tool to make it, so you can fully customize the look and aesthetic of these pages to fit the branding of your website.
These can be included using a WordPress plugin and will make it so that a landing page can be put into any website hosted by ConvertKit.
Landing pages are commonly used by bloggers to make it easy to attract more subscribers to mailing lists. They can be made more attractive by offering the upgrades mentioned in the previous sections.
While the landing pages offered by more premium services and plugins may be more powerful, the ones offered by ConvertKit are fully serviceable in most cases and allow a good level of customization.
Using Email Autoresponders With ConvertKit
ConvertKit makes it, so your web page can have a simple autoresponder email for different scenarios which are most commonly used to be sent to a new subscriber to a mailing list.
These autoresponder emails are often used to give an introduction to your page and what it is about as well as offer services or products that are associated with your page.
While composing an autoresponder email can feel quite overwhelming, once it has been done and written well, you can be confident that all new subscribers are receiving a good introduction to your page.
Sell Products Using ConvertKit
This has already been alluded to, but the proper use of ConvertKit is to further your ability to sell products or at least remind your subscribers of your products and how they can be helpful.
The products most commonly sold using this kind of marketing are:
- Courses.
- Coaching.
- Literature.
- Any other digital or physical products.
ConvertKit can build in tracking to sales made through their emailing system and can even mark out which subscribers are buying what and which subscribers are purchasing the most.
You can use this data for more targeted marketing, with it being possible to send certain subscribers certain emails and these can be tailored to the statistics you have gathered from having them on your mailing list.
Automate Your Marketing Using ConvertKit
One of the best and most useful features of ConvertKit is the advanced options for automating the systems it offers.
You can set up full logic trees and email sequences as previously mentioned and tag subscribers to make tracking the success of these ventures.
Setting up marketing automation using ConvertKit can seem complex. It will require some effort to learn, but with the popularity of the platform, there are plenty of resources and forums dedicated to learning these systems.
How Much Does ConvertKit Cost?
The pricing for ConvertKit scales with how many readers you have on your mailing list and the more you have, the more you will have to pay.
You can technically use the service with its most basic features for free indefinitely, but this will limit your growth significantly and will only let you do this with up to 300 subscribers.
After this bracket, the minimum you will be paying is $29 monthly for up to 1000 subscribers, but this will grow more with the number of people on your mailing list.
ConvertKit also started the creator pro tier for their product in 2019 which includes many features integral to getting more success out of the product.
Some key features included are:
- More advanced reports on the people who have subscribed.
- A Sparkloop account for referring subscribers.
- Facebook custom audiences.
- Changing URLs that have been emailed.
- Supporting virtual assistants.
- More priority is given to customer support.
While these are technically bonus features, many users see these features as a necessity for the business they are running.
ConvertKit Overview Conclusion
If you just want to test it out, the basic version of ConvertKit being free is a massive bonus for helping you interact with the platform and helping you work out if you want to take it further.
While only 300 subscribers are quite small in the grand scheme, this is a good amount for setting up a platform that can grow to something bigger, and this is of course when you would have to start paying for the premium versions.
ConvertKit does have competitors like the cheaper MailChimp and the more expensive Infusionsoft, so comparing which features are a necessity is worthwhile in considering if ConvertKit is right for you.
If you are a content creator who wants to keep growing their platform, consider ConvertKit for your current or future project.