It can be a daunting task to select the correct email marketing software to run your campaign. With so many programs for email marketing, which one should you choose? The truth is, everything depends on your company’s specific needs. You need to know what particular features you’re looking for when you’re considering different options – And this ConvertKit Review will help you with that.

To continue our email marketing software reviews, let’s talk about ConvertKit. In this ConvertKit review we’ll be discussing its pricing, features, updates, and its pros and cons.

What is ConvertKit?

ConvertKit was originally built by Nathan Barry in 2013 out of frustration with the other softwares at his disposal. Because of his disappointment with the poor competition, Barry decided to create his own free email marketing software.

Even with ConvertKit’s amazing origin stories, ConvertKit is still considered a baby compared to the other email marketing softwares on the market.
It was built to help creators produce visually powerful automated email campaigns. It’s automation builder does the stressful job of delivering your audience well-timed, targeted content so that you can remain focused on growing your business.

On ConvertKit, your subscribers are organized by automated tags and segments based on their preferences, location, and other data points. ConvertKit makes it easier for you to learn more about your subscribers through your custom built marketing funnels.

ConvertKit offers a basic drip email campaign solution and generates simple forms and drip promotions to deliver emails to new subscribers automatically.

Who should use ConvertKit?

ConvertKit is built by creators for creators. It is an email marketing software developed for content creators, such as online bloggers, journalists, podcasters, creators of courses, and more.

ConvertKit promises to help creators grow their audience by creating website visitors into subscribers. The email marketing software also promises to nurture the connection between creators and their email subscribers.

Lastly, ConvertKit aims to help creators make an income through funnels that automatically pitch digital products to engage customers and make the sale.

What Makes ConvertKit Different?

• ConvertKit is intended for online creators, which means there’s no need for a lot of e-commerce-focused features.
• ConvertKit is easy to use, effective, and it has fair rates for its paid plans.
• Compared to older email marketing softwares, it doesn’t have overly complicated tools that you have to learn.

ConvertKit Review – Benefits

Great Opt in Forms

Compared to other email marketing services, ConvertKit helps you easily set up attractive opt-in forms.

Variety of Landing Page Templates

This is ConvertKit’s really good and unforeseen advantage. ConvertKit has templates for landing pages that allow you to build a whole page devoted to your opt-in. ConvertKit lets you set up a quick landing page at no extra expense.

Autoresponder Sequences

The autoresponder sequence on ConvertKit is extremely intuitive because you can drag and drop your messages to make changes to your sequence.

One List

On ConvertKit you only have one email list. This means they only charge once per email. Every subscriber on your mailing list has a special profile where you can easily tag and segment them.

Broadcast Emails

Since you only have one list on ConvertKit, sending broadcasts while excluding certain segments of your list becomes way easier. For example, you can send a welcome email to your new subscribers, while excluding those who already received the email.

Tagging

ConvertKit lets you tag and segment possible leads based on their activity on your website or via your email.

Reporting

You can see an easy-to-understand subscriber graph as you log in to your ConvertKit account that tells you by the day your which forms are growing your subscriber list.

Integrations

ConvertKit directly integrates with other software applications such as LeadPages, OptinMonster, Acuity, and Shopify, or Typeform through Zapier. It is now one of only a handful of services chosen to integrate directly with the Rainmaker Platform for email marketing.

ConvertKit Review – Pricing

Aside from the free platform migration, ConvertKit allows users access to almost all of their features no matter what paid plan is chosen. When you buy a package with more than 5,000 subscribers, ConvertKit will move your lists into their system for you.

The price you pay varies depending on the amount of subscribers you have. ConvertKit is free If you have 0-1000 subscribers, then it’s $29 or a $59 pro version for 1000-3000 subscribers and up. The amount then increases depending on how many subscribers you add to your plan.

You can check their website to calculate the costs.

ConvertKit Creator Pro

For users with bigger lists, Creator Pro provides some useful features, such as:

• Advanced features on the ConvertKit dashboard that provides information for reporting and tracking.
• A Sparkloop account that enables users to reward referring email subscribers.
• Support for custom audiences on Facebook to run ads.
• The ability to change URLS after sending wrong links.
• Allows users to add team members to one account
• Customer support priority

You can get your one month free trial here.

ConvertKit Review – Features

Expanding Your List

You may gain email subscribers using ConvertKit by either building a landing page or a form.

In blog posts or other web sites, you can embed these forms and adjust their visuals so they complement the style of your website.

For a new subscriber, write a brief welcome email after developing a form. This will be delivered by ConvertKit to anyone who fills in the form. You may also include an update or coupon for content.

ConvertKit gives a piece of code to use on your website to embed the form. A variant of this code can also be used to create a clickable button call to action.

Single/Double Opt-in

There have been debates on what you ought to use i.e. single opt-in vs double opt-in. Wanting to improve the quality of your list of email subscribers is a major reason for wanting to use the double opt-in. While the major argument against double opt-in is that it will damage your conversion with this extra step.

To solve this, if you use lead magnets in ConvertKit, your double opt-in automatically happens a download is considered as the second opt-in option.

Automation

Email automation is the ability to send carefully planned emails to subscribers at a specific time or action with relevant information.

Triggers and actions are the two main parts of ConvertKit’s automation feature. The trigger is an occurrence or behavior that begins the automation, and what you want to happen is the action.

ConvertKit provides 6 different automation templates you can use for different purposes. You can also personalize the content based on how your subscribers answer a question.

You can then add triggers then customize them from there to receive email sequences, add or delete them from the tags, and more.

Visual Automation Editor

ConvertKit allows you to see exactly what’s happening in your funnels with its visual automation feature.

Personally, I appreciate the editor for visual automation by ConvertKit. When compared to a few other similar automation editors, you make out the difference and will enjoy using it. The reason being ConvertKit creates a smooth automation workflow for each step of editing.

For instance, in case sending emails is the first step in the automation. Various services will enable editing in a different page of email editor, outside the automation editor. With this shift, you may tend to lose track of your work. However, ConvertKit allows all editing within its automation editor. Hence, when you click the email step, it permits its editing inline. Also, editing of your forms is possible in the same manner.

Landing Page Creator

ConvertKit offers 18 different types of landing page templates. You can customize these templates to match your branding. Users may publish landing pages on their site or use a version hosted by ConvertKit using a WordPress plugin.

Conditional tagging

ConvertKit offers one more beneficial feature which is segmenting of individual emails with the use of conditional tags. For example, you want to send an individual email to the list, and also include an additional bonus coupon for your customers who are VIP. It is possible in ConvertKit.

However, its syntax may seem unfamiliar to non-techies and it may be difficult to recollect what is to be typed while using it.

For help with the same, click on the “Personalize” tab in the menu which is present in the toolbar and further on the Subscriber’s tags. ConvertKit can insert the precise code snippet instruction straight in your email.

All you have to do is change your tag and update the text for the respective two branches.

Open Rate Tracking

People rarely open a broadcasted email. According to HubSpot, advertising, as well as marketing emails, have a 25% email open rate.

The reason could be you did not have an attractive headline or the people have been very busy to open and read the email. ConvertKit includes a simple feature of resending your broadcast for people who have not yet opened your email in the first attempt. This feature is found in the stats page in which you will find a button called ‘Resend to Unopens’.

Clicking on it allows you yo re-send as well  and edit your line of the subject.

ConvertKit Review – Updates

ConvertKit has also recently made updates in the past month to better serve their customers. They also listed some updates to look out for.

Some of their updates and soon to be updates include:

Discounts

Now, by simply sharing a URL representing the discounted price, you can provide your subscribers with discount codes so that they can easily check out and enjoy the product! You may also offer free goods and set limits on the amount of discounts via ConvertKit that you want to offer.

Share Landing Pages on Social Media

ConvertKid added the ability to share your lovely landing pages on social media. If you have personalized one of their many templates, click the sharing button in the landing page builder and from inside ConvertKit, you can share it with Facebook or Twitter.

Recurring Payments

ConvertKit now accepts recurring payments on a monthly basis for creators wanting to sell a subscription based product.

ConvertKit Future Updates

Added date options in Visual Automations

ConvertKit is working on adding powerful new date functionalities to Visual Automations. This upcoming feature will allow creators delay subscribers in Visual Automations until a specific date, based on a custom field, or until a specific day of the week.

Supporting Taxes

ConvertKit is planning to add a supporting taxes feature for users from different countries.

ConvertKit is constantly updating and improving their services for their customers. You can see their full list of updates and upcoming updates here.

ConvertKit Pros

• Great visual automation
• Conditional tagging for segmentation
• Excellent open rate tracking

ConvertKit Cons

• Complex syntax for conditional tagging

ConvertKit Review Conclusion

To conclude, ConvertKit is a great email marketing software that’s worth giving a shot. Even though this email marketing software was created with content creators in mind, i.e. bloggers and writers, plenty of small businesses with an online presence can benefit from it.

Have you used ConvertKit for your email marketing campaigns? Tell us your experience and thoughts in the comments section below.

You can read more on our series of email marketing reviews here.