ConvertKit Email Marketing Review: An Overview at a Glance
Who Is ConvertKit For? ConvertKit was created by bloggers and exists for small businesses or bloggers like myself. It offers extremely intuitive tools that even the utmost beginner can learn and start applying right away (If I can manage to use it, you can too!).
Simplicity Is Key: ConvertKit focuses on offering the essential features you need to be successful in email marketing. Everything it offers, it does well. But one pitfall is that it doesn’t offer advanced features like some of the other email marketing platforms might.
ConvertKit Pricing: Pricing varies according to your needs. There is a free plan with limited features for up to 1000 subscribers. The creator plan which includes all the essential features starts from $15 per month (reduced to $9 per month if you purchase an annual subscription) for up to 300 subscribers.
Do I Recommend ConvertKit? As you will read from my ConvertKit email marketing review, there are many factors I love about ConvertKit. That’s exactly why I use it myself for my email marketing needs. Continue reading to find out why I recommend ConvertKit!
Disclosure: My website/blog is reader-supported and may contain affiliate links. If you decide to make a purchase through links on my site, I may earn an affiliate commission, at no extra cost to you. You can read my full affiliate disclosure here.
Introduction to My ConvertKit Email Marketing Review
Welcome to my email marketing review of ConvertKit, an email marketing company that automates your emails and allows you to create high-quality forms and landing pages! In this review, I have conducted a comprehensive examination of all the features, pros, cons, and services offered by ConvertKit.
Throughout my review, I use my own content that I have created using ConvertKit to make sure you can see the full scope and simplicity of using the tool!
In fact, this blog post is as much a tutorial as it is a review, so you can be sure that once you finish reading this review, you will have all the information you need to make the right call about whether or not ConvertKit is right for you!
ConvertKit Overview: Email Marketing Solution
ConvertKit is an email marketing platform designed to help you build, grow and engage with your email list.
The emphasis of ConvertKit is on user-friendliness and simplicity. In fact, the reason that ConvertKit exists is because the founder was a blogger/content creator who was frustrated and fed up with the challenges of finding tools and software to get started as a content creator.
There are so many platforms out there that claim to have powerful software or offer the most advanced features, yet often what is promised by these tools can be the exact thing that restricts your success, particularly if you’re only just starting out.
The problem is that these tools are often overkill for anyone who is just starting out, and instead weigh you down in complexity and leave you confused and irritated.
So that’s why ConvertKit was created by its founder – to target those individuals like you and me who don’t have whole teams behind us, individuals who have to figure it out on our own.
ConvertKit is not for large companies with entire teams and resources that can be thrown at email marketing, instead ConvertKit exists to solve the pain points of creators like you and me.
ConvertKit Pricing: Finding the Right Plan
We all know that pricing is at the forefront of our purchasing decisions, so I’m just going to cut straight to the chase in this ConvertKit email marketing review and cover the pricing model before we move into examining the ConvertKit features in great detail.
There are three ConvertKit Plan options available to select from, which vary in functionality. The three plans include:
- Free Plan
- Creator Plan
- Creator Pro Plan
The free plan is only valid for up to 1,000 subscribers. For the Creator and Creator Pro Plans, the exact costs depend on the number of email subscribers you have. The more subscribers you have, the higher the monthly cost.
I’ve created a table that summarises the cost of each plan for different subscriber counts up to 105,000.
| Subscribers | 0-300 | 1,000 | 5,000 | 10,000 | 55,000 | 105,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Free |
$0 / mo |
$0 / mo |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
|
Creator |
$15 / mo |
$29 / mo |
$79 / mo |
$119 / mo |
$379/ mo |
$679 / mo
|
|
Creator Pro |
$29 / mo |
$59 / mo |
$111 / mo |
$167 / mo |
$519 / mo |
$879 / mo |
Choosing the Best Plan for Your Needs
Free Plan
The Free plan is a great choice for creators who are just getting started with building an audience. It allows you to create landing pages, and newsletters and send emails to up to 1,000 subscribers for free. This plan is limited though, and has no automation capability (such as sending sequenced/multiple emails).
Creator Plan (My Personal Choice)
The Creator plan is perfect if you want to grow your email list using automation features that allow you to spend less time on marketing and more time on creating. This is the plan I personally use because it offers all the features + more that I actually am interested in using. I will talk all about the features in the next section, don’t worry!
Anything beyond the Creator plan is overkill for me and my email marketing needs.
Creator Pro Plan
The Creator Pro plan is best for creators who want to scale their business with advanced features like subscriber engagement and deliverability reporting and Facebook custom audiences.
Personally, I don’t think ConvertKit Creator Pro is worth it for most of us – unless you have a sizeable email list ( >10,000 subscribers) or if you need more advanced analytics for whatever reason.
My recommendation? Save yourself a buck and just go with the Creator plan.
ConvertKit Pricing Summary
At the end of the day, ConvertKit isn’t the cheapest email marketing software out there.
But if you are like me and don’t want to spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to understand other email tools that aren’t intuitive, then ConvertKit really is the holy grail.
To me, the value of signing up to ConvertKit and being able to immediately jump in and start creating forms, landing pages and automating your emails without any prior experience is really what I am paying for.
So if you’ve been frustrated with other email marketing tools because they aren’t intuitive, then ConvertKit really is worth every dollar.
Plus, once you get the ball rolling, recouping the subscription costs should be an easy job if you make use of affiliate marketing techniques in your email marketing campaigns.
But if you’re still unsure, you can always just create a free account to test the waters.
You can also extend this to include a 14-day free trial of any of the Creator or Creator Pro plans. You don’t even need to enter a credit card, so you won’t be charged if you decide ConvertKit isn’t for you but accidentally forget to cancel your subscription before the end of the trial!
The last thing I should mention about ConvertKit’s pricing is that if you switch your billing cycle to annual billing, you’ll score yourself a discount and get two free months off your plan.
I’ve made it easy for you to choose which plan best suits you below. So when you have finished reading the rest of my ConvertKit email marketing review, you can can come back here and choose your plan of liking.
My link will take you to the 14-day free trial – so you can test it before you pay for anything!
Free
- Unlimited landing pages
- Unlimited forms
- Unlimited email sending
- Audience tagging and segmentation
- No automation features
Creator
Creator Pro
- All Free + Creator plan features included
- Newsletter referral system
- Subscriber scoring
- Advanced reporting
Features Of ConvertKit
I’ve already mentioned how ConvertKit is aimed at everyday people like you and me who are wanting to add email marketing to our suite of tools, yet don’t want the complexities of having to learn an entire freaking course just to get started…
And although it is true that there are other platforms out there bundled with more features, it doesn’t necessarily mean that ConvertKit is lacking in features by any means. In fact, even in the Creator plan I use, I haven’t utilised all of the features available.
When it comes to ConvertKit, I tend to adopt the motto, less is more, rather than falling victim to becoming a jack of all trades, master of none (i.e. trying to squeeze every possible feature in just because it’s there).
So with that out of the way, let’s look at the ConvertKit features that are available, with emphasis on the features I actually make use of.
To do so, let’s consider the logical flow of processes that occur in email marketing. Specifically, I will cover the relevant features offered by ConvertKit that help address each of the below steps.
- Building Your Email List: Forms & Landing Pages
- Managing Your Email List: Tags & Segments in ConvertKit
- Engaging Your Email List: Sending Emails with ConvertKit
- Automating Your Content: Creating Funnels with ConvertKit
Building Your Email List: Forms & Landing Pages
The most important part of email marketing is to establish and grow your email list.
It may not come as a surprise to you, but you need an email list in order to be able to connect with and share content with your audience through email marketing.
That’s why this section of the ConvertKit email marketing review is focused on growing your email list.
ConvertKit has two main tools that you can use to gather email subscribers and grow your email list. These include Forms and Landing Pages.
Essentially, both of these are lead magnets – they are designed to offer some form of incentive or service to visitors with the intent of gathering their email/subscription details.
KEY TERMINOLOGY
A lead magnet is a free item or service that is incentivised to visitors for the purpose of gathering their contact details (email address)
ConvertKit Forms
Forms, as the name suggests – are a digital form that is designed to collect information from visitors to your website, specifically their email address. These forms can be embedded anywhere on your website, blog or sales page that you host yourself.
ConvertKit makes it very easy to design a high-quality looking form and offers a number of different display form types you can choose from. Specifically, you can choose to create any of the following forms:
- Inline: The form appears as part of your blog post or website content.
- Modal: You can elect for a modal form that appears as a pop-out form on your website after specific criteria you have defined is met, for example – after the visitor has been on your page for 25 seconds.
- Slide in: A slide in form is placed on the edge/corner of your page, and can be minimized or expanded by the user.
- Sticky bar: If you opt for a sticky bar form, it will remain ‘locked’ in place. This means when visitors scroll up/down your page, the form will always remain in the same position (typically locked to the top or bottom of your page).
Once you have decided upon the type of form you want to create, the next step is to actually design it and make it look visually appealing!
Thankfully, ConvertKit has us covered on this front as well – making it extremely easy thanks to the custom suite of templates that can be selected from (see image below). All you have to do is hit the ‘Choose’ button on whatever template tickles your fancy, and then its literally just a matter of replacing text, and images and adjusting colour schemes to match your website/blog.
Once you have designed a high-quality-looking form – thanks to the WordPress integration that ConvertKit supports (more detail to come on this), all the forms that you create can be embedded absolutely anywhere on your website or blog.
This is exactly how I’ve created my own e-Newsletter form – which I’ve embedded for you below to see for yourself!
ConvertKit just makes the process so easy and helps add that extra little bit of professionalism to your website/blog!
ConvertKit Landing Pages
Unlike forms which are typically embedded into posts or pages of websites, landing pages are instead a kind of mini website.
That’s because a landing page is a website that contains a single page with the sole intent of generating lead magnets.
ConvertKit has many landing page templates for a range of categories including:
- eBooks
- Newsletters
- Podcasts
- Products
- Webinars
You can create landing pages in ConvertKit basically the same way you create a form. You select the template that best matches your needs, and then customize it with your own content and images and colour schemes.
That’s really all there is to it.
To provide you with an example, I’ll link you my own landing page that I created using ConvertKit below.
For context, I have created my own course on how to set up a blog from scratch. So as a way to grow my email list, I created a landing page that offers visitors a 7-day free email course about how to set up their very own blog.
And in order to enrol in this free course, all that is required is for them to enter their email address.
I get a new subscriber – and in return, they get free content from me!
On that note – if you are interested in learning how to start your own blog, then you can enrol as well 😉
The landing pages you create are hosted on ConvertKit’s own web hosting services, which means you don’t need a website or domain name to create one. However, if you are like me and you do own a website/domain name, then you can also opt to import a custom domain into ConvertKit.
If you clicked on the link above to my landing page, then you might have noticed the first section of my URL which is convertkit.trajectorytowealth.com.
I added a custom domain to my ConvertKit account, which allows me to host the landing pages I create on ConvertKit with this URL.
Rather than using a randomized generated domain name created by ConvertKit, I opted to add a custom domain name (the name of my own blog/website) where all my landing pages created on ConvertKit can be hosted.
This is by no means essential, but it can help to add credibility to my landing pages, since if anyone visiting the site were to actually take the time to review the URL, then they would see it matches the name of my personal brand.
Plus what’s great about the landing pages you create with ConvertKit is that they come with free SSL certificates included.
This ensures the information of any visitor browsing your landing page is encrypted and kept private.
Managing Your Email List: Tags & Segments in ConvertKit
It’s one thing to start building and growing your email list, but equally as important is managing your subscribers. You don’t want all that hard work you put into capturing your subscribers to have been in vain.
You need to understand and acknowledge the interests of your subscribers to be successful in email marketing.
The reason?
Well, at some point in your email marketing journey, there will come a time when you will expand your content offering to subject matters that may be relevant for only a portion of your subscriber list.
For example, my blog is about personal finance – and one topic I write about is cryptocurrency. This isn’t the only topic I write about, but is it one of them.
But not everyone who subscribes to my email list may necessarily be interested in cryptocurrency, so I have to be careful that I don’t spoon-feed crypto-related content to individuals on my list that don’t actually want to hear about cryptocurrency… Otherwise, if I fail to filter out who on my list is interested, or more importantly, not interested – and I instead send everyone everything, then my pestering pushiness will inevitably lead to unsubscribes that could have easily been avoided.
That’s where the power of Tags & Segments come into play.
It’s essential that as your following grows, you segment your audience and send focused content only to the segments that you know will want to hear your focused content. This means avoiding the tendency to constantly email your entire list about every little thing you do.
With ConvertKit, you can achieve segmentation via the use of tags. Tags enable you to group and organise subscribers in your email list based on their actions, interests, and more. Basically, since you only have one list of subscribers, you use tags to organise your subscribers based on certain criteria.
For example – did a visitor sign up to my email list through my blog course landing page? Well great! I can get ConvertKit to tag this subscriber with an ‘interested in blogging’ tag when they sign up to my list using my landing page. And now I know this particular subscriber is interested in blog-related content, so I can send them emails relevant to blogging.
Basically, by adding tags to users when they sign up to different forms and landing pages, ConvertKit lets me know where my subscriber’s sign-ups are coming from.
But tagging doesn’t just end here, I can embed questionnaires or buttons into emails I send out to my subscribers, and refine their tags even further based on the responses/calls to action they provide.
The point of tagging your subscribers is to establish the different segments that they fall into. The diagram below summarises this very nicely – basically, tags organise people based on their interests, and segments organise a folder full of tags.
Engaging Your Email List: Sending Emails with ConvertKit
Now that we know all about tags and segments from this ConvertKit Email Marketing Review, we’re in a good position to talk about the next area – connecting with your email list.
So far, we’ve spoken about how to ConvertKit can be used to capture subscribers and manage them, but what we haven’t discussed yet is how to actually go about emailing our subscribers?
After all – there’s a reason it’s called email marketing…
Broadcasts
Broadcasts are the simplest form of emails that you can send to your subscribers from your ConvertKit Account.
Essentially, broadcasts are emails that you manually send (either immediately or at a future planned date and time) to specific segments of your email list.
ConvertKit allows you to send emails to your entire subscriber list, but as we’ve discussed already, it’s better to send targeted emails to specific segments within your list.
Broadcasts make this easy by allowing you to use logic to decide which subscribers will receive your email (based on the tags or segments you have assigned them).
When you create a broadcast, you have the option to select “Any,” “All” or “None” of the matching options.
Doing so allows you to tailor which subscribers will receive your broadcast.
For example, if I have subscribers who I know are interested in blogging (thanks to the ‘interested in blogging’ tag that I had previously tagged them with), then I may want to send a broadcast to them informing them of my 7-day free blogging course that I offer.
However, some of my subscribers with the ‘interested in blogging’ tag may have already completed my blogging course – so I don’t want this broadcast to go out to them as well since it would just be annoying for them to hear about it again.
So what I can do when creating a broadcast is to define a series of filters that will allow me to include some of my subscribers and exclude others based on tags/segments (or identifiers, for want of a better word)
For example, in order for a subscriber from my list to receive this broadcast about my blog course – they need to have the ‘interested in blogging’ tag but not have the ‘Completed Blog Course’ tag.
I can achieve this by setting the first filter to match ‘all’ of the specified criteria, but then setting the second filter to match ‘none’ of the specified criteria.
As you can appreciate, the more filters you create, the more refined and targeted you can make your broadcasts.
Snippets
Another nifty feature that I quickly wanted to mention in this ConvertKit email marketing review is something called snippets.
Snippets are chunks of reusable content that you create only once but can then embed into any of your emails with just a click of a button.
For example, I used the snippet tool to create a signature item that contains my display picture and social media links (you can see it for yourself in the image below!).
I embed this at the end of all the emails that I send out. Doing so adds that extra level of professionalism whilst simultaneously linking all my social media accounts to my subscribers, which helps to increase my overall exposure.
Sequences
Sequences (sometimes known as autoresponders) are a more advanced method to send emails to your subscribers with ConvertKit.
Unlike broadcasts, sequences enable you to send an automated series of emails that are triggered by a user event (such as someone signing up to my blog email course through my landing page).
An email sequence is critical to your brand’s exposure since it can get your best content in front of the eyes of new subscribers. It helps you connect with your audience, ensuring your content stays fresh in their mind.
As an example, I created a 7-day sequence that sends out a new email each day to anyone who subscribes to my email course through my landing page.
The process to set up a sequence is really intuitive and user-friendly. It’s just like writing several emails that then connect together in series. The best part is, you only have to set it up once and the rest is completely automated.