ConvertKit - Irresistible and Way Better Than Mailchimp

What Is ConvertKit?

ConvertKit is an email marketing service provider that’s purpose built for professional bloggers. It supports landing pages, content upgrades and more. It’s like a cross between Infusionsoft and MailChimp–except more affordable and easy to use.

ConvertKit is an email marketing solution that is aimed at bloggers and e-commerce marketers. It offers excellent subscriber management, segmentation, and form building capability, but it has a very basic email editor. Find out if this software meets your email marketing needs

Is ConvertKit the right newsletter service for you?

Recommended if:

You want to run ultra-targeted campaigns:

With ConvertKit’s flexible tagging and segmentation system, you can run laser-focused automated campaigns to very specific groups of contacts. Its inbuilt landing page editor also allows you to manage end-to-end campaigns within the one tool.

Not recommended if:

You want to send visual emails:

The fact that it only offers 3 email templates (and all text-based) means that you’re very limited. There’s no option to select from or even upload your own email templates, so if this is important to you we’d recommend a more design-flexible option like MailerLite or MailChimp.

You don’t have a big budget:

Although ConvertKit is aimed at creatives and bloggers, their pricing seems more apt for big businesses. There are definitely more affordable tools available, with similar (and even better) features.

Convertkit Review: Features

• Visual marketing automation tool
• Customizable forms
• Can send unlimited emails
• Subscriber tagging
• Reporting
• 70+ integrations
• API compatibility
• Email & Live Chat Support

Convertkit Features: The breakdown

Straight up, ConvertKit is an email marketing solution for content creators, with a few added extras.

Here is everything you can do with your ConvertKit account as of this year:

1. Create opt-in forms and landing pages

2. Send email broadcasts

3. Create automation sequences

4. See opt-in and email performance reports

5. Manage contact records

6. Integrate with e-commerce providers and take payments

If you're familiar with any of the available CRM's like Salesforce or InfusionSoft, then try to imagine ConvertKit as being a more affordable and simplified version of these.

ConvertKit Review: Opt-In Forms

If there was ever an area ConvertKit could afford to spend more time on, it would be improving their opt-in form and landing page builder.

When creating a form, initially you have 2 choices:

1. Inline (embed it directly on your site)
2. Modal (popup)

Next up, you have 3 styles to choose from:

1. Clean

2. Full

3. Minimal

Email editor

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. ConvertKit’s email editor is extremely disappointing. Considering that they managed to build outstanding features for the other aspects of creating and managing email marketing campaigns, it’s strange that the company didn’t put more effort into the email editor.

There is a very limited range of email and newsletter templates, and the editing options are very basic.

You can alter style attributes such as background and content color, font, and button color and style. If you want to personalize the subject line, you have to copy and paste a snippet of code.

There are no preview, spam-check, or spell-check options. ConvertKit’s email editor is way below par when you compare it to Mailchimp or SendPulse

Subscriber management

Instead of using lists to manage subscribers (the term ConvertKit uses for contacts), ConvertKit uses email tags. You can specify what the tags are (for example, subscribers imported on November 1st), and add as many tags as you like to a subscriber.

When you’re adding subscribers, you can choose which autoresponders, forms, and tags to add them to. ConvertKit also lets you migrate subscribers from another email marketing provider.

ConvertKit is very analytics focused, and this extends to subscribers. It tracks important subscriber metrics, such as

• New subscribers
• Total subscribers
• Average open rate
• Average click rate

PROS

• Tag-based subscriber system
• Can create dynamic emails with merge tags
• Has a simple but effective visual automations builder
• Alternative “rules” builder for basic automations
• Ability to create various form types
• Offers a landing page builder (albeit a very rudimentary one)
• Digestible reporting for subscriber acquisition
• Great support channels available

CONS

• Very limited A/B testing functionality
• Few customization options for forms and email templates

ConvertKit’s pricing

ConvertKit has a very limited free plan, which provides unlimited free landing pages and 30 premium email templates. If you want to send emails for free (the main aim of email marketing!), you need to refer a friend. 

ConvertKit’s paid pricing plans are expensive. Its least expensive plan — which is only for 1–1,000 subscribers — comes in at $29 per month.

The price varies according to the number of subscribers, rather than the feature set. The lack of a free plan is another conscious decision from ConvertKit, as the company believes you have to pay if you want to create winning email marketing campaigns.

You get two months free when you choose to pay annually.