ConvertKit’s popularity among bloggers and content creators is credited to the platform’s ability to remove the complications behind email marketing. The software provides a seamless experience that ensures they can focus on creating content that their audience will appreciate. ConvertKit’s interface is simple and comes equipped with simple design forms and landing pages that truly convert.
Capabilities |
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Segment |
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based |
Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
With the global email user base predicted to reach around 4.5 billion in 2024 and an ROI of $36 per dollar spent on email marketing, it’s pretty safe to say that email marketing is still king. There’s simply no other marketing technique that’s as successful as converting potential customers. But let’s face it, having a great product or service just won’t cut it anymore. You also need a solid marketing campaign to help drive your message across.
This is where ConvertKit comes in.
ConvertKit is an email marketing platform with features tailored for professional online content creators. Their offerings support creators with getting their messages opened, read, and, most importantly, leading people to purchase.
But is ConvertKit the right tool for you? This review hopefully helps you make the right choice.
ConvertKit is a full-featured email marketing platform for content creators, i.e. social media influencers, professional bloggers, YouTubers, podcasters, and the like. They offer an impressive range of automation tools to help individuals set up a robust marketing strategy for continued growth. ConvertKit was founded in 2013 and is now one of the fastest-growing email marketing companies.
ConvertKit offers three plans for “every stage of your creator business.”
Their free plan will allow you to send emails to under 1,000 subscribers. Although it’s slightly limited feature-wise, it’s ideal for identifying and targeting your audience. If you upgrade from the free plan, you can take advantage of the 14-day free trial.
The premium plans, Creator and Creator Pro include all the features from the free plan. The Creator plan is ideal for automating campaigns, building your email list, developing trust, and increasing conversions.
The Creator Pro is there to help scale your business. Its premium features are subscriber engagement scoring, deliverability reporting for open and click rate info, and access to a Sparkloop plan for newsletter referrals.
Here are the current costs for the Creator and Creator Pro plans, from 300 to 20,000 subscribers.
No of Subscribers |
Creator Plan |
Creator Pro Plan |
||
---|---|---|---|---|
|
Monthly |
Yearly/Monthly |
Monthly |
Yearly/Monthly |
Up to 300 |
$15 |
$108/$9 |
$29 |
$290/$25 |
Up to 1,000 |
$29 |
$290/$25 |
$59 |
$590/$50 |
Up to 3,000 |
$49 |
$490/$41 |
$79 |
$790/$66 |
Up to 5,000 |
$79 |
$790/$66 |
$111 |
$1,110/$93 |
Up to 8,000 |
$99 |
$990/$83 |
$139 |
$1,390/$116 |
Up to 10,000 |
$119 |
$1,190/$100 |
$167 |
$1,670/$140 |
Up to 15,000 |
$149 |
$1,490/$125 |
$209 |
$2,090/$175 |
Up to 20,000 |
$179 |
$1,790/$150 |
$251 |
$2,510/$210 |
ConvertKit’s plans and pricing structure goes up to 500,000 + subscribers, but for higher subscriber numbers, you’ll have to contact them directly for a demo. If you decide to pay annually, you’ll receive two months free, and both plans include a 30-day free trial.
The ConvertKit platform is easy to use, versatile, and has a wide variety of exciting features tailored for content creators at all stages of their business.
ConvertKit has free unlimited landing page templates on all plans. Even with no coding experience, these completely customizable templates will help you create a landing page that’s fully responsive, attractive, and converts new leads. Because it’s also integrated with Unsplash, users get a selection of over 100,000 royalty-free images.
ConvertKit also offers responsive signup form templates that you can modify to fit your brand. Unlimited custom fields mean you can collect the specific information you need to send targeted content. Their frictionless forms can be embedded into websites, including WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, and many other popular website or landing page builders. Free unlimited forms are available on all plans.
The email designer feature helps you to stay on point with messages. The text editor offers inline styling options for an easier writing process and assists with designing simple, structured, and functional emails that inspire action. You can personalize headers, add lists, CTA buttons, images, and more. In addition, you can create as many email templates as you wish.
ConvertKit has reliable delivery and average open rates. For example, according to their latest delivery report, their system-wide delivery rate was 99.7% and their average open rate was 44%. So you can rest assured that your emails will successfully land in inboxes.
The visual automation tool is one of ConvertKit’s best features for a targeted marketing strategy. Here are some of the tasks you can achieve with it:
The visual automation templates can help get you started. However, this feature is only available on the Creator and Creator Pro plans.
ConvertKit provides an easy way to try out money-making ideas and is an ideal platform if you have a product to sell. Without needing to invest in an eCommerce platform , here are some examples of the products sold on ConvertKit:
While you focus on content creation, their Sponsor Network feature can connect you with premium advertisers who will support your work in exchange for publicity amongst your audience. If you publish at least once a week and have a minimum of 10,000 email subscribers, you can apply for this opportunity. ConvertKit handles the negotiations, sales, reporting, and all other groundwork necessary to make the deal a success.
The service costs 20% of total sponsorship revenue and 3.5% to process payments.
For an idea of how ConvertKit compares to alternatives, here’s a quick synopsis of three of the best email marketing software on the market.
Mailchimp is one of the most popular alternatives to ConvertKit. Their paid plans start at $20 per month for 500 contacts. Like ConvertKit, you can use their email editor for complete control over your content designs, or use their curated email templates. In addition, Mailchimp offers an automated workflow feature similar to ConvertKit, where something happens based on your reader’s action. For instance, they’ll automatically receive specific content based on their selected preferences. However, it doesn’t provide a visual builder, which could make it difficult to set up.
EngageBay is a one-stop shop for marketing, sales, activities to discover new opportunities, features to keep your customers happy, and more. It offers automation, email broadcasts and sequence, A/B landing page testing, and many other standard digital marketing functionality. Its standout features include video templates, CRM software, helpdesk support, and live chat software.
EngageBay has packages to suit your requirements. For example, the “All-in-One” paid plans start at $12.74 per user per month, including a 15% discount for a two-year contract.
Sendinblue is a French email marketing solution and is one of the cheapest available on the market. They deliver an extensive range of marketing tools and allow you to customize features for a package to suit your needs and budget. Their price point is one of the cheapest as they charge based on your monthly email volume and not the size of your email list. They offer standard email marketing tools, in addition to SMS marketing and customer support, in six languages.
Their customizable starter plan is £16/$19.22 per month based on 20,000 emails.
This is a popular question for the deliverability team. There are several reasons why emails end up in the Spam folder. These include misleading or Spam triggering subject lines, no unsubscribe link included in the message, or it consisting of too many attachments, for instance. For more reasons, check out their deliverability podcast.
Many reasons cause subscriber bounce, and there are two types—temporary (soft) and permanent (hard) bounces. ConvertKit protects your sender reputation and ensures your messages aren’t bounced by removing the permanent bounces from your active subscriber list.
Read the room. If you send daily emails to a predominantly cold list, that’s a cue to send messages less frequently. But if you send daily emails which are frequently read, then daily emails sounds like a winning strategy for you.
Consider starting with two to three a month, then gradually increasing to two to three times per week, which seems to be the sweet spot.
Choosing the right email marketing platform is crucial for getting great ROI. And ConvertKit targets people who want to make money through blogging, for example, or those already established in the content creation space. They provide several features to help creators grow their businesses and benefit from other income streams.
However, their reporting feature is slightly disappointing, with only basic features compared to comparable platforms. And their pricing is somewhat expensive.
Findstack helps you whittle down your choices and select the right software to fit your business. Our helpful resources, expert advice, and tailored insights spanning the most popular software categories mean you can find the tools you need for a prosperous business. In addition, our discounts and exclusive deals help you to save money on service and software purchases.
The best thing about this tool is that it has a free version and it is super easy to use. Along with this, all its other features are also very good. You can create any landing page or form in less than 1 minute using its pre-built templates. It has pre-built templates for email newsletters too. You can send an email newsletter to your customers in just a few clicks. You can set a sequence email for a campaign and see the report in the dashboard. Its automation feature is very easy to use. On Convertkit, you can also add your products and earn money by selling them. Along with these awesome features, it has easy-to-understand documentation, a supportive community, and CreatorUniversity. From time to time, they also send information about learning materials and new products through email.
This tool has one drawback. If I use its API in a form of a WordPress page builder like Elementor and anybody subscribes to my newsletter using that form, it will not send any confirmation email to that person. It will directly add that person as a confirmed subscriber. This drawback can increase the chance of spamming.
I use this tool to collect email addresses, generate leads, and send newsletters & offers to my email subscribers.
The interface is clear, especially for the creation of targeted, automated follow-up sequences that are ideal for lead nurturing.
The message creation is not quite as full-featured as MailChimp, but it reinforces the idea of keeping messages simple and I appreciate that.
I use ConvertKit for my business, especially for my weekly emails called Luscious LInks. I also use ConvertKit with clients for whom I create automated follow up sequences.
Lots of features to target different customers. Plus easy to use, and affordable compared to other ESP. And the best part is your broadcasts inbox. Compared to other ESP, this is my pick.
I really do not have anything I dislike about Convertkit, as there have been no issues, and every broadcast we do goes out quickly and inboxes. You could offer more optin pages.
We are solving getting mail getting delivered and being able to put together an email quickly. Plus being able to easily upload customers from Woocommerce and other ESP easily
Convertkit is so easy to use. Their support is wonderful and helps me fix any issues quickly and simply. I get great deliverability. It is easy to set up complicated funnels too and their tutorials are simple to apply.
The website can be glitchy at times. So sometimes just my weekly email takes me a while to write because the website isn't allowing me to scroll down or click a button or something.
Delivering content to my followers. Delivering freebies to interested followers. Weekly emails. Keeping track of my audience. I've also been able to host events through Convertkit which is wonderful.
Tailored very much for creative types. They speak the language that people like me understand (photographer turned coach). The automation interface is so much better than the other product I've been using for the past few years (and reviewed). Their support staff is very prompt and helpful (and kind!). It feels like they try really hard to look after their customers. As soon as I joined (paid for one of the plans), I felt heard and looked after.
There are some features that I requested when they asked me about what could be improved. The email template system could be improved by allowing the template selection for automation for example. Also, what's not there (compared to other EDMs) is the ability to add smart fields against a subscriber (e.g. time/date fields for appointments etc). I got around the problem by using Zapier so it's not a deal-breaker right now.
I use ConvertKit to send a weekly newsletter out to my list and I use it for lead generation (automated email sequence). Their email sequence builder is so easy to use. The automation interface is brilliant as well. Migrating from one email system to another can be super painful but Convertkit's interface made it possible to move complex automation in a day which was quite surprising.
I like that you can learn how to use this product for emails and landing pages. You click on learn and people who actually use it show you how. or you can go to the Creator University to learn. They have easy-to-learn videos. And other courses you can take. Very easy to use.
Nothing. I have no big problems with it as I just started out with it a month ago.
Learning how to create better emails, landing pages.
Convertkit can do so much more than Mailchimp and other email services. The way sequences work is the way my brain maps out email campaigns. Once you get the hang of it you'll stay with them forever.
A little difficult when getting into more granular tasks, such as restarting a sequence or applying rules. They also keep changing the menu structure and it's no longer intuitive.
Sequences and forms work so well with our Wordpress website. We are able to do much more than we were with Mailchimp.
I like that the first 1000 subs are free.
All is good actually. I don't have anything that the tool doesn't do at that point.
To send emails to my subscribers.
I like that I am able to control and edit my email templates to be more custom to my needs.
I dislike how plain the templates can be if you do not know how to navigate the platform fully.
ConvertKit makes it easy for me to have all my business automations in one place including a landing page and products. The benefits is that everything is in a centralized location.
I love the fact that it's built with a simple interface whose main focus is on growing your audience, and that it's easy to integrate with other marketing platforms.
It does miss some of the freedom to code freely your own modules and email logic (in comparison to Zoho) and the other (minor) issue is that if I need to change the text of a broadcast email after I scheduled it, it defaults to "send now," forcing me to schedule it again. This can be particularly dangerous if scheduling an email that is timely with something that hasn't happened yet (e.g., asking a client or potential client what they thought about something they haven't yet received).
My favorite thing about it is how complete it is for an app that is free for up to 1,000 contacts. I also love the fact that it comes with an extensive library of modules to capture leads that can be easily incorporated to any website without needing to spend time searching for and setting up plugins.
Once I signed up it was easy to get started using ConvertKit. They have plenty of templates to choose from. Very user friendly.
Overall it seems like a solid software. Once my numbers grow I'm interested to see if it will hold up.
I'm able to get information out to potential buyers quickly with their templates. They're very eye catching too.
I think their UI is the best. Probably the next best thing is their email server. Open rates & click rates are usually high. I don't know how but it is what it is.
Quite expensive for beginner creators who want to experience Convertkit
Benefits were popup forms and embedded forms. They look great.
Interface User experience Ease of creation of emails Best automation solutions
Not many customize options to add design.
I am using this for email marketing.
The most helpful features are the marketing products like landing page builders and forms. There are many helpful and useful templates to choose from. Plus they will help you have a site page with your own url for easy linking.
The downside is perhaps pricing canbe a bit high and the mobile landing page and form builder is sometimes glitchy. My experience with this builder onmt android smart phone has been frustrating, but on laptop it is easier than most other builders.
Convertkit has solved my issue with having visitors bIt those online visitors were not signing up nor buying. Convertkit helped turn traffic to leads and to customers. This just by using their free services and products. After becoming a paid member I have increased conversions and sales.
I love that ConvertKit is not just another email marketing software. You can create landing pages, sell courses/ebooks/newsletters, etc. through the platform. It really is becoming a great one-stop solution in being able to tend to your various marketing needs.
Can't say any real dislikes because I have really enjoyed using the software to date.
I wanted an email software that was affordable, effective, efficient, and user-friendly. ConvertKit checked all of those boxes and then some!
ConvertKit focuses on creating. This tools makes it easy to start collecting your first leads and get those emails out to build momentum. If you want to build a following through email marketing, then this is a great tool to get started. It's easy to use, offers more than enough features that marketers and businesses will want (even if you don't need them yet when you're just starting out). I like the user interface and how you can get pretty much everything done with just a few clicks. No unnecessary steps that can confuse you, this is a straight-forward email marketing tool that's been getting a lot of updates and improvements.
Pricing is a little higher than some other tools. At least it looks like that on the surface. But you're actually NOT paying for duplicate subscribers (one email contact is only counted once even if the email subscribes to different lists/email campaigns). Other email marketing tools count the same email address multiple times. ConvertKit doesn't. One unique email address only counts as one contact, even when it's added to various email lists.
Convertkit offers simple email marketing with good deliverability. It's a modern and reliable tool for sending out email newsletters. I use it for automated email series and email broadcasts to my customers and blog subscribers. It does a good job.
I love so many things about ConvertKit, and I'm happy I made the switch. The thing I like best is how easy it is to set up automations. I have several automations setu p for my newsletter subscribers, including adding members to my email lists, a welcome series, and custom RSS feeds based on how people want to receive emails (for every post, daily, or weekly). ConvertKit makes it easy. I like the look of ConvertKit emails and forms and the emphasis on text and not using too many images also.
There was a small learning curve when I started using ConvertKit, for example learning how to use tags. But ConvertKit has lots of helpful tips and guidance in their knowledge base. Twice I had to ask for help in chat and someone responded to me within a few minutes. I needed help figuring out how to set up multiple choice checkboxes for readers so they could select which newsletters they wanted to subscribe to. The employees who responded in the chat directed me to the instructions and I was able to set this feature up easily after reading the links they sent me.
I run a local news website. My readers want choices for receiving emails. The RSS automation features offered with ConvertKit helped me serve those readers. The deliverability is excellent too, and now that I'm launching a freemium newsletter, I can use ConvertKit to charge premium subscribers. ConvertKit seems to care about user success and often offers courses and helpful emails that include tips on how to improve what you are doing.
Great customer service, support, conferences, webinars and community.
Some coding involved now and then to customize templates, but otherwise, it's absolutely perfect. Seriously.
Rethinking email marketing as a way of cultivating relationships with clients in a more targeted, helpful way (to the clients).
I love that you can create landing pages, tags, and the ease-of-use on the client side as well. For example rather than creating multiple list and paying for the same people in duplicate lists they can just get a tag added. You can also send out an email with a tag, for a launch, for example. If they want to opt in to hear about that launch all they have to do is click the button without re-filling out a form
The price is more for those just getting started, but once you grow your list the price is actually cheaper. The landing pages are not as good as lead pages. I wish I could cancel my lead pages membership and just use ConvertKit but they're not at the same level.
Having to have multiple lists in my email provider! Plus being able to automate my email marketing and drip content out to course subscribers