ConvertKit Reviews & Product Details
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 |
|
|---|---|
| Segment |
|
| Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based |
| Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
| Training | Documentation |
| Languages | English |
ConvertKit Pros and Cons
- Reliable deliverability
- Interface is simple and easy to use
- Broadcast email functionality is seamless and convenien
- A choice of 50+ templates and quality themes
- Handy additional elements like a countdown timer and past edition feed
- Lacks integration with ecommerce platforms
- Not ideal for multiple clients
- Solely specializing in email means that you’ll need heavier integration all round
- Clunky builder
- Lacks spam testing
ConvertKit Review: Best Email Marketing Platform for Creators in 2023?
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.
What is ConvertKit?
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.
How Much is ConvertKit?
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.
ConvertKit Features
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.
Grow Your Audience
Landing Pages
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.
Sign Up Forms
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.
Connect with Fans
Email Designer
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.
Automate Your Marketing
Visual Automation
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:
- Create subscriber exclusions based on specific variables like segments or tags to ensure the right emails go to the right customers.
- Create simple automation to send content to your targeted audience at specific times.
- Use targeted entry point automation to ensure your audience follows your pre-built subscriber journeys.
- Use logical progressions to specify follow-up actions once a customer performs a specific action based on the form information.
The visual automation templates can help get you started. However, this feature is only available on the Creator and Creator Pro plans.
Income Generation
Commerce
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:
- Albums or singles
- Coaching sessions subscriptions
- eBooks
- Photos or video presets
- Paid newsletter subscriptions
Sponsor Network
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.
ConvertKit Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Landing page editor available on all plans
- Easy switch with free migration
- Tight account security with two-factor authentication
- Approximately 90 prominent website integration tools
- High deliverability and opening rate
- A “tip jar” as an additional income stream
- Option to sell products and services, i.e., paid newsletters
- Plenty of help, including live chat and email support, how-to guides, and a comprehensive knowledge base
Cons:
- Higher price point than some alternatives. The cost increases with more advanced features and a growing subscriber list
- Limited text-based email templates
- A/B testing of email subject only
- No automation features available on the free plan
- Some functionality is not newbie-friendly, like tagging and segment
- Limited reporting and analysis
ConvertKit Alternatives
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 – Most Popular Alternative
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 – For Increased Marketing Functionalities
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 – Cheaper Alternative
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.
ConvertKit’s FAQs
Why are emails going to spam?
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.
Why do subscribers bounce?
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.
How often should I send emails to my 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.
Use Findstack to Make an Informed Decision on the Best Email Marketing Software
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.
I just started using Convertkit and open rates and click rates are highest i have ever seen across any ESP - i have only been using the product a few months and it usually takes time to build up email sender reputation so this makes it even more amazing
The product is limited and hard to use - you need to hire an expert coder to help figure stuff which is basic in most ESPs also support is sometimes slow and unavailable which makes someone who can help (and is usually expensive) even more important
We have been through a lot of ESPs we switched to ConvertKit because of issue with high block rate and the performance has been very impressive at ConvertKit
I liked how easy it was to set up an account and actually start capturing email addresses. Definitely a simple solution for people who are not techies. Helps me create and send clean, simple emails.
I found that the app is somewhat limiting when it comes to design, but I guess it fulfills its purpose for most people.
Building a list for a small email newsletter.
great for email marketing and automating email porcess to grow your buisness and following
learning to connect with my website and loading contacts to use the automation.
saving my time and automating my porcesses
The visual automator is amazing and super easy to use
“Prettifying” emails isn’t particularly easy
The organization of campaigns is great and being able to run multiple campaigns at the same time is easy. We’ve experienced 40-50% open rates.
ConvertKit's interface and ease of use are epic. It has all the functionality I need to create great emails. The reporting is really useful and has improved over time as the product has evolved. Their support is exceptional and fast. They have live chat and email support and I've never been disappointed.
I would love drag and drop templates that could be saved and the ability to duplicate emails in a sequence, not just the whole sequence, to save time.
Customers are getting the right emails for the right things and move easily between message sequences. Smart, functional logic helps achieve this.
I like how easy to use it is for beginners and the set up. Perfect for easily adding to my wordpress website quickly with the theme that I had. Easy to see contacts
The starting monthly fee was a little high for no subscribers compared to other platforms. Also, I switched because I wanted a better way to tag and segment users
Convertkit is a great place to store all my leads and to have automatic email follow up sequences which saves me a lot of time and will nurture my leads more to help them turn into customers
I love that Convertkit is centered on sending emails as if from a friend, without all the fancy images and fluff. I really like their new automation rules, and how easy it is to integrate with nearly every software because they are a big player.
The cost. I don't use all of the features but I feel like I'm paying for them all. I also wish that they would remind me when something isn't working or when I accidentally duplicate something and it crosses over to the next email broadcast. I wish they would have a more affordable solution for small businesses that don't use everything.
Email marketing, segmentationg and delivery.
Ease of understanding of the service. It did not take long to figure out how to use. It connects to a lot of other services seamlessly too
It could be more organized and have prettier templates for emails. If thought of switching simply to have better bisually appealing emails
I am helping women take back their health. It's very easy to choose who sees specific emails. I have gotten more clients from utilizing
I like how the website tries to encompass so many tools. I also like the email stats you can read after campaigns.
I dislike the pricing models the most, as it can be unrealistic for new businesses to invest
Formatted and automatically sent email campaigns with minimal effort on my part
I like how simple the system is, but that can also be a downside if you plan to scale and get more granular with your data.
Part of what I like is how simple it is, but it's also what I dislike – it's not easy to gather a lot of detailed data about your contacts, at least from what I've poked around with. As our business grows, I'm sure I'd like to have more specific data about what my users like.
Email marketing and website forms. It works well with Wordpress, and it's free which was what we needed for our business as it was starting.
I love the features relating to the email marketing and the amazing customisability that comes with newsletters on our business site.
Potentially something to make it easier to first understand how to use all the available tools in convert kit because there are so many.
Spreading of email newsletter and correspondence with customers.
It's useful in multiple regards - sending out "broadcasts" (or what I call "blanket e-mails"), organizing your list subscribers, checking various statistics (how many new subscribers you have, how many you lost). There's a heck of a lot you can do with ConvertKit, and for the most part it's easy to use. Not the most intuitive platform - some things can definitely benefit from better flow and ease of use - but still quite useful.
As I mentioned, it's not the most intuitive platform in the world - there are definitely some hangups and over-complicated steps. It could have better flow, but I wouldn't say the problems you run into are a deal-breaker by any means.
E-mail list management - as I've said, it makes it easy to categorize and specify your subscribers, as well as only send out messages to specific subscribers/tags/groups.
The Double Opt-In amazing feature which helps create a better and relevant email list is supported by Convertkit in a unique manner that will not impact your conversion rate. Sending emails again to prospects who haven't opened your email at first. Way easy to use than Mailchimp and has clear segmentations.
If you are an agency then it can get a bit expensive for managing multiple clients. It is much costlier than competitors in the industry. Since it's still a developing product, many electronic commerce products are yet not supported for integration.
I have extensively used Convertkit for email campaign automation. The best feature being Sequences which will send emails sequentially by which we are able to send emails as per our convenience and time. We have also been able to create landing pages from the tool itself.
This service is great for setting up tagging and automations, especially when just starting out. It has made it very easy to use.
Landing pages are very basic and not really structured for converting well. Some of the analytics are a little unclear.
I am able to contact my list regularly, keep segments separated, organize webinar sequences and follow ups easily, etc.
Convertkit allows me to draft, format and schedule e-newsletter mailings. I can add images, links, alternative text, etc. I appreciate that I can A/B test email subject lines, and view detailed open rate statistics once a campaign has been completed!
The learning curve is a little steep. I wish it were more intuitive at the beginning, but after a few times, you get the hang of it!
Drafting, formatting, and scheduling e-newsletter mailings.