Today we’re going to be reviewing Convertkit, an email marketing platform based around setting up email campaigns. Convertkit has a ton of unique features, so we will go in-depth to see what this service provides as an email marketing service provider, and how that compares to others in the market.
Hopefully, by the end of this review you’ll be able to figure out if this is the right email marketing provider for your business needs.
ConvertKit Features
The first thing we’re going to be diving into is ConvertKit’s features. They have a couple of integral features that really define ConvertKit, and those are:
- Landing Pages
- Email Sign-up Forms
- Email Marketing (Sequences & Automation)
- Email Designer
- Integrations
Let’s figure out what each of these features provide and how they best fit in when you’re looking for an email marketing platform for your business.
Landing Pages
The first feature we’re going to look at is ConvertKit’s landing page designer. Converkit allows you to create landing pages in minutes with their drag & drop builder.
There is no coding necessary in this creator as almost all the blocks you can just drag and drop in to create a unique landing page. The landing page designer allows you to customize almost every aspect of them with custom css as well as their design panel, allowing you to change things like font, size, color, positions, and more.
The landing page designer contains a bunch of stock images for you to place around the page, which can be very helpful if you don’t have your own handy.
The main purpose of these landing pages to begin with, is to gather emails from your customers in order to market to them; As such ConvertKit allows you to easily integrate their email capturing forms straight into the landing page.
Overall it’s a great feature, and definitely necessary if you’re looking for a high converting page for gathering emails, rather than your typical in-line form.
That being said, it is definitely not the best landing page designer out there, as products specifically designed for landing page creation such as Unbounce or Leadpages. Although that is to be expected for a tool that is providing a bundle of features rather than focusing on just one.
Email Sign-up Forms
The next feature we’re going to take a look at are their Email Sign-up Forms. When it comes to gathering customer emails, the bread and butter is integrating email capture forms into your website.
This can be achieved in a variety of ways such as in-line forms, popup forms, newsletters, etc. And that’s where ConvertKit steps in to help you build these forms, so that you can easily integrate them into your website or landing page.
Similar to the Landing Page designer, ConvertKit has a Form-Builder that allows you to customize your own email capture form in a variety of fashions, as stated earlier, pop ups, inline, newsletters, etc.
The Form-Builder has a very similar design structure allowing you to customize almost every aspect of the email capturing form by modifying either the CSS directly or through a design panel; In which you can change things like color, font, size, position, and other things of that nature until the form fits your needs perfectly.
Alongside the visual styles of each form, which ConvertKit allows you to customize, they also have various animation styles for your form. This includes things like animating your form to slide into the page, rather than just instantly appear.
On-top of the form builder, ConvertKit provides quite a few pre-designed templates. These templates are actually quite nice looking, and often if you’re not looking to spend a ton of time designing your own, you can simply pick a template out of their selection and integrate it directly onto your website or landing page.
Email Marketing - Automation & Sequencing
Now for the feature I would consider the bread and butter of ConvertKit as an email marketing platform, their Automation and Sequencing.
Basically, the goal of most email marketing platforms is to help you both sign up customers for your “emailing list” and actually market to them through email.
ConvertKit does this through what they call Email Sequences. An Email Sequence is essentially a list of emails that will be sent to each person in order. This becomes much more advanced in ConvertKit as it allows you to design and create each email, to be sent to various customers on your list.
On Top of these email sequences is their Automation. Basically, their automation is a tool that allows you to define a custom email sequence with functionality. These are very similar to what you would expect to see with something like a Sales Funnel.
ConvertKit provides an easy to use funnel creation to design an automated sequence of emails based on various actions, events, and behavior. For example, you can create an email that is sent to all customers who viewed a specific page on your website, then follow-up with a separate email if they replied to the first email sent in your in this funnel. This is a really simple example, but these funnels & sequences can get really in-depth, allowing you to fine tune your email marketing campaign to provide the highest conversion rates.
Overall, I would say this is probably the single most important factor when it comes to email marketing providers and ConvertKit does a really good job in this area.
Email Designer
Another core feature of ConvertKit is the ability to design emails. Normally when you use an email platform like Outlook or Gmail, you send emails that are pure text, but there are actually ways to send nice looking emails with custom views including things like images and buttons.
ConvertKit provides a specialized tool, very similar to the Email-signup builder and landing page designer, which allows you to completely customize each email being sent through their automation or sequences.
As stated with the previous tools, this designer allows you to customize the emails through the use of CSS directly, or with a panel for various aspects of the design.
They do include a few pre designed email templates that you can select, if you don’t want to spend the time fine-tuning your own custom design as well.
Integrations
The final feature we’ll be taking a look at are their Integrations. One of the great things about ConvertKit is that they have an absolute ton of integrations.
Almost any tool you use in which you want to share data, or use to trigger sequences and automations within ConvertKit are supported.
One of the most popular of these integrations being Zapier, which in itself can connect to thousands of various API’s allowing you to integrate basically any software. This can be super important when you’re creating in-depth email sequences with their Automation designer, as having custom events that are triggered through various software can vastly improve how intricately you can design your funnels.
They also have most website integrations, like wordpress, covered to make sure you can easily integrate ConvertKit into any website be it landing pages or email capture forms
That, about, covers all the features you can expect to find in ConvertKit.
ConvertKit Pricing
Let’s move on to what you can expect in terms of Pricing when it comes to ConvertKit.
The software has 3 basic plans you can choose from, Free, Creator, and Creator Pro.
ConvertKit’s Free plan is, obviously, free and allows you to use the software with a fairly limited set of features for up to 1,000 subscribers. The features you’re allowed to use in this plan are mainly their email capturing and landing page design functions alongside email broadcasting.
If you’re looking to use their main bread and butter functionality, the automations and sequencing, you’ll need to step up to their Creator plan, which starts at $29 a month billed monthly, and $25 a month billed annually. Keep in mind that these prices scale with the number of subscribers, the above prices are for 1,000 subscribers. For example, the Creator Plan will increase to $79 per month billed monthly for 5,000 subscribers.
The last plan is Creator Pro, which starts at $59 a month billed monthly and $50 a month billed annually. The Creator Pro plan gives some more advanced features such as a newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and access to use Facebook custom audiences in your automations.
It is worth noting that when you purchase any of these plans billed yearly, you will get 2 months free.
ConvertKit Support
What can you expect when it comes to support with ConvertKit? Well, this is probably the area where ConvertKit is the worst.
The support that is provided by ConvertKit, which includes both email, ticket, and live chat support is pretty dang slow. You can expect a rather long response time when emailing and live chat has very specific hours in which they can be reached.
If you’re looking for technical help or have issues with the platform, it can sometimes take a decent chunk of time contacting support and going through the whole process of figuring out your issue.
As such I would probably rate this as one of the weakest points to using ConvertKit, which can definitely be a bummer for users who aren't quite as advanced when it comes to the use of Email Marketing platforms.
ConvertKit Review - My Experience
Alright, now that we’ve reviewed most of the topics you can expect with ConvertKit, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of our experience and overall review of ConvertKit.
We used ConvertKit for well over 6 months and had great success when using their automation and sequencing functionality. This was 100% the best feature that was included in ConvertKit and allowed us to fine-tune multiple perfect funnels to reach peak conversion rates.
That being said we did have some issues with setup on the initial email, it going to spam which turned out to be a DKIM issue. When contacting support this took quite a bit of time to resolve, which slowed down our initial usage of the software.
The landing page designer and form creator were pretty nice, but having our own custom site, it didn’t really make much sense for us to use it that much. That being said, we did extensive testing to make sure it worked well, and for all intents and purposes it did perform pretty well; Allowing us to design some pretty clean looking landing pages, forms.
In terms of pricing, ConvertKit is a bit more expensive then you might find with some of the other competitors and so it definitely loses in that aspect. As to whether this price increase is worth it, I would say that definitely depends on your use case. If you’re looking for a simple email marketing platform to simply broadcast out emails to your list, I think there are better alternatives for much cheaper. On the other hand, if you’re looking for audience segmentation and sequencing/automation then ConvertKit really has a great setup for fine-tuning your own email funnels.
Overall, we really enjoyed using ConvertKit and for what it’s strengths are, I think it’s definitely worth it.
Conclusion
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