Convertkit Review [2020]: Pros, Cons & Alternatives (With a Video Demo)

If you’re looking for a thorough Convertkit review, you’re in the right place. Here, we’ll be discussing pros, cons, and alternatives to help you decide if this is a good fit for you.

When done right, email marketing can add major equity in any business.

Take this scenario for example…

You start a business.  You work your butt off on content marketing (posting daily for 90 days), buy a few ads, do a media tour, and have thousands of people show up, but most of the people look around and leave without making a purchase.

How do you find out why they didn’t buy?

How do you build the relationship with them further?

Do you continue to put in the same momentum, pick up thousands of visitors, and potentially yield low conversions?

If not, how can you increase the conversions when the traffic comes to your business?

Most marketing experts #1 answer to you would be…..Email marketing.  In fact, 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel in terms of revenue generation.

A Good Email Service Provider

A good email service provider will have features that enable you to effectively grow your relationship with your customer.  You should have sufficient tools and data that you can learn demographics, psychographics, and interests simply by their interaction with email.

If you’ve been in the online world for a little while, you know the consensus used to be slanted towards Mailchimp and Aweber.  The main statistics that told you about your readers was open rate, click-thru rate, and bounce rate.

That WAS enough data for most people because they may not have wanted to afford the price or complication of upgrading for more options.  Other options were seemingly out of reach for most bloggers.  After your business grew to a certain point where you have a team to help you fathom the complication, and you can handle the price (without choking), you would upgrade to Infusionsoft.

The “New” Best Email Service Providers

Now, times are different.

Bloggers don’t have to wait until their businesses are scaled to size where they can afford a technical team and the price of Infusionsoft to get extra features of the best email service providers.  Drip, ActiveCampagn, and Convertkit offer many features at a much more affordable price.

The difference in open rates like this…

(Image Source: SmartInsights)

…and open rates 5-10% lower, could be major money!

Convertkit is an email marketing software that is specifically targeted towards bloggers, podcasters, and online business owners.  It was started by Nathan Barry, who started out as a bootstrapper, and now has the business generating well over $1 million dollars per month in 5 years!  He’s a crazy genius entrepreneur!

He keeps the Convertkit revenue information public, and I highly recommend reading the Convertkit blog, taking the trainings (that come included with membership), and checking out their numbers even if it’s just for entrepreneurial education’s sake.

What is Convertkit?

If you’ve ever used an email marketing service before, Convertkit will have many features in common.  If you need to switch, the learning curve should be minimal.

When you log on, you can see that Nathan works with high-level engineers to maintain Convertkit as a user-friendly software.  The interface is clean, easy to navigate, and fairly straight forward.

This is the screen you see immediately upon logging on.  There is “forms”, “automations”, “sequences”, “broadcasts”, and “automations”.  If you’ve used any other email service provider before, then this all should look pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll still explain in case you haven’t…

Forms

The “forms” are the available optins that Convertkit offers.  If you “create new form”, you’ll see this…

You can create as many landing pages and email optins as you want.  Simply by choosing one of the two options.  For this example, let’s choose the most common example: the form.

As you can see, there are three form options we can create: one with text and the optin, one with text image and optin, and one is simply the optin.

The form can be customized with image, text, and if you know code, you can even edit the form as you please.  If you want more customization options than what is available on the three optin forms Convertkit offers, I’d recommend checking out Thrive Leads.  It integrates with Convertkit and offers you many additional lead conversion options that would help to massively grow your email list!

Automations

While many other email marketing services have automation options, the automation options of Convertkit hugely set them apart.  You don’t have to take my word for it, listen to what other millionaire bloggers are saying about the automations inside Convertkit:

My favorite part of ConvertKit are the automation rules that you can create. AWeber has automation rules but they are very limited. Infusionsoft was built for automation, but for me, it was a bit overwhelming and too difficult for me to learn.  With ConvertKit, it’s based on a very simple “if this / then that” sequence. 

-Pat Flynn, Smart Passive Income

 I didn’t start taking my email list seriously until around April of 2016 when I switched to Convertkit. Convertkit makes sending an effective and efficient newsletter so much easier and better. I never really understood email marketing before, but ConvertKit makes it so easy and now I feel like I’m an expert! I now have over 60,000 email subscribers.

-Michelle Gardner, Making Sense of Cents

ConverKit’s entire platform has been a crisp, cool breath of fresh air. From the dashboard to the editor, and all the way to the automation rules, everything is SIMPLE.

I used to spend HOURS trying to find things and design emails in Active Campaign, Get Response, and others that only takes me minutes to do now in ConvertKit.

-Alex and Lauren, Create and Go

When you select “automation”, you’ll see a major component that sets Convertkit apart from their competitors.  Let me give you a glance, so you can see what I mean…

You can set up complex automations or very basic ones.  You can tag subscribers based on their interactions with your emails.

For example, if you have an email subscriber that clicks a link to your product or service, you could tag them as a “warm lead”.  Tagging can also save you loads of money and customer loyalty.

Previously, I worked for an online business remotely helping with the internet marketing of their membership site.  When their customers signed up, there was no easy way to tag or segment them based on which membership plan they signed up for.  As a result, when they would have discounts, they would send the sales out to everyone on the list.

Customers who had paid retail price were upset that they weren’t aware of the upcoming sale.  Customers who paid the day before wanted to be “grandfathered” into the sale.  It was a mess that tagging could solve.

Convertkit has 6 different triggers and 6 different actions.  Once you’ve integrated a shopping card, the trigger “purchases a product” is also added as a trigger.  When a user does a trigger on the left, you can choose which action on the right takes place.

By setting up a simple tag and automation, customers who have purchased one product can be nurtured based on their purchase, and exempt from other sequences and vice versa.  The competitors that offer this feature (Drip, ActiveCampaign, and Infusionsoft) each have a much more complex user interface and process for re-arranging the tags and automation rules that sets Convertkit apart as the superior option.

According to email marketing stats:

•  Segmented email campaigns have an open rate that is 14.32% higher than non-segmented campaigns.
• Click-throughs are 100.95% higher in segmented email campaigns than non-segmented campaigns.
• Nonprofits lose about $15k/year in donations due to spam filters blocking fundraising campaign emails from prospects’ inboxes.

Not only does tagging and segmenting enable you a more in-depth relationship with your customers, but it also increases the deliverability of your emails.  Convertkit does a phenomenal job at making the tagging and segmenting feature available and easy to use–this feature alone is a HUGE ADVANTAGE!

Sequences

Like the forms, you can create as many sequences as you’d like.  You can have welcome sequences, special offer sequences, abandoned the shopping cart sequences, and a whole laundry list of others.

You can be as creative as you’d like as long as it makes sense because Convertkit enables you to make sequences easily and integrate them with your automation rules.  Here’s a sample of one sequence I’ve made…

Emails in the sequence are listed along the left side.  You write into the sequence using a pretty standard word processing interface, and you can drag emails around until you have them laid out in the sequential order you think would be best for your subscribers.

Broadcasts

In the broadcast tab, you can set up a newsletter from an RSS feed or simply email everyone on a particular list: whichever you choose.  Like all of the other functions, the broadcast function is powerful, but simple to use when logged onto Convertkit.  Here’s a sample…

As you can see, I’m able to send a broadcast email to a small segment of my email list based on a self-elected prompt they’ve opted into by interacting with previous emails.  This means I have the capability to email specifically all those email subscribers who have told me (by clicking in my emails) that they’re interested in blogging and content marketing.

This hugely impacts open rates and click thru rates in comparison to other companies who don’t have the automation features Convertkit has!  This also is the reason why many people with small lists can have big revenue numbers simply by way of high conversion rates: tailored emails gets responses!

Another very effective feature in the broadcast section is called “resend to unopens”.

Most times, when you send out a broadcast email, you won’t get 100% open rate.  Sometimes, it could be due to the time of day, the title you used, or some other factor you weren’t even aware of.

In Convertkit, there is a button that says “resend to unopens” where you can tweak your email a bit, and resend it to all those who hadn’t opened it.  This is another Convertkit feature that drastically boosts open rates!

Subscribers

If you’ve used any other email marketing service, the “subscriber” tab will be another source of relief for you if you were to switch.

Most entrepreneurs using digital marketing have multiple email sequences or lists in their email marketing service.  For example, if you were an accountant who uses email marketing, you may want a list for annual tax customers and quarterly tax customers.  Some of the customers may be the same people.

With most email marketing services, you would be charged twice for having one contact on two lists.

Then, if the person decided to unsubscribe from the list, many email service providers would continue to charge you UNTIL you manually update things.

In contrast, Convertkit automatically deletes unsubscribers without additional manual work.  This is a Huge Time Saver!

Regarding the absence of this feature in Aweber, Pat Flynn said:

I found myself going into each of my individual lists and deleting unsubscribes from my account about once a week. And no, there is no easy way to delete them from your account—no “delete all unsubscribes” button, which would be nice for obvious reasons. When you have a large list and send a considerable number of emails, your unsubscribe counts could be in the thousands per week.

Additionally, if someone were subscribed to two of your lists, they count as two subscribers. For example, perhaps someone is signed up to your main list as well as a secondary list you created for a particular webinar you conducted. That counts as two.

 

Some of my records were found to be subscribed to four or five of my email lists!

Added onto relieving the dread of duplicate subscribers, Convertkit also offers a FREE MIGRATION SERVICE for lists of 1,000+, or a paid migration service for smaller lists.  The difficulty of migrating the email lists left many bloggers feeling “stuck” or “forced” to stick with services that weren’t fully servicing their business needs sufficiently.  Convertkit has taken away this objection by offering the free email migration service.

Why Others Switched To Convertkit & Case Studies

Convertkit is the “new kid” on the block in regards to email marketing services, but they’re definitely taking the market by storm.  People are switching from long term players in the industry by the droves.  Here is a pretty interesting playlist with reasons why others switched from other service providers.  You should check it out:

Convertkit Pros

These are a list of things that stick out most about Convertkit:

• Great automations
• Tagging
• Resend to unopens
• Easy to use
• Very nice user interface
• Makes adding content upgrades easy
• You can have unlimited optins (even attaching them all to one list)
• Unlimited sequences
• Not charged for duplicate subscribers
• No manual deletion of unsubscribes required
• Many integrations (including Zapier)
• Great training, transparency, and blogs
• The owner is an awesome entrepreneur to watch
• Free email list migration for lists of 1000+

Convertkit Cons

These are some things that Convertkit could improve on:

• No lead scoring
• No A/B Split Testing
• No free plan (which could be a pro since this means more updates and support)

Final Words answering, “What is Convertkit?”

The goal of this article was to explain what Convertkit is, what the features are like, how it stands up in its industry, what the competition is like, and help you make a buying decision that’s best for your business.

Convertkit is the best solution for my business, and others have found it works best for them, but that doesn’t mean it will jive as effectively for you, which is why I’m glad to offer you a FREE TRIAL!  With the FREE TRIAL, you’ll get time to try it out, see how it works for you, and decide if it’s as easy as I’ve described here.

VERDICT: Strongly Recommend

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