ConvertKit is an email service provider that offers a complete suite of marketing and promotion tools designed to help increase email conversion rates. Unlike other email marketing services (like MailChimp or AWeber), ConvertKit has been built from the ground up to focus specifically on helping bloggers, YouTubers and other online content creators connect with their audiences.
To that end, it doesn’t include a lot of extra (and often unnecessary) features in its bid to try to be all things to all users.
At its core, ConvertKit is broken down into five sections:
- Subscribers – the users that have subscribed to your mailing list
- Landing Pages – Specialized pages that are designed with mobile-responsive templates to help you gain more subdscribers.
- Sequences – Emails that are sent at pre-determined intervals. Also called an autoresponder.
- Automations – The ability to send specific emails to specific segments of users based on previous actions they’ve taken.
- Broadcasts – One-off emails sent to your subscribers that aren’t part of a sequence.
What Makes ConvertKit Different than Other Email Marketing Services?
In asking “what is ConvertKit?”, you may be wondering how ConvertKit differs from other email service providers. There are a few areas where ConvertKit stands out from its competition.
Subscriber Counts
The first is the way in which ConvertKit counts subscribers. Other services, like MailChimp, look at your total number of subscribers. So if one user subscribes to two of your mailing lists, they count as two subscribers even though it’s really only one user.
If you have a lot of mailing lists, this can make your subscriber count blow up considerably. That’s why it often costs more, over time, to use a low-cost email service provider like MailChimp vs. ConvertKit.
On the other hand, ConvertKit bases your subscriber count on the number of users. So if one user subscribes to two mailing lists, it only counts as one user. This creates a more accurate representation of your actual subscriber count (and is a fairer way of calculating pricing).
Understanding Segments and Tags
You can’t ask “What is ConvertKit?” without getting into Segments and Tags, which are two of the ways that ConvertKit helps you manage your subscribers. Think of Tags like a label that you give subscribers: people click a certain link, sign up for a certain freebie, participate in a certain mailing list campaign, etc. You can tag them accordingly.
From there, you can then separate these groups of users into segments. This makes it much easier to send out emails only to certain people in your subscriber list. For example, if you sent out an email announcing your latest YouTube video, you could tag those users who clicked the link to view the video. From there, you could segment it into “People who watched my video” and send them a follow-up email asking how they liked it.
Superior Personalization
Most email marketing services would have you believe that personalization is simply adding “!firstname” to an email message and calling it a day. But ConvertKit allows you to go much deeper than that, if you want.
Going back to our YouTube video example. Let’s say you have a segment of users who regularly watch your YouTube videos or read your blog posts. You have tagged those who click those links as “regulars”. From here, you could create an email that not only goes out to that segment of users, but references the fact that they participate often.
In short, you can, simply by clicking and dragging chunks of pre-programmed text, send emails that are personalized and tailored to very specific user groups within your subscriber list.
What is ConvertKit? More than Just an Email Marketing Service
As you can see, ConvertKit is more than your average email marketing service. With excellent personalization options, fair pricing and great segmentation and organization options, its focus isn’t just on helping you build a list — but a list of users that will convert more effectively into paying customers.
ConvertKit offers a “Freemium” account that lets you create an unlimited number of landing pages and opt-in forms. This lets you get started at absolutely no cost while you build up your content.
