8 reasons why I chose ConvertKit

This post is a part of a 4-week series to get your email marketing up and going. Here are the other posts in this series:

1. Want to grow your list from your website? Your first step starts here.
2. 8 Reasons why I chose ConvertKit
3. How to strategically place your opt-in forms on your website & quickly grow your email list
4. Behind-the-Scenes of my first email challenge & how to use challenges to grow your list

A year ago my reaction to email marketing was the grimace face emoji.

Yep. It made me feel super grimacy – no matter how much I tried to psych myself up for it.

It was like that episode of Friends when Chandler went to get pictures done with Monica. He knew he was supposed to smile and love it…but every time that camera came up, his grimace face would come out.

I’m the Chandler Bing of email marketing.

In my mind, email marketing was a good thing to do, but I wasn’t actually doing it on a regular basis. And anytime my business mentor spoke to me about how my business was going, I definitely grimaced knowing the reaction that would come from her over my avoidance of all things email marketing related.

Hands on hips….”Amaaaanda!”

I knew she was right, but I had no plan, so email marketing wasn’t a priority.

Then I decided to move from MailChimp to ConvertKit.

And things shifted a bit with how I felt about email marketing. I’d heard really great things about ConvertKit and I wanted to see what the hype was about. The $29/month price tag didn’t freak me out, because I was already used to paying $10 a month for MailChimp.

So, I quickly switched everything over one day after a spontaneous decision to just jump in and do it.

From the beginning ConvertKit got me super pumped. I went from grimace-face to slightly-smiling-face-emoji. I didn’t understand all the things that I could do with ConvertKit, but I saw the potential.
A few months later, after a brief chat with my biz bestie, I made another switch to the fancy-pants and heavy-hitting Ontraport.
And I started paying $297 a month! Whew. It was scary, but Ontraport changed my perception of email marketing as a whole.

With such a hefty price tag, I was more committed than ever to growing my list and emailing regularly, but I also didn’t have enough time to do all the things I envisioned.

I was trying to learn this robust system all at once.

Finally last month, I decided to move back to ConvertKit.

It had all the things I wanted for a great price (that wasn’t so scary), and with a really easy setup that would make me actually do the things consistently without having to learn something new.

My philosophy about choosing an email provider is to choose the one that you will use. For me that’s ConvertKit and here’s why:

• You can resend your emails to people who didn’t open up the email broadcast the first time around.

There’s a really easy way to see who has and hasn’t opened your emails, plus a button to resend the email to them. I tested this out recently, and an open rate of 45% went up to 72%. All it took was a slightly different title and the click of a button.

• You’re able to easily see the analytics.

You can easily see how many people you have on your list altogether, which was a struggle in Ontraport. You can even see who opened and who clicked on the links within your emails. I can use these details to figure out if I’m on track. It also helps me to get to know my subscribers even better, because I can see what they like – and do that more!

• Convert kit uses tags and sequences instead of separate lists.

I love being able to use tags because I feel like there isn’t a huge commitment or a way to do the tags wrong. I had different lists in MailChimp with different content going out to each of the lists, but with ConvertKit I have one main list that is separated by tags. Users can have tags for all their different interests that can be added by something as simple as a click. In ConvertKit I label the tags whatever will help me to remember where the subscriber came from or what they’re interested in.

An example, one of my tags is, “Brand Photography Interest”. When I’ve written a blog post that is directly related to brand photography, I can send the post just to the people with that specific tag. Or I could add a new call to action to an email broadcast for those who are interested in Photography that will make it more clear to them, how the post will benefit them.

• It integrates well with my shopping cart & membership site, easily.

I use Samcart for my shopping cart and Wishlist Member for my membership site. Both of these tools work well with ConvertKit, so it’s easy to sell my courses online. I love that it was easy to set up ConvertKit and didn’t take me hours or days to figure out how to do it.

• You can have as many forms as you want and they’re easy to embed into WordPress, plus the forms work well with Popup Ally.

Once you’ve created a form in ConvertKit, you can just grab the code and paste it into your blog post or put it on your page of choice. There’s also a plugin for people with WordPress, or you can copy the html code and put it into a Popup Ally form (which is my favorite plugin for opt-ins and popups) to make it prettier.

• You can create a new email template for each tag if you have some coding experience.

This is a more advanced trick to make your emails pretty too. I love this option personally, as it gives flexibility to add a custom footer for each tag. So if I want my brand photography people to see something specific in the footer that’s different than my website people, I can do that really easily.

• The rules are so easy to make.

There is only one place to add a rule in ConvertKit. There were multiple places in Ontraport, which I think made it difficult for me to understand how to make everything work together. ConvertKit is very straightforward and easy to use.

• It’s a great price!

Ontraport was awesome to use, but I definitely wanted something a bit cheaper. ConvertKit provides some of the same features as Ontraport, but for a much lower price. And while you can sign up for both MailChimp and Mad Mimi for free, if you’re wanting to really focus on your email marketing, I’d recommend to just skip the free versions and go right for a platform that allows you to grow and your list grows.

There are a lot of reasons why ConvertKit is my top choice for my email provider. Overall the ease of use and the lower price tag won me over in the end.

If you still worry that it’s difficult to use or that all of these things sound really scary, I created a quick video to walk you through the ConvertKit dashboard.

That should give you an idea of where to find things in ConvertKit, and maybe you’re starting to see what it’s able to do. I know it will be easy for you to set it up and quick too!

If you’re struggling coming up with ideas for what to offer people for your freebie incentive, sign up by popping your name and email in the form below and get 25 Opt-in Ideas For Creative Entrepreneurs worksheet.