ConvertKit Review: Monetize your talent with exclusive content, automated emails and digital tipping

ConvertKit features you’ll love

• 💳 Collect payments - digital products, subscriptions or tips

  The creator economy is booming.

  With its excellent monetization tools, ConvertKit is no small part of that. The three main ways they help you to make money are:

  • Sell digital products – It’s as easy as adding your product details, setting the price and embedding a ‘buy now’ button on the page(s) of your choosing. Use it to sell one-off digital downloads or recurring subscriptions.
  • Collect tips [NEW] – Taking on Patreon, ConvertKit now lets content creators collect donations direct from their audience. Use the Tip Jar wherever you choose – on popular blog posts, YouTube channel, footer, newsletters – and suggest pre-set amounts they can donate.
  • Gated paid newsletter posts [NEW] - Reward paid subscribers with exclusive posts, within exactly the same newsletter. Free subscribers will receive a CTA inviting them to upgrade to unlock the content.

  

  These ConvertKit Commerce features are on ConvertKit’s Free Plan, with a small transaction fee payable on every sale or tip.

• 🗺️ Visual email journey builder

  Make a great first impression by delivering the right content to the right email subscribers, every time.

  ConvertKit recognises this is the bit creators could find most daunting so have provided a few templates to work from. They won’t cover every use case but it’s enough to grasp the basics e.g. launching a podcast, a newsletter referral program, or selling a new ebook.

  And once you’ve mastered tags, sequences and events, I think most will think of ConvertKit’s visual automation builder as their new best friend. Being able to see your entire marketing workflow on a single screen and compose emails from the same page are big plus points. Anything too labored would have many creators tied in knots and be a complete non-starter, so I’m grateful for the simple UX.

  So, how do these automated journeys work?

  

  First up, forms or landing pages are the starting point to any ConvertKit journey.

  Customers are assigned an email sequence or tag (e.g. ‘newsletter subscriber’, ‘competition entrant’, ‘purchased product X’, and so on) as they enter ConvertKit and how they interact with your emails dictates what happens next.

  The visual journey builder ensures that ConvertKit automatically follows-up for you in response to a subscriber action. That could be on the back of a purchase, a course milestone, a link trigger a subscriber clicks, the moment they’re assigned a new tag, and so on. The possibilities are endless and you’re in total control!

  If you’re feeling really generous you can even choose to share your new automation workflow as a template for others to adopt – nice touch ConvertKit!

• 👋 Unlimited entry points - landing page builder

  Visitors enter ConvertKit and become leads via forms and landing pages on your website. The big USP being the ability to create multiple opt-in offers at any one time, so you can automatically juggle thousands of leads at once.

  Another unsung hero is ConvertKit’s ready-made templates and easy-to-use landing page builder, making it possible to create beautiful, responsive pages in record time.

  

  The templates cover most use cases, from eBook downloads and product waiting lists, exclusive newsletter content, event and webinar RSVPs, and of course trusty old newsletter subscriptions. Each comes with several different designs too. While they’re not as stunning as Unbounce’s templates, ConvertKit is hooked up to Unsplash and Instagram, so a beautiful hero image isn’t far away and there’s pattern background from Hero Patterns too.

  Nearly everything you see on the landing page can be customised, including fonts, colours, reCAPTCHA checking, SEO titles and confirmation titles. For everything else, you can add custom CSS.

  The other email marketing platforms are slowly coming round to offering lead capture and landing pages features, but I found ConvertKit’s to be particularly flexible to make your own and tailor to your monetization goal.

• 📝 Unlimited forms too

  ConvertKit’s forms come in far fewer shapes and sizes.

  

  These can either be embedded inline in your content, stuck to the top of your site or pop-up after a set amount of time spent on the page or once somebody has devoured a certain percentage of the page.

  ConvertKit is all converting leads in record time, so unlike the hundreds of landing page options, there’s only 7 form templates to choose from. I find the limited choice refreshing as making them your own (e.g. added custom fields, changing colours, etc) is dead easy. There’s also a ton of advanced settings e.g. should you wish to add a lead magnet or send a double opt-in email.

• 💌 Email broadcasts – when you have something to say

  Have news worthy of a wider audience?

  ConvertKit email broadcasts let you share product announcements, newsletters, and more with your entire database or a group of your choosing.

  

  It’s super easy to target the recipients you want to reach and the total number of potential recipients changes as you apply your filters. The builder itself is straightforward and allows for exclusive content modules and A/B testing.

  All this is pretty standard for a email marketing tool. As per MailChimp, once you’ve settled on a design, you can now duplicate your email templates. Ideal for small changes to a campaign.

• 🏷️ One subscriber list - organise it with tags instead

  ConvertKit keeps all your contacts in a single list and dynamically organises them by tags and segments instead. This sharpens your targeting and makes sure you only pay once per subscriber regardless of how many tags or segments they appear in – a major bugbear of Mailchimp!

  So, what’s the difference between tags and segments?

  Well, you ‘tag’ individual subscribers and a collection of ‘tags’ can be grouped into a ‘segment’. For example, ‘Course A buyers’ might have their own tag but fall under the ‘All course buyers’ segment.

  All of this might seem overkill if you’re used to keeping contacts in a single list in other email marketing platforms, but it can be the key to keeping different customers happy and making sure you’re converting at every opportunity.

• 📈 Track your conversion rate – measure what matters

  Following your dream doesn’t mean doing so blindly. ConvertKit’s relentless focus on conversion means important performance stats are never far away. Handy analytics includes:

  • new subscribers and the forms/landing pages driving them (visitors, subscribers, conversion)
  • email newsletters and sequence stats (open rates, click rates, unsubscribes and A/B subject line tests)
  • individual subscriber history (entry point, emails opened, tags and delivery reports)
  • landing page stats (integrates with Google Analytics to track activity on your page)

  Again, you’d arguably get more insights elsewhere, but this is just the right info and level of detail for ConvertKit’s target audience.