ConvertKit Review: Why It's My #1 Pick

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ConvertKit is a powerful and user-friendly email marketing tool that’s popular among bloggers, content creators, and other online entrepreneurs. It offers a 30-day free trial (no credit card required), so it’s worth checking out. Learn more in my in-depth ConvertKit review.

Email marketing can be a gamechanger for your blog or online business. It’s said that email marketing has a whopping 4,400% return on investment, meaning for every dollar you spend on it, you could make $44 back.

My number one recommendation for an email marketing platform for bloggers and other online content creators is ConvertKit. This popular email marketing software has powerful features but is still easy to use, even if you’re completely new to email marketing.

I’ve been using ConvertKit for over a year and have been blown away by its user-friendliness, rich features, and helpful customer support. Let’s take a closer look at what you can do with ConvertKit, including its features, pros, cons, pricing and more.

Table of Contents

ConvertKit review: User-friendly platform with powerful features
ConvertKit pricing and plans
ConvertKit pricing vs. other email marketing platforms
ConvertKit review: Final thoughts

ConvertKit review: User-friendly platform with powerful features

ConvertKit was built with bloggers and content creators in mind. Its founder, Nathan Barry, was a blogger and course creator who was frustrated with the limitations of other email marketing services, which were clunky to use or designed for big, impersonal businesses.

So he made a new email marketing platform specifically for bloggers and content creators. Here’s how ConvertKit defines its ideal users:

“Do you identify as an online creator? Are you a blogger, podcaster, YouTuber, maker, course creator, freelancer, coach, musician, or photographer? Do you make digital or physical products, provide services, build software, or have ads, sponsorships, or affiliate products and market or sell those things online?

If you answered yes to ANY of those descriptors, then yep, ConvertKit is built for someone just like you.”

As a blogger, I’ve found that ConvertKit lives up to its promise to help you “find your audience, turn them into true fans, and earn a living as a creator with our audience building and email marketing software.”

Here are all the ways that ConvertKit can help you reach your email marketing goals.

1. Grow your email list

It’s said that 95% of visitors who come to your website will never return. Let that sink in for a moment.

If you’re not collecting their emails before they leave, you could be missing out on a vast number of potential customers.

But if you snag their email, you can keep communicating with them week after week.

ConvertKit makes it easy to grow your email list with pop-ups, landing pages, and other forms.

You can invite someone to sign up for your list or newsletter, or better yet, offer them a “freebie” such as a free checklist, cheatsheet, e-book, or email course.

ConvertKit lets you automatically send your freebie to anyone who signs up.

For example, if someone requests my Blog Post Checklist, they’ll automatically get the checklist after they confirm their email.

Instead of doing all this manually, you can set up this system in ConvertKit once and watch it collect emails from your website visitors on autopilot.

By providing value and building trust over email, you’ll be more likely to turn your email subscribers into loyal fans and paying customers.

2. Send broadcasts

If you want to send an email to your subscribers — perhaps to tell them about a new blog post you published or a new product you tried — you can easily do so through ConvertKit.

ConvertKit calls these one-off emails “broadcasts.”

Simply sign into your account and create a broadcast. You can enter what content and subject line you want, as well as decide how you want your name to appear in their inbox.

You can also decide who to send your email to, whether you want it to go to all of your subscribers, only subscribers who signed up after a certain date, or some other grouping.

ConvertKit has an excellent deliverability rate of 98%, meaning your emails are unlikely to end up in someone’s spam folder. It also boasts a high email open rate of up to 30%.

ConvertKit also has a great “resend to unopens” feature. If you want to try resending your broadcast to people who didn’t open it, perhaps with a new subject line, ConvertKit lets you to do that.

ConvertKit’s minimalist email design

Note that ConvertKit’s email designs are relatively simple. You can add in logos or images, as well as extra features like buttons and videos.

But they’re not as visual-heavy as some other email marketing platforms.

ConvertKit says it does this on purpose — it prefers a minimalist look to emails, making them appear as if they’re coming from a friend.

I also prefer this minimalist approach, especially since visual-heavy emails can be slow to load.

But if you prefer a more visual-heavy email tool, you might check out an alternative email marketing platform.

3. Set up email sequences

Email sequences are one of my favorite features about ConvertKit.

Basically, you can set up a whole sequence of emails to automatically send when someone signs up or takes some other action.

Let’s say, for instance, you want to create a sales funnel to sell a new course.

You can create a sequence of let’s say, seven emails and have them send out automatically over the week.

You can select when you want them to send and how often (for instance, every day, every two days, skip a day, etc.).

This makes it easy to drum up excitement among your readers and create a sense of urgency so they’re eager to buy.

For instance, you could set up a limited-time promotion and remind readers that the sale will be ending at midnight.

Here’s a look at my “How to Start a Blog” email course within ConvertKit. You can see how easy it is to click on Day 1, Day 2, etc. and edit each email.

4. Set up automations

Another one of my favorite ConvertKit features is its visual automations.

The beauty of email marketing is that you can set it up once and forget about it. ConvertKit’s automations make this possible.

Basically, you can set up an automation so that if someone joins a form or takes some other action, they’re automatically put into an email sequence.

In the example above, you can see how if someone joins the “Create More Financial Freedom” form, they receive an email asking them what their biggest financial goal is.

Depending on what they click, they’re placed into one of three email sequences.

Your automation doesn’t have to be this complex, though. Yours could simply have someone join a form and then go into a single welcome email or sequence of emails.

5. Create beautiful forms and landing pages

As for the nuts and bolts of how to get people to subscribe to your list, you’ll mainly accomplish this through forms and landing pages.

ConvertKit has a variety of form templates for you to use:

You can set up forms to be pop-ups, slide-in forms, or sticky forms that stay permanently on the page.

Here’s a form I use for Remote Bliss:

You can easily insert the code for forms within blog posts, widgets, or wherever else by installing the free ConvertKit plugin and inserting the WordPress code.

You can also set up landing pages if you want even more space to describe your freebie or newsletter. Here’s a look at some of ConvertKit’s landing page templates:

While the landing pages aren’t as robust as a landing page software like LeadPages, they still have some great designs and can be highly effective at converting visitors into subscribers.

ConvertKit’s forms and landing pages integrate with stock photo marketplace Unsplash to provide you with more than 100,000 free stock images.

6. Use tags, triggers, and rules

As you get more advanced with your email marketing, you might want to use ConvertKit’s tags, triggers, and rules features.

With a tag, you can create different segments of your email list. Maybe you want a category of people who signed up in January, for example, or of people who clicked on a link in your last email.

As mentioned above, you can also set up triggers easily in ConvertKit’s visual automations. Someone joining a certain form, for instance, is the trigger that funnels them into an email sequence.

Finally, you can set up rules within your emails depending on user behavior. Let’s say you’re selling an online course, and someone buys your course, as in the screenshot above.

You don’t want them to keep getting sales emails from you, so you set up a rule within ConvertKit that they’ll be removed from the rest of your sales email sequences.

You can also automatically funnel them into a new email sequence, perhaps an onboarding email sequence welcoming them to the new course.

ConvertKit integrates with a number of other platforms, such as Teachable, Shopify and WordPress, allowing you to set up these advanced rules for your subscribers.

7. Sell products

In addition to email marketing, ConvertKit now has an e-commerce feature, allowing you to sell digital products directly to your readers.

You can set up one-time purchases for products like e-books or coaching, or recurring subscriptions for newsletters, music or whatever else.

Here’s what to expect from ConvertKit’s e-commerce feature:

Easy to customize the product page and set prices
Set up one-time purchases for products such as e-books or recurring subscriptions, e.g., monthly newsletters, music, coaching, and more.
Embed “Buy Now” buttons and customize your product page’s URL
Sort and exclude buyers based on their activity. For instance, you can avoid sending a quote to someone who has already purchased your product or service.
Track your sales from one dashboard
Integrated, safe payment processing with low transaction fees

Instead of having to rely on a third-party software to conduct transactions, you can do all your email marketing and e-commerce from within your ConvertKit account.

8. Learn from free trainings and resources

ConvertKit doesn’t expect everyone to be an email marketing expert from the beginning (I certainly wasn’t).

To help new users, it has a big library of free trainings, on-demand workshops, technical tutorials, podcasts, and other resources.

Plus, you can get on ConvertKit’s email list and sign up for live webinars it puts on, often in collaboration with bloggers and content creators.

All these resources can be a great way to learn more about email marketing and make your efforts a lot more effective and profitable.

9. Get help from customer support

Finally, ConvertKit has excellent customer support, which can be a lifesaver if you run into an issue or simply need help setting everything up.

You can live chat customer support or send an email anytime, and they typically get back to you quickly. During business hours, I generally get a response within 15 minutes.

I’ve always had great experiences with customer support. They respond fast, are very thorough, and you know you’re talking to a real person.

Whatever your level of experience with email marketing, having a responsive customer support team can be extremely helpful.

ConvertKit pricing and plans

ConvertKit offers three main plans: a free plan, Creator plan, and Creator PRO plan.

The free plan lets you have up to 1,000 subscribers, and you can create unlimited forms and landing pages and send broadcasts.

However, you’ll need to upgrade to the Creator plan to use email sequences and automations. The Creator plan starts at $25 per month if paid annually and $29 per month if paid monthly.

Prices increase as you get more subscribers.

You can try a 30-day free trial to see if it’s right for you (you don’t have to enter your credit card information unless you want to at the end of your trial, so it’s pretty risk-free).

The Creator PRO plan is for more advanced users who want additional features. For instance, the PRO plan lets you access even more advanced reporting, as well as set up a referral system and reward subscribers for referrals.

Try a 30-Day Free Trial of ConvertKit

ConvertKit pricing vs. other email marketing platforms

While I’m a big fan of ConvertKit’s powerful features and ease of use, it does come with one downside: It’s a bit pricier than some other email marketing platforms.

When you compare ConvertKit vs. MailChimp or ConvertKit vs. ActiveCampaign, for instance, you’ll see that ConvertKit costs more.

ConvertKit vs MailChimp pricing: ConvertKit has a free plan that supports up to 1,000 subscribers. Its Creator plan, which costs $29 per month, supports up to 1,000 subscribers but has more features when the free version. MailChimp, on the other hand, has a free plan that supports up to 2,000 subscribers. Its next plan, the Essentials plan, costs only $9.99 per month and supports 50,000 subscribers.
ConvertKit vs GetResponse pricing: GetResponse’s basic plan costs $15 per month and supports 1,000 subscribers. But ConvertKit costs $29 per month for 1,000 subscribers (almost double the amount).
ConvertKit vs MailerLite pricing: MailerLite costs $10 per month for 1,000 subscribers. This email marketing software also has a free plan for 1,000 subscribers, but the only catch is you can’t send more than 12,000 emails per month. If you’re just starting with email marketing, chances are you won’t send nearly that many.
ConvertKit vs Active Campaign: For 1,000 subscribers on Active Campaign, you’ll pay around $25 per month for their Lite plan. This price is on par with ConvertKit’s beginner Creator plan.

I feel like the price is worth it for the quality of the software, but if you’re looking for a more affordable email marketing platform, check out MailerLite, Active Campaign, or another email marketing platform.