What is ConvertKit
ConvertKit is an email service provider that is specifically marketed towards bloggers, podcasters, and other businesses who are building audiences.
It was started by Nathan Barry who I was already a fan of, being a regular reader of his blog.
For a brief moment, it was rebranded to Seva, until they reverted back to ConvertKit.
What’s interesting about ConvertKit is how transparent Nathan is about the entire process of taking ConvertKit from scratch to making $30k a month in 2015. Now in 2018, they have 19,500 active customers and doing over $1 million a month.
We are basically getting a front row seat on his journey to building a successful SaaS product. It’s pretty cool since we get to read about both the highs and the lows.
Even if you don’t end up using ConvertKit, his blog posts are always interesting and I recommend giving Nathan a follow.
Part 1: What are some of my favorite features of ConvertKit?
Cool Feature #1: Seamless Visual Automation Editor
I really like the ConvertKit’s visual automation editor. It’s a joy to use, especially when you compare it to some of the other automation editors out there.
That’s because ConvertKit makes editing each step in your automation workflow seamless.
Let’s say one of the steps in your automation is sending an email. With other services, editing the email will take you out of the automation editor and into a separate email editor page. This can cause you to lose context of what you were doing.
With ConvertKit, everything is done inside the automation editor itself. So clicking on an email step will allow you to edit it inline. And you can also edit your forms in the same way.
It’s a great experience and it puts other automation editors to shame.
Cool Feature #2: Simple Segmentation within emails
Another useful feature is ConvertKit’s ability to segment individual emails using conditional tags.
So let’s say you wanted to create a single email to your list, but add a bonus coupon to your VIP customers. You can do that in ConvertKit like this:
Pretty cool, right?
The syntax might look a little strange to non-techies and you might have a hard time remembering what to type when you go to use it.
To help with this, you can click on the Personalize menu in the editor toolbar and click the Subscriber’s tags menu item. ConvertKit will then insert the appropriate code snippet template directly into your email.
All you need to do is change to your tag, and update the content for the two branches.
Cool Feature #3: Auto resend broadcasts to un-opens
Every time you send out a broadcast email, a certain percentage of people won’t open it. Hubspot says marketing and advertising emails only get 25% email open rates.
Maybe you didn’t write a good headline, or they were too busy at the time to take a look.
ConvertKit has a neat feature where you can resend your broadcast to the people who didn’t open it the first time.
This is available in stats page, where you’ll see a button named Resend to Unopens.
Pressing it will allow you to re-send your email again, where you can make changes to your Subject Line if you wish.
I love this because you can maximize the eyeballs you get for every broadcast you send out.
Cool Feature #4: Lead Magnet Double Opt-in
There are debates everywhere about whether you should use double opt-in vs single opt-in.
The main reason why you want double opt-in is that it will improve your email list quality. But the main argument against is that the extra step will hurt your conversions.
All this is true.
However, if you’re using lead magnets, then ConvertKit can handle double opt-in for you automatically like this.
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