Should You Use ConvertKit for Email Marketing?
Over the past several weeks, we’ve been taking a closer look at #AllThePlatforms to help our BFFs (that’s you!) decide which tool is best for you and your offers. Whether you’re looking at creating courses, selling digital products, or integrating your offers and services, we’ve probably covered a platform that can help you.
Now, we’re turning our focus to email and SMS marketing platforms – two tactics that can help make any future offers and launches more successful.
We’ve already highlighted one of our favorite underrated marketing tools, Drip, and we’ve walked through the pros and cons of ActiveCampaign. Now, it’s time to talk about another highly popular tool: ConvertKit. Is it worth the hype? Does it make sense for email and SMS marketing? Let’s find out!
What is ConvertKit?
According to their website, CovertKit is a creator marketing platform with powerful, visual automations, so you can visualize your customers' journeys and expertly map out your sales funnel. Basically? It’s an email marketing and lead generation tool.
It’s uniquely built for creators, by creators, and can help grow your audience with multiple opt-in forms with a variety of incentives. More than 400,000 people use ConvertKit – including lots of famous authors, musicians, vloggers, and more – to connect with their audiences.
Pros of using ConvertKit for email marketing
At first glance, ConvertKit looks pretty impressive. With lots of aforementioned famous people on the home page, it’s easy to think, ‘If they use it, then it must be good!’ For email and SMS marketing specifically, there are quite a few things we like about ConvertKit, like:
- Sending email campaigns to specific segments and subscribers using tags
- Simple and easy-to-use visual automation editor
- Great deliverability
- No coding degree needed for landing page creation (but they can still be customized with CSS)
- Convenient and fast customer support
- Unsplash integration for royalty-free, commercially licensed images
- Forms can be embedded on WordPress websites
ConvertKit also offers light eCommerce capabilities, but we have more to say about that in a little bit.
Cons of ConvertKit
Just because a platform or tool may seem like the most popular choice, that doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for you and your business. And because we’re talking about email and SMS marketing specifically, we’d be remiss not to point out some of the features of ConvertKit we’re not so crazy about.
First, even though ConvertKit offers lots of options for monetizing services, it actually lacks the completeness of an eCommerce platform like Shopify. As a result, it doesn’t integrate with eCommerce platforms, which makes selling your products and services a challenge. To that end, ConvertKit kind of becomes yet another tool you have to juggle alongside your other ones because it doesn’t have all the capabilities you need to grow and scale your business.
Here are a few additional cons to using ConvertKit for email and SMS marketing:
- It’s not great for managing multiple clients (or email addresses) under the same account
- Lack of robust reporting on email metrics
- Limited collection of email templates to use
- Can be expensive for those who are new to email marketing
- Somewhat difficult to navigate for newbies
Our final verdict for ConvertKit? Skip it.
The TL;DR version of this? Popularity contests ain’t always it. Sure, ConvertKit is clearly a widely popular and widely used platform – there’s no denying that. But just because it might be the most used, most popular, or most advertised…doesn’t mean it’s actually the best for your business and needs.
We’re certainly not afraid to boast about popular tools (like Kajabi, for example), but we also want it to be known when we think something isn’t worth the hype. And for us, ConvertKit doesn’t quite do it.
Bottom line: If you’re dedicated to stepping up your email and SMS marketing game, we advise that you pass on the more ‘popular’ tools like ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign, and go for something that’s more intuitive, capable, and impressive like Drip.
Of course, seeing is always believing when it comes to trying and testing new products and tools for your biz, so if you still feel like ConvertKit could be the right fit for you, we definitely encourage you to give it a try!