ConvertKit Review (2024) The Newsletter Tool for Creators (Like You?)

• ConvertKit Review

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ConvertKit Pricing

These prices are for month-to-month subscriptions, and refer to the Creator Plan, which doesn’t give you access to the native newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, or advanced reporting. To access these, you need to be on the Creator Pro plan. Prices start at $29 a month for 300 subscribers and increase from there.

While the cheapest paid package is one of the cheaper options on the market, that can rapidly change as your subscriber count grows. While some tools (like Flodesk) put an upper limit on pricing, ConvertKit prices continue to increase the more subscribers you have.

When you purchase a paid plan, they’ll migrate your lists into their system at no extra cost.

You can always check our pricing comparison tool to see how ConvertKit stack up against the competition. Or check our pricing guide to find out how each plan’s features vary.

Pros and Cons

Is ConvertKit the right newsletter service for you?

Rating Details

How to use ConvertKit

ConvertKit is well known for its extremely user-friendly nature—so easy, in fact, that once you sign in to your ConverKit platform, you’re instantly presented with a “quick actions” dropdown on the right-hand side. Here, you have the option to create a broadcast, form, landing page, snippet, or email template. The term “snippet” refers to a reusable block of content designed to help you save time when you create email campaigns.

To create an email campaign, select the “Broadcast” option. From here you are taken to a basic email editor, which, as we mentioned earlier, could easily be mistaken for a basic plain text editor. You can start typing straight away using the design blocks available, or you can choose one of the 15 pre-made templates—which, while decent enough, aren’t as good as the options available from other tools.

Alternatively, if these templates don’t suit your email marketing strategy, you can import your own custom HTML. You can edit email templates from the dashboard, by clicking ‘email template’ from the quick actions tab.

Automations and rules

One of my favorite parts of ConvertKit is its visual automations and rules features. When I originally started using the tool, you could only add “rules”, which meant you could trigger emails based on an action. For example, a subscriber signing up to a certain form could trigger a welcome sequence or add a tag to their subscriber profile.

The rules feature is great for applying quick, one-off triggers to your sequences. I use it to send specific automated sequences to subscribers depending on which form or lead magnet they’ve signed up for. However, if you want to create more complex automations, you’ll need to use the visual automations feature. This lets you map out subscriber journeys based on actions they do and don’t take.

It’s simple to use and you can drag and drop different outcomes, including subscribers you want to exclude from sequences (e.g. people who have already bought a course you’re promoting).

The Creator Network

The latest addition to ConvertKit’s toolkit for creators is the Creator Network. You can build your own “Creator Profile”, complete with its own domain. Here, you can share your latest broadcasts and add links to other, relevant offsite pages.

But for me, the most useful part of the Creator Network is the recommendations feature. This is ConvertKit’s way of creating a referral system. I can recommend up to 10 other creators every time someone signs up to my email list and vice versa. It’s proven to be a particularly fruitful way to grow my list and, since it came into play about a year ago, I’ve sent over 1,000 subscribers to other creators’ lists.

ConvertKit’s landing page editor

ConvertKit’s landing page editor is quite basic, but it gets the job done. You can create standalone pages or use the helpful copy-paste code and share it on your website (there are different methods for sharing it depending on the platform you’ve built your website on).

Although there are 50+ templates to choose from, it’s difficult to customize them aside from changing the colors, fonts, and imagery.

How to create a landing page with ConvertKit:

• • 1. Click on the “Grow” tab at the top of the page and select “Landing pages and forms”.
    2. Next, you’ll see a “Create new” CTA. Once you’ve clicked this you’ll be asked how you want to gather your subscribers. Here you’ll be asked which landing page template you want to use – there are over 50 templates for you to choose from.
    3. Now you can choose the landing page design that suits your marketing needs, whether that’s for Newsletters, Webinars, Profiles, etc.
    4. Then once you’ve found the landing page template you like, click “Choose” to start editing the design. Now you can add your content, branding, imagery, etc.
    5. You can preview your landing page before publishing it to make sure you’re happy with the overall layout and design.
    6. Once you are happy with the overall feel of it, click “Save & Publish.” Then you’ll be able to choose your domain name for your landing page.
    7. Later, if you need to go back and edit your chosen domain, landing page URL, or SEO settings, you can access and update all of this within the “Settings” tab.

ConvertKit’s Deliverability

ConvertKit’s email deliverability rates have always been pretty stable in our deliverability tests, their results have ranged from 80% to mid-nineties in our last five tests. In our June 2023 test, they scored 91.3% which is their best score since October 2021. They were one of the providers who were most likely to end up in Gmail’s main inbox, with 78% of their emails ending up there. Unfortunately, we couldn’t include them in our test in January 2024. This is due to some limitations with their authentication settings.

Conclusion

There are several areas where ConvertKit does quite well. For example, support is quick, friendly and effective, we can’t complain here. We also liked the flexibility when managing subscribers via its tagging system. This is certainly something bloggers (and digital marketers) can take full advantage of whilst targeting communications to their audience (hence why we listed it as one of our Mailchimp alternatives).

We also think the new Creator Network addition is a nice touch for creators, bloggers, and freelancers. It provides a unique way to grow your email list while supporting others in the industry.

ConvertKit comes with a landing page editor that will let you collect subscribers even if you don’t own a website, which is great for social media campaigns. Their new commerce feature, which allows you to sell digital products and subscriptions, is pretty cool, and not something you’ll see in other email marketing tools.

However, ConvertKit is only really effective when you are using the paid option, therefore it can get expensive pretty quickly. For this reason, we’d strongly suggest that you check out some ConvertKit alternatives before choosing them as your next email marketing platform.

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ConvertKit Alternatives

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You can see why ActiveCampaign is our top ConvertKit alternative in this detailed comparison.

Not sure that ConvertKit is right for you? Use our Smart Finder to see which newsletter tool matches your requirements.