Back when we first learned about content upgrades and email marketing, the idea was exhilarating. Who would have thought that you could make thousands of dollars from an email list?! As our research continued, we had to decide which email marketing platform to use.

So when we heard about the simplicity of ConvertKit, it was too good to be true. ConvertKit had everything we needed to be successful from the start. Even more, the software was designed by professional blogger Nathan Barry for bloggers just like us!

While ConvertKit is definitely not the cheapest email marketing platform in the marketplace (starting at $49/month for your first 1000 subscribers), we believe their features are worth the investment. Here are 21 reasons why Convert Kit is the best email marketing strategy for bloggers and online entrepreneurs:

*Some links in this post are affiliates links. We truly believe in the power of ConvertKit and use it ourselves. If you sign up for the software using our link, we get a small commission. This gives us the ability to create more helpful content for our readers. Thank you for supporting us!*

#1 Fast And Responsive Customer Support

With any new software, customer service is a huge selling point for us. For beginner email marketers like ourselves, we needed step-by-step support. The ConvertKit team is super fast at responding to our questions. Right now, there are two ways to contact a member of the team for help:

Submit A Ticket

Simply click on the question mark inside ConvertKit and type your question in their contact form. They usually respond within 24 hours!

Join The FB Community

Once you sign up for ConvertKit, you are invited to join their private Facebook community. This is great if you have a question that needs to be answered right away. Usually another community member will have the answer and respond to your question.

#2 Library Of Tutorials

If you like to read or watch tutorials to figure out how to do something yourself, ConvertKit has an amazing library filled with helpful content. Almost everything you could possibly want to know about email marketing strategy is tucked away inside. With just a few click of your keyboard, you can find the answer you are looking for.

#3 Simple Interface Design

There’s nothing worse than purchasing a new software and just staring at it because you have no idea what to do. We know we’ve done that before! But, not with ConvertKit!

Instantly create more conversions on your website with @Convertkit #emailmarketing Click To Tweet

ConvertKit has a very intuitive, and simple design that makes it easy to navigate to where you need to go. On the home page, you are greeted with your analytics and all your forms in one place. Overall, it is flexible and easy to use for both beginners (like us) and experts.

#4 Basic Forms And Landing Pages

Collecting and storing email addresses is the main goal of ConvertKit. Basic forms and landing pages help you easily do this.  For WordPress users, they have a plugin that you can install that easily lets you select the form you want for each blog post.

The best part about the landing pages, are that you don’t have to pay for an additional service like Leadpages. Forms and landing pages within ConvertKit can be customized with your brands’ color palette, images and voice.

#5 Simple Text Based Email Templates

When it comes to creating your email campaigns, ConvertKit focuses on content over design. Unlike other email marketing platforms, you won’t have the option to create beautiful email designs. This was done intentionally.

With the average attention span lasting less than 3 seconds, people don’t need anything else distracting them. Simple text based emails help your subscribers focus on what you’re actually saying.

#6 HTML Customization

If you have basic coding skills, now’s the time to flaunt them in Convertkit. There are no limits on what you can accomplish!

Email Style

ConvertKit makes it easy for you to design and format your own email templates with just a few lines of HTML and CSS. Depending on how complicated you want to make your email, ConvertKit has several tutorials in their library on how to do it.

Form Style

If you don’t like the look of the standard ConvertKit form, you can customize it with a few lines of CSS. You are able to change the colors, fonts and even remove the ConvertKit branding.

#7 Analytics

When it comes to analytics, we totally geek out. We love tracking our progress (slow as it may be) and seeing our growth. ConvertKit breaks their analytics down in two places – the home page and opt in forms.

Subscribers

On the home page, you can see a bar graph of your subscriber growth. If you hover over each bar, you can see the amount of subscribers you gained that day.

This is great for tracking what marketing tactics worked best. For example, on Feb 22, we heavily promoted our #InstuthorityChallenge on social media and saw a huge influx of subscribers that day.

Opt In Forms

Each individual opt in form will also give you a set up analytics without having to click on it. Here is an example of one of our opt in forms for our #InstauthorityChallenge. You can see how many people actually visited the form (vs. clicking directly on our promo link), how many subscribers we gained, and our conversion rate.

#8 Sequences

Sequences are a series of pre-written emails sent out at specific intervals. These are great for creating email courses, challenges, sales funnels, welcome series and so much more. ConvertKit makes it super simple to get started with sequences, and even provides an example of how it should look. Here are two more ways you can use sequences:

On Boarding Process

Don’t let your best content go to waste. What better way to introduce your new subscribers to yourself and your blog posts than through a series of introductory emails? ConvertKit makes this super simple to do with sequences and will help increase traffic to your past blog posts.

Product Pitches

Do you have a sample of a product that you could offer to new subscribers? You can easily create a form that entices them with the free sample. Once they subscribe and get the sample, you can place them into an educational sequence that sells the full version of the product to them.

#9 Tags

This feature is a game changer and one of the main reasons we jumped on the ConvertKit bandwagon so quickly. Tags will be your best friend.

We can organize our subscribers around forms and with tags without ever having to worry about paying for the same subscriber twice. This is powerful because we can now target specific subscribers with specific emails.

For example:

• When someone downloads a specific opt-in on our site, they get tagged.
• If someone clicks a link to read about a product, they get tagged as interested in that product.
• When a subscriber opts in for a free course, we can tag them too.

#10 Broadcasts

Broadcasts are a one-time email sent to a specific group of subscribers (or your entire audience). We love how simple it is to write a quick email and send it to the segment of our list we feel might be interested in reading it.

#11 Control Over Time And Day

The majority of our subscribers are based in the United States and Canada. This posed a problem for us when sending out emails manually. ConvertKit gives you the control you need to send the content to subscribers based on their time zone. This may not seem like a huge deal, but it definitely gives you more flexibility.

#12 Increase Open Rate And Resend To Non-Opens

When you send out a broadcast, there’s always a few moments of praying that people will actually open your email. According to email marketing experts, the average email open rate is currently around 22.87%. This could be a result of a whole manner of things – the subject line, junk mail, or even the time it was sent preventing your subscribers from taking action.

ConvertKit makes it simple to resend to those that didn’t open it. However, if you decide to use this feature, don’t abuse it and keep resending the email. We recommend waiting at least a week before resending, and only use it for super important emails that may have done to spam.

Wait at least a week before you resend, and only use it for super important emails that may have gone to spam.

#13 Double Opt In (Incentives)

We bet you’re thinking, is this even possible?! Uh, heck yes it is! When creating a new form, you can check a box that says, ‘auto confirm new subscribers.’ Once they subscribe, they will automatically be a confirmed subscriber without them having to go check their email and confirm.

This has cut down tremendously on the amount of people who simply forget to confirm to our email list!

Disclaimer: In some locations of the world, the law may prevent you from having the option to auto confirm new subscribers. Make sure to check before doing so. 

#14 Integrations

ConvertKit integrates with a number of services such as WordPress, LeadPages and Teachable. They are constantly adding more to their capability. However if you don’t want for your platform to be added, you can use Zapier to connect with thousands of other services.

#15 Twitter Cards

By now you’ve probably discovered that Twitter is a great way to communicate with your audience. It simple and quick to use. With Twitter cards, you can send tweets with embedded subscribe buttons. Now, when you tweet out an offer, your followers will be able to click a button right on the tweet and subscribe to your email list immediately.

ConvertKit integrates seamlessly with Twitter Cards right our of the box. This means you can automatically send your Twitter subscribers directly to your lists. How cool is that?!

#16 Automations

There are endless uses for ConvertKit automations. Basically it tells the software, when this event happens…then do this.

Link Trigger

You can turn any of the links in your emails into an automation trigger. For example, in the first email you send out to new subscribers, you can give them the option of joining your Fb group with a click of a link.

#17 Display Custom Message To Existing Subscribers

Have you subscribed to an offer or email newsletter, then found yourself subscribing for the same thing weeks later? Yep, us too. ConvertKit has this awesome feature that gives you the option to display a custom message to existing subscribers.

This can be a link to another offer, or just asking them to join your Facebook community. Our own community, The Moose Lounge has been growing quicker than we thought because of this feature.

#18 Subscriber History

This feature is worth gold. We can spy on our subscribers and see what they are interested in. Unlike some email marketing services, ConvertKit only charges you once per subscriber. They can opt to as many freebies or offers as they want from you, but they will one count as one subscriber.

We love that it automatically pulls the subscribers photo from their Gravatar online. This helps us put a name to a face and really feel like we are speaking to a community of people, not just a list.

#19 RSS Feed

The main benefit of having an RSS feed is so you don’t have to revisit each website you love to see if they’ve posted new content. Instead, it comes to you in one centralized location. ConvertKit gives you the option to add your RSS feed link to your account so your subscribers can be notified of each new blog post.

#20 Include And Exclude Subscribers From Your Emails

When sending out a broadcast (email), ConvertKit gives you the option to include or exclude certain subscribers from receiving it.

For example, say you want to send an email with a sales offer for one of your products. You can choose to send the email only to subscribers that have shown interest in blog posts related to said product. Or, exclude the email from people who have already purchased your product.

This takes no more than 5 second to do. Maybe even less time depending on how fast you are!

#21 Create Email Courses And Challenges

This is by far our favorite feature. Technically, these are called sequences, as explained in #8, but we wanted to further explain benefits of them. ConvertKit was built on the principle of using email courses to sell more of your products. Delivering email courses in a simple, easy to implement way is designed into the software.

ConvertKit is the best email marketing strategy for those who want to monetize their blog. Click To Tweet

We use personally use email course challenges to introduce new subscribers to our paid courses. You can arrange the order of the emails through drag and drop. The best part is, you can make changes to any email without pausing the challenge. We created the #InstauthorityChallenge and have already had over 70 people sign up in less than a week!

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If you’re still not convinced, then sign up for Convertkit today and try it for yourself. There’s no free trial, but $50 is worth it to experience the power for yourself. It has made a huge impact on our business and could do the same for you.

Now, go create your account and get started! Let us know in the comments when you do!