February 2020 - Millennial Nextdoor

In this Convertkit review, I'm going to uncover it all. You'll learn the ins and outs of Convertkit, pros and cons, features and benefits and finally answering the question if it truly is worth it for your business. Make sure to bookmark this post to come back to it later if you need to! Email marketing is super important and crucial for businesses of all sizes. If you haven't started email marketing yet, my best advice to you, is to start now! Start now, start before you think you need it, start from zero, yes, but your list will grow and bring you tons of business and customers and be the best thing for your brand, watch! When implemented properly, email marketing can become the most important resource if your business toolkit, singlehandedly responsible for helping you create relationships, win the business, and make sales. According to Capterra, the average return on $1 spent on email marketing is $44.25! Can you imagine? So, if you spend $100/month on email marketing, your return is 44.25X that! Mindboggling. This is super important to highlight and a chief reason why you should invest in an awesome email marketing software solution for your business. ConvertKit Review | Is it Really Worth It? ConvertKit is a powerful email marketing software that helps you send emails to your audience. Visit the website It's essential because it can help send messages to large groups of people (your audience groups) at once. Like, if you want to announce a sale to your 20,000 customers or share your latest blog post with your 100K monthly viewers or tell a personal story relating to your business and audience to your 4,000 sized email list. Email marketing software can help you do that! It also helps you automate your business through a variety of activities like distributing email courses, executing sales funnels, and so much more. It's all about working smarter and not working harder, right? Email marketing software helps you do that! And, if you've ever signed up to an email list, there's a good chance that you signed up to that brand through email marketing software. It's a business-must-have! Today, email marketing automation is in the forefront of business and has become more and more important. It cannot be ignored and it's a crucial piece of achieving success and reaching your goals in business. For a long time, the email marketing software standard was Infusionsoft. People have used Aweber and Sendresponse and other providers. Let me tell you, I have tried them all. They can be quite complex and overwhelming, making you not even want to start in the first place. Convertkit stands apart from the crowd and they have helped me achieve six figure business growth with my brand. I really don't see myself with any other email service provider. No other compares to the price and value that you get (more on this below). You'll read in this review that ConvertKit has emerged as one of the most popular, highly respected and well loved email marketing software solutions for businesses without the high price tag. Here’s what I will be covering inside this ConvertKit review. What is ConvertKit? What are some of my favorite features of ConvertKit? What I don’t like about ConvertKit An Inside Look at ConvertKit ConvertKit Pricing Everything else you need to know about ConvertKit Summary I’m also offering an incredible bonus, my Traffic ebook ($25 value) for free to people who use my affiliate link to sign up to ConvertKit! Just contact me after you've purchased using my link and I'll send the ebook your way!t. Before getting into it, I wanna talk a bit about blogging! Do you have a blog? It’s a really amazing way to make income semi-passively. It can even become your full-time job! My first blog made me $20,000 in the first year! Vent, express yourself, educate others, blogging can be all this and more. And, email marketing is a great complement to blogging. Heres a quick tutorial on how to start your very own profitable blog in 20 minutes! How to Start a Profitable Blog You’re ready to start your blog, yay! You are going to LOVE blogging. I’ve been doing it for about 5+ year and it has completely changed my life. Benefits of blogging Your blog can be a place to… Educate Share Vent Share your passions Be an online journal Work independently Make Money Online Freedom No micromanagement Be the boss Flexible schedule And, more! Starting a blog is SO MUCH EASIER than you might be thinking. Using the tools and resources we share in this article (like WordPress and Siteground), you’ll be able to create your hub for creativity, helping you earn up to thousands of dollars (or more) every month doing something that you love! Here’s our easy guide on how to start a profitable blog in just 20 minutes: Step 1: Pick a Niche The best way to choose what you will blog about is starting with your interests and passions. Think about how you spend your day, what you do for a living, hobbies you do after work or on weekends, etc. Some examples include: Baking Food and nutrition Fitness Travel Knitting Homeschooling You can even pick a very specific niche like raw vegan or parenting a special needs child, etc. From here, it’s time to build your blog (the fun stuff)! Step 2: Building Your Blog Start by thinking of a name for your blog. You can make this simple, a play on words, your name, really anything you’d like. Once you decide on your blog name, move onto the next step, your blogging platform, Wordpress. You may see that there are a ton of platforms available for blogging but Wordpress is the ABSOLUTE BEST! It’s great for all blogging levels, user easy to navigate and our top recommendation. Plus, it’s free! Can’t go wrong with free. Head to Siteground (Siteground partners with WordPress) and pick your hosting plan. We recommend the Grow Big plan. And, you can change plans in the future, no problem so don’t feel stuck in your choice you make today. Why Siteground? They are incredible. I've had dozens of blogs and many different hosts and Siteground is by far the best. I like them better than Godaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost and others. I've tried all these guys too. Siteground shocked me with their stellar support. They are super knowledgeable, friendly and have uber-fast response times. I like that I can chat with support conveniently from my computer or cell phone and get all my questions answered. They have a streamlined dashboard that lets me manage my hosting plan, email accounts, and even my affiliate account! Plus, all this and more... YOU will LOVE SITEGROUND! Click this link to learn more about them and sign up. Go through the steps for setup, apply WordPress and you got yourself a blog! Step 3: Design and Theme In this step you get to apply a pretty theme to your blog. You can go with one of Wordpress’s many themes or you can pick a premium theme from a provider like Studiopress. Studiopress is known for Genesis Framework which is THE framework for helping you get your blog tons of traffic and helping you make money faster than other themes. They have integrated, built-in tools with the theme that help you with virtually every aspect of SEO on your blog.SEO is search engine optimization and it’s the stuff that helps your website get found on Google and other search engines. Studiopress themes have built-in SEO tools to help you with that so it’s hands off for you, as the blog owner. Pick a StudioPress theme if you go the Premium route, then apply it in WordPress. Head to Appearance>Themes>Add New Step 4: Add Content In this step it’s about adding content. This is where you can let your personality shine and start writing blog posts about whatever your heart fancys. Don’t forget to add your Navigation menu and other critical pages for your blog like About and Contact. The About page tells the reader all about you. Get detailed here and talk about yoruself. Share why you started blogging, what your goal is for the blog and anything else you’d like your audience to know about you. The Contact Page is a way for readers to reach out to you if they need to ask questions, etc. You can use the Contact 7 Plugin for this page, which is an easy contact form, or feel free to use the contact page/plugin that comes with your theme. Final Thoughts You just created your blog! How do you feel? Make sure to bookmark Millennial Nextdoor as we will be sharing more helpful info to help you with blogging and navigating your blogging journey. Questions? Head to our Contact page and drop us a line! Or comment below and we’ll get back to you ASAP! Happy blogging! Convertkit Review | What is ConvertKit? ConvertKit is an email marketing software service provider that aims to help small businesses like bloggers, small business brands, podcasters, etc. to build their audience using the power of email marketing. You may have heard of the creator, Nathan Barry, who is the genius behind ConvertKit. You can read about how we took ConvertKit from scratch to $30K per month and you'll love how transparent he is about the entire process. Today, he's reached over $1 million in recurring monthly revenue. If you like reading this sort of stuff like I do, you'll appreciate reading about his journey including all the highs and lows, struggles and successes he had with building up ConvertKit. What are some of my favorite features of ConvertKit? Favorite Feature #1: Seamless Visual Automation Editor If you are a visual learner like me, you'll really appreciate this. ConvertKit's visual automation edition makes it a pleasure to learn how it all works and appears using seamless, streamlined visuals.This is a stand out feature that other email marketing providers don't offer. They make editing a breeze. The visual editor helps you see each step in the process so if you're stuck or get mixed up in one of the steps, you can visually see what's going on, separating out each of the steps to figure out the root of the problem. You will find that much of ConvertKit is built this way, including their email forms, which makes it easy for you to get to know their software intimately super fast and easy. Favorite Feature #2: Share Your Visual Automations with others This is one of the newest features of ConvertKit, allowing you to share visual automations with others. This is super helpful for sharing among teams like your staff, peers, people who you network with, etc. Sharing is caring, right? It is super cool. You click to toggle the button to enable sharing publicly and then you'll get a url that you can share with anyone. They will use that url to load the visual automation into their account. Easy! It is also really cool to have the feature for incentivizing your own products, like creating a sales funnel you can use as a lead magnet or bonus to your online course, etc. Favorite Feature #3: Email Segmentation Segmenting your audience is a great way to deliver specific messages to certain customer groups. For example, if you are selling an online course, you might have groups of consumers that bought the course, others that added to cart, others that looked at the sales page but didn't act, others that asked you a question but didn't act, others that attended the webinar but didn't buy, etc. With this info, you can craft specific messages for each consumer group, relevant to them. Because sending a Congratulations email to a customer who bought isn't going to make sense to a customer who didn't buy, and vice versa. ConvertKit allows email segmentation super easy. And there are a ton of ways to do it, like using tags. With tags, you can actually tag groups of customers into a group which helps you organize your entire email list and email campaigns. This way if you send out an email to customers who haven't bought the course, you won't send to customer who did purchase, because they will be tagged "purchased customers" or something similar. The great news is, you control this entire process so you can choose how you want to segment, how tags will be used, etc. Favorite Feature #3: Automatically resend broadcasts to those who didn't open How cool, right? So, say you have a 20% open rate for your emails. Once your broadcast is delivered, you can go back and resent to the 80% of your list that did not open. And, you can automate this process! This can help you go back and target those folks a second time. You can find this in the stats page, Resend to Unopens. It even allows you to change your Subject Line! What I don’t like about ConvertKit #1: No email templates Eek..no email templates. What's an email template, you may ask? It's a premade format that can be applied to emails. Other platforms like Kajabi have them, and they can help you for various kinds of emails you send out, like a sale template, an announcement template, etc. A lot of people don't use templates so if you're one of these people, then you won't sweat this. I have been a ConvertKit customer for so long, it's honestly no big deal to me and I don't think it's caused any hindrance or slowdown in my business, to be honest. I don’t personally send out email newsletter type emails, so this is not that big a deal to me. #2: Limited A/B Testing A/B testing is a really important feature to utilize for any email service provider you're with. Doing this A/B testing on a regular basis helps you to improve your rates, for conversion, open rates, etc. While ConvertKit allows you to split test your subject lines, there isn't split testing for email body content, automations and other things. This is lacking and one of the things I don't like about ConvertKit. #3: Not a Ton of Variety with Custom Forms The forms available are professional and attractive. They are classic, clean and have gotten me some great results but they are limiting. Compared to others, like Clickfunnels, for example, I wish that there were more template options. For some parts, you can't change the font or color, etc. (for some not all) and this flexibility is what I'd like ConvertKit to improve upon. But if you use something like Thrive leads or a third party tool, there are ways to get around the lack of customization. An Inside Look at ConvertKit ConvertKit has 5 major components: Forms Subscribers Broadcasts Sequences Automations Let's review each, shall we? Forms Forms are the email forms that you use to get subscribers to your ConvertKit account. With ConvertKit there are forms and landing pages so you'll enjoy getting a mix of both options. Forms can be embedded in different places, like within your blog posts, as popups on your website, etc. Then, landing pages are their own dedicated page. Now, ConvertKit offers a ton of gorgeous landing page templates to really customize the subscribers experience. Take a look. There are 4 kinds of forms: inline, modal, slide in, and sticky bar So, you can pick a form or landing page, design it and then have it available to embed where you'd like! Subscribers Subscribers is the section of ConvertKit that houses are all email subscribers. It's your singular database where you have your users. You can group subscribers together using segments and tags. You can also group by a custom identifier, by location, etc. There is a ton of flexibility with ConvertKit, you'll love it. ConvertKit also lets you really explore each individual subscriber to see things like what emails you sent them, how they responded, what funnels or sequences they are on, etc. Broadcasts Broadcasts are next and they're basically an archive of all the one-time emails you have sent. In Broadcasts, you can click into each email you sent, look at the clickthru rates, open rates, see which texts got the most clicks, and more. When sending broadcasts, you can use your list segments like tags, forms, etc. to decide what portion of your email list gets that email. For example, if you're hosting a sale on a digital product, you can send to all subscribers who have not purchased the digital product already. Make sense? Sequences Sequences are where you can create autoresponders, which are a series of emails that get sent to your subscribers on a schedule. For example, you can deliver a free email course over 10 days using a sequence. Email 1 sends immediately after subscribe. Email 2 sends 1 day after. Email 3 sends 2 days after. Then, so on and so forth. It's a really neat feature that lets you automate content that you want to drip to your subscribers. Automations To tie everything together, there are automations and your subscriber can enter an automation in a few different ways, through getting tagged, having a custom field updated, from a form or from a purchase. The automations are super easy to use and understand. They are lightning fast and help you seamlessly edit forms and emails with ease. ConvertKit Pricing ConvertKit’s uses the same tiered pricing model as a lot of their competitors. This means the more subscribers you have, the more you'll pay. I really love this model because it helps beginners with the service get in at an affordable price and as you grow with the platform and earn more subscribers, you are charged more but, your business will likely be more developed too, to help offset the additional cost. For the value, ConvertKit pricing comes at the lower end of it's competitors. It's not the cheapest email marketing service but it's more affordable than mid-range and definitely not the most expensive. A really great fit for small businesses, in my opinion. Prices below are for monthly prices but if you do annual payments, you can save my getting 2 months free! Subscribers 500 1,000 2,500 5,000 10,000 15,000 Active Campaign (Lite) $15 $29 $49 $89 $139 $225 AWeber $19 $29 $29 $49 $69 $149 ConvertKit $29 $29 $49 $79 $119 $149 Drip $49 $49 $49 $122 $184 $246 MailChimp $10 $20 $30 $50 $75 $129 Market Hero $19 $19 $49 $99 $129 $299 All the Other Stuff You Wanna Know About ConvertKit How is their support? ConvertKit’s support is great, from personal experience. You can reach out using their Chat feature and about half the time I have gotten a response within a few minutes. If they don't reply immediately, they usually respond pretty quickly, within 1-2 days and you will be notified via email when you get an answer to your question. So, fast response, very friendly and professional. Email response time is pretty quick, in my opinion. Do they have a presence or community on Facebook? Yes, they do! You can join their Facebook group to join other ConvertKit users, who are very active, asking questions, sharing successes, and more! They are a very lively bunch. You'll love it. It is also a neat forum to learn tips and tricks, ask questions to ConvertKit or fellow group members. What integrations do they offer? ConvertKit integrates with a ton of third-party applications like LeadPages, Shopify, SamCart, ClickFunnels, and more. You can find the full list of ConvertKit integrations here. How good is ConvertKit for lead magnets? ConvertKit is awesome for lead magnets. Lead magnets are freebies that you offer to your audience to entice them to optin as an email subscriber in exchange for that free item. And, ConvertKit is terrific for these. They can host your lead magnets for you, get you double opt-in subscribers, and more!N How good is ConvertKit for eCommerce? ConvertKit is really good for ecommerce. They are constantly testing and launching new features, including a brand new one that helps to track every purchase made by a subscriber. This is really neat because you can get subscribers based on their purchases. It’s working with Shopify and Teachable currently but they're making great strides and there will likely be more growth on the ecommerce side with additional integrations soon. Can it handle live events or webinars? Live events or webinars are handled through broadcasts. With a broadcast you can send you emails at a specific date/time to notify people of webinar start times but aside from that, it isn't fully integrated to handled webinars or live events. Do they have an affiliate program? Yes, ConvertKit offers 30% recurring commissions as part of its affiliate program. If you love ConvertKit and become an affiliate, it's a neat way for you to earn recurring affiliate income. Who’s switching over to ConvertKit? Everyone! It's growing at a crazy rate and more and more folks are switching to ConvertKit. Check out some of these stories: Why I Switched To ConvertKit: The Unofficial Definitive Review Why I Switched From Aweber To ConvertKit 10 Reasons Why I Switched From Aweber to ConvertKit Summary ConvertKit has only been around a few years but they are one of the most robust, powerful user-friendly email marketing software programs out there. They are a major player in the industry and paving the way for new email marketing in the future. Email marketing is great for targeting customers, making more money, increasing traffic, connecting with customers and other benefits. They make marketing to customers via email truly accessible even for the novice user. You don't need to be a techie to quickly learn the ins and outs of ConvertKit. Try ConvertKit Today ConvertKit Bonus Are you ready to sign up for a ConvertKit account? Why not get some extra help to start your ConvertKit journey with this exclusive bonus ($25 value): The Newbies Guide to Traffic Generation Claim your bonus by Contact Me after Purchasing ConvertKit with my Affiliate Link!