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AUGUST 15, 2015 BY DONNIE LAWSON
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This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.
DonnieOver the past few months Abby and I have worked to transition our email marketing systems away from MailChimp to ConvertKit. Chances are, you’ve never heard of ConvertKit. That’s ok! It’s a tiny but effective company with just a handful of employees and around $15,000 in month recurring revenue (as of July 2015). On a side note, they share their financials publicly on Baremetrics so you can track their growth. How cool is that!?
What I think is so awesome about online/software businesses is that a single talented and driven person can see a problem or gap in the marketplace and work hard to create a solution to that problem. That’s exactly what happened with ConvertKit. The owner, Nathan Barry, is a professional blogger who also creates and sells his own products. A few years ago when Abby and I prepared to launch version one of Building a Framework, we purchased his Authority product. We devoured the book and it shaped a lot of the way we think about selling digital products and marketing eBooks.
My biggest takeaway from Authority is the importance of email marketing when selling products. I know, I know… you’ve heard that 1,000 times… in the last week! But here’s the thing: most of the advice and strategies you read about are how to get more email subscribers. Advice on what to do with email subscribers once you get them is seriously lacking.
In blogging, both increasing your number of subscribers and effectively communicating with your subscribers once you have them are both equally important. In just a minute I’ll talk more about why ConvertKit does an amazing job at both gathering subscribers and also marketing to them.
It’s one thing to know how best to use email marketing, but it’s another thing entirely to be able to properly set up the systems in your email provider. Nathan’s frustration with being unable to use some of his advanced email marketing techniques with MailChimp led him to the creation of his own product. He created ConvertKit to solve his own problems. Fortunately for me, his problems with MailChimp were the sames problems I was having, and the integrated solutions in ConvertKit were the exact solutions I needed.
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WHY WE DECIDED TO LEAVE MAILCHIMP
MailChimp has a lot of things going for it: the design is great, the price is reasonable, and they make it easy to build beautiful email newsletters.
If all you need is a place to store your email subscribers and the only email marketing you do is sending out occasional newsletters, MailChimp could be the perfect place for you. They even have a free version (with limited functionality) for up to 2,000 subscribers! That really is a great deal for some people.
What MailChimp is not great at is automated email marketing — the exact thing I needed it to do. Here were some of my frustrations with MailChimp: SIGN UP
1. MAILCHIMP ONLY ALLOWS FOR ONE OPT-IN FORM PER LIST.
There are no unique codes or forms for various incentives, so with MailChimp, if a reader signs up for more than one of your opt-ins, you can end up paying double, triple, or more for the same subscriber to be on multiple lists.
One of the most effective strategies for building an email list quickly is to create custom opt-in incentives to match the content. For example, Abby and I love the “after post content” opt-in box. I think it’s the most polite and most effective way to collect email addresses.
After someone reads one of Abby’s posts, they are given the option to enter their email address. It’s a value exchange that is built on trust: they are giving you their email address, and you are giving them something in return. The more value you can provide, the more likely this “exchange” will take place. It’s also important to offer something that the reader is interested in.
Does it make sense give your reader a free eBook on blog growth strategies if they just read a tutorial on painting baseboards? I don’t think so.
To give you an example, here’s a basic ConvertKit opt-in form that displays after paperless-related posts:
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