Last year, I did an hour long interview with Nathan Barry, founder of ConvertKit*, a simple email marketing service that was designed for bloggers. We touched on the broad strategies of email marketing, what ConvertKit is good at, and some other fun stuff.
A lot of artists have asked TAA if ConvertKit* is a good email marketing option for artists. Here’s my take on it after having been a user for about a year.
Is ConvertKit Good for Artists?
When artists do email marketing, they need their email service to be easy to use, they need to be able to insert images of their art, and it needs to be flexible enough to grow with their business.
Does ConvertKit do this? I’ll quote Melissa Kojima here.
“Pluses:
+ Having everything triggered as soon as someone signs up
+ Scheduling newsletters weeks in advance
+ Getting stats
+ Taking notes on each subscriber
+Have sequences triggered after 1 sequence is finished, etc. (note from Cory – we cover this in HTSYAO 201: Sales Funnels for Artists)
+ Good customer service
+ Tagging to segment different subscribers
Minuses:
-Not being completely compatible with my Squarespace website. For example, I wanted to put a sign to form on a cover page, but it wasn’t compatible with that kind of Squarespace page. (from Cory: another client reports having a similar problem with Shopify – we’ve reached out to ConvertKit to see if they have a solve for this)
-Breaking the scheduling button and no one knowing how to solve it. I just ended up doing a hack and got it to work, but this was only after weeks of it not working.
-Not being automatically notified if there is a new subscriber unless you get another service from an affiliate website.
-Wanting more customization of the way the sign n forms look. It’s pretty limited.
Overall:
I think it mainly works for what I want now, but I may want to change it later as my business grows and I want to do more complex things.”
Thanks for the response Melissa.
Our experience closely reflects Melissa’s experience with ConvertKit. It’s designed to be a lightweight system that makes email marketing easy.
In fact, we designed our email marketing example sequence from How to Sell Your Art Online 201 exactly around the way that ConvertKit encourages you to create your first email sequence. For more email marketing templates and examples, see this post.
ConvertKit vs. Mailchimp
For a long time, TAA recommended Mailchimp as the best option for email marketing. We switched our recommendation to ConvertKit some time ago because ConvertKit’s segmentation functionality is better than Mailchimp. MC’s groups function is good, but it doesn’t have the same flexibility that ConvertKit has. Most major email systems use tagging systems because it allows you to be highly creative with how you suppress emails to certain groups or select a group of people to send emails.
Beyond that, Mailchimp and ConvertKit have similar pricing. Although MC does have a free account for small lists of under 2,000, you don’t get the automation features that make email marketing effective.
If you want to check out ConvertKit, click here to sign up*.
Have you used ConvertKit? Let us know what you think in the comments.
* = affiliate link
When I click the link to sign up, there is no free information and or free one month. How do I get it?