The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 65. Why We Use ConvertKit

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Hey there and welcome back to the Ultimate Blog Podcast!  It’s Jennifer here and  today I am sharing the reasons why we use ConvertKit to manage all of our email marketing.  Email marketing is one of the most important tools to use when sharing your content. If you are wanting to learn more about how ConvertKit can help your business, this episode is for you! Thanks for listening! Connect with us on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsConvertKit is the email marketing hub for creators like you. Check out our affiliate link for more information.SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode65

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm, and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success, and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life, all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Well, hey there, and welcome back to the podcast. Today, it's Jennifer. You just get a solo episode with me today, and this is going to be a quick one. So it's important to Amy and I that we cover some of the basics of blogging that we think are the most important. If you have ever been a student of ours, you know that we really believe that bloggers should create a solid foundation. There are lots of bright, shiny objects out there in the blogging world, new social media platforms, new ways to share, new ways to try to drive traffic to your site. But we believe the most important thing is that bloggers should create their solid foundation.

One of those things is obviously creating content, which is essentially your blog post for your website. You should be creating quality content consistently. But when it comes to sharing that content, another aspect we think is really important is email marketing. Now, we've talked about email marketing in the past, and we have two previous podcast episodes that if you have not listened to those yet, I would love for you to go back and take a listen. Both of those episodes are with Allie Grummert, and she is an email marketing strategist and a conversion copywriter, and she helps us go through and understand a lot of the basics of email marketing, like why we do it, what types of content to write, how to create email sequences, and more. Today, what I want to talk about is I want to get a

little bit more specific about platforms and why we use the platform that we do. There are a lot of different options out there, free, paid, etc. for services that you can use to provide your email marketing. So this is when you are collecting email addresses from your website, and then you're sending emails to people who have opted in and subscribed to your email list. So they have chosen to be on your email list. So how do you manage all of that? Well, Amy and I use a service called ConvertKit. And so we just wanted to share a little bit more about that with you today about why we use ConvertKit. So the number one thing we love about ConvertKit is that it is pretty user friendly and easy to navigate. So this is awesome

for new bloggers because you're trying to learn so many new things all at once. You're going to want something that's simple and easy to get set up and running. Even if you're just doing the basics to start with, it's really important that you not get frustrated right out of the gate trying to set something up. So that's why we love ConvertKit because it's pretty intuitive when you hop into it. You know, you can navigate around pretty easily and find what you're looking for. Email marketing is an essential piece of blogging. Growing your email list is just as important as SEO and keyword research in our opinion. And in order to grow your list, you need a reliable platform that will allow you to connect

with your community and turn them into email subscribers. That's where ConvertKit comes in. ConvertKit is the go-to marketing hub for creators like you that helps you grow and monetize your audience with ease. ConvertKit allows you to grow your audience and reach, put your funnels on autopilot and earn an income with your email list, all with an easy to use platform that is approachable, even for beginners. Click the link in our show notes to learn more about the different plans that ConvertKit has and how it can help you propel your business to the next level. Secondly, ConvertKit will really grow with you. So if you start out and the only thing you're wanting to do is just to send an automated email

every time you have a new blog post, that's essentially just called an RSS feed email. So you can set that up, automate that and kind of forget about it for a little while. But when you're ready, ConvertKit will let you do so much more than that. And that is what is amazing about it. You can start putting some things in place now that will help you to be able to do more and more powerful things with your email list later on down the road. So some of those things would be, it's really easy to give subscribers a tag. So basically tag them for something specific because of an action they took, a form that they used to sign up, links that they clicked on within your emails, and you can get more information about

those people and what they're interested in. And that way you have a list in the future if you want to target them for something specific, like if you have a product that you're going to offer and they've already shown interest in that by clicking on something that you've shared before. So it's super easy to set up tags for those subscribers. It can be a link. It can be based on a form. And those are all done with automations that are very visual and easy to set up in ConvertKit. So I mentioned automations. So creating automations and sequences, that's a very visual thing. And what those are would be when somebody comes in on a specific form, they may get

tagged and then they might get a specific welcome series that you have set up just for them. Maybe you offer something for somebody who signs up on a particular form and they get a free download or they get an email series about how to do something. So that is really, really easy to drag and drop in ConvertKit. You can see each step of the process and you can drag it around, move it around, update it, change it very easily. So you know what's going to happen and who is going to get those emails. Another great thing we like about ConvertKit is that you pay based on the number of subscribers that you have. So they do have a limited free plan when you're first starting out. And then as you start to grow, you're going to pay based on the number of subscribers that you have. So they do have a limited free plan when you're first starting out. And then as you start to grow, you're going to pay based on the number of subscribers that you have. So you're not investing a ton of money into it right from

the beginning. Speaking of money, ConvertKit is one of the few email marketing platforms that I know of that has tools so that you can actually sell products using your email list and create a new revenue stream. They have the tools built right in to do that. So that is an awesome feature and an awesome bonus of ConvertKit so that even when you're a new blogger with a pretty small email list, you can start playing around with this. Start practicing. Have a PDF that maybe you're selling for a small dollar amount. You can just incorporate that right into ConvertKit and not have to try to figure out how to set it up somewhere else. One of the biggest things about ConvertKit is that their emails have better deliverability than a lot of other services.

This means that the email that you send is much more likely to land in the inbox of the person that you're sending it to instead of getting filtered out as spam or blocked from getting sent. And this is because ConvertKit puts a priority on their emails being simple. There's not a lot of graphics and flashing and this and that. It is all simple text, no fuss formatting, and it's easy to open it up. Just start typing your email. It looks like an email you got from a friend. It is very simple. It doesn't look super fancy, but it is super effective. Also, when you are setting up ways for people to subscribe on your site, you can create landing pages within ConvertKit.

They have some really nice templates, so you don't even have to start from scratch. You can just use one of their landing page templates. It takes a few minutes to customize it, and you have a really professional-looking form and landing page for somebody to be able to sign up for your email list. form and landing page for somebody to be able to sign up for your email list. And I did slightly mention this before, but one of my favorite features about ConvertKit is I like to send out a free welcome guide. It's a PDF guide when somebody signs up for an email list. And so it is super easy to do with ConvertKit. A lot of the other platforms, you kind of have to have a work around and host the file somewhere else for people to be able to access it. And in the other platforms, you kind of have to have a workaround and host the file

somewhere else for people to be able to access it. And in ConvertKit, you can just upload it directly and that will get delivered to the person that subscribed right away according to the automation that you're sending. And it is so simple and seamless that that person you know is going to get what they signed up for. So those are just a few of the reasons that we love to use ConvertKit. If you want to learn any more about ConvertKit and whether or not that would be right for you, we're going to include a link in the show notes and you can look it up, check out their different plans. And of course, as always, if you have any questions, just reach out to us and let us know.

Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at spark media concepts. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog, join the waitlist for the ultimate blog bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes. Go out and make today a great day.