10 Reasons Every Author Should Use ConvertKit for Email Marketing

I think it's pretty common knowledge at this point that if you’re an author who wants to make more than $500 per year, you need a website and an email list.

A website is important because it’s the place where your biggest fans can come to find out about your books.

More importantly, it’s the place where your biggest fans can send other people to see your work.

But a website isn’t enough.

You also need an email list so you can connect and engage with these readers.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve written about why you need a website and why you need an email list.

I’ve gotten an overwhelmingly positive response to both articles with hundreds of shares and thousands of views (if you were one of the people who shared, thank you so much).

The positive reception to this idea also led to an equivalent number of questions asking about the how. Specifically:

“what tools / tech / software do you recommend for authors and self-publishers to build a lucrative platform?”

(which is only the second most commonly asked question I get after “how are you so really, really, ridiculously good looking?)

So today, I’m going to take you behind the scenes and show you how I use ConvertKit for myself (as both a publisher and author) and for the authors I work with through Insurgent Publishing.

If you find this article helpful, please share!

10 reasons you should use @convertkit to grow your email list: http://bit.ly/1M5R1r8 via tmorkes #selfpublishing #emailmarketing (click to tweet)

If you’re not familiar with ConvertKit, it’s an Email Marketing Service (EMS) that lets you build an email list and engage with your readers, subscribers, and customers easily.

And today I’m going to share with you 10 reasons you should be using it for your publishing projects.

But first, let’s start at the beginning…

What’s an Email Marketing Service?

Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. – Wikipedia

So if email marketing is sending messages to a group of people using email, an Email Marketing Service (EMS) is software that allows you to do just that (versus, say, sending an email with 10,000 people cc’d).

Who Needs an Email Marketing Service?

You do, if you plan to sell products or services (sorry, social media is not a replacement).

For a more detailed answer why, check out my free, in-depth resource: The Author’s Guide to Building an Email List (and selling more books)

What are my options for Email Marketing Services?

There are a lot out there. Search Email Marketing Service and you’ll find dozens if not hundreds of competitors. I’ve been doing this stuff for the past few years and have had the chance to work with many EMS’s through consulting work with various clients. They all have their pros and cons. Below, I’ve listed just a few of the more well-known EMS’s for authors, bloggers, and product creators:

Aweber.

A favorite of affiliate marketers (it has a great affiliate program), Aweber provides a simple platform to connect with people in mass (who have opted into your list, of course). I have dabbled with Aweber, but found it no better than Mailchimp, and Mailchimp is free to start, which made it the no-brainer solution a few years back when I was debating between the two.

Mailchimp.

This is the EMS I used for over two years. It was great at first because it was free…then after a few months, I realized I needed more advanced features like the ability to create email autoresponders, which was NOT free with Mailchimp. So I upgraded and continued using the platform…unfortunately, it’s mind-boggling how unituitive it is for the most simple tasks, like sending out an email broadcast or creating online courses (more on this below). Bottom line: I really wouldn’t recommend Mailchimp to anyone who is serious about starting or growing a business online.

Infusionsoft.

This is the big boy in town. A lot of the biggest names in blogging use Infusionsoft with good reason: it’s an all-in-one solution (email marketing, ecommerce tool, etc.). Infusionsoft has been around long enough that it integrates with just about every piece of relevant software and can do some pretty advanced stuff…but it also costs an arm and a leg (starting at $199/month for only 2,500 contacts). I’ve also been told that to do anything with the software, you need to hire a consultant. Bottom line: not worth the investment until you’re making $100k / year (and even then, may not be worth the investment unless you need an all-in-one solution).

ConvertKit.

This is the new EMS in town, started by Nathan Barry, a professional designer and published author, to scratch his own itch as a blogger, author, and product creator. There are a lot of reasons to consider ConvertKit if you’re working online, 10 of which I’ll point out in today’s article.

10 Reasons You Should Use ConvertKit to Grow Your Email List

#1. ConverKit is Easy to Use

ConvertKit is intuitive.

Hands down, it’s one of the simplest, easiest to understand email marketing service out there.

With Mailchimp, I have to struggle with the simplest actions. Even sending a routine email (known as a campaign in MailChimp and a broadcast in ConvertKit), is painfully counter-intuitive. There are about 6 different pages I have to go through and 12 buttons I need to click before I can send an email. With ConvertKit, sending a Broadcast can be completed in 3 pages and 4 clicks.

Here’s the process you need to go through to send an email with Mailchimp:

  1. create a new campaign
  2. select what type of campaign
  3. choose which list you want to email
    1. note: you can’t send to multiple lists (what sense does that even make?)
  4. define your campaign info
    1. name your campaign?
    2. email subject
    3. from name
    4. email address
    5. select tracking and opens and a bunch of other stuff that should come automatically
  5. select a template
    1. note: this process is confusing, especially since it should already be chosen for you
  6. write the email in their editor
    1. note: there’s just way too much going on this screen when all you really need is a simple text editor
  7. confirm email
  8. schedule or send the email

Here’s the process to send an email with Convertkit:

  1. select a new broadcast
  2. choose who will receive it
    1. note: you can send to only people with a specific tag, segment, or who opted into a particular form or course, and you can also exclude anyone with a particular tag, segment, etc. – making this very powerful and robust
  3. write your content
  4. preview + send or schedule your email

This may sound minor. but when you’re sending emails weekly, and when the same complexity spills into everything else (see segmenting below), it quickly becomes a time suck (and therefore a drain on your wallet, because time is money – am I right or am I right?).

ConverKit also excels at auto responders (what MailChimp calls automation and what ConvertKit refers to as Courses). Once again, the process of building an auto responder in MailChimp is a huge pain that is needlessly convoluted. With Converkit it just makes sense:

“Drip email is so powerful, but for some reason it’s incredibly complicated in other software. The way ConvertKit allows bloggers to organize their drip emails is just logical.” – Andrew Warner

Here’s a brief video to walk you through the user interface and dashboard of ConvertKit:

#2. ConvertKit Has a Beautiful (and useful) Interface

What can I say, I’m a sucker for good design.

Not in the “hey, everyone look at my [place name of status-symbol device here]” kind of way, but in the functional kind of way. This is one of the reasons Apple can charge exorbitant prices for their products – because people will pay money for looks that improve function.

ConverKit’s interface is clean, clear, and tells me everything I need to know at a glance. Compared to competitors, it’s the Model X of Email Marketing Services. (if Nathan reads this, yes he can use this as a testimonial)

The ConvertKit dashboard is simple, clear, and useful
The ConvertKit dashboard is simple, clear, and useful

Because of ConvertKit’s design, it’s a tool I don’t need to spend much time with, but when I do, I don’t mind.

#3. ConvertKit Let’s You Deliver Digital Products as Optin Gifts

One of the fastest ways to build an email list is to offer an incentive for people to subscribe.

For more on how to build your email list with free gifts, check out: The Author’s Guide to Building an Email List

Say you’re an author and you want to get people to sign up for your email list. A simple way to do this is to offer a free chapter of your book.

With MailChimp (or Aweber), it’s impossible to do this out of the box (not if you want different optin gifts for different forms).

Alternatively, you can pay $40 / month for Leadpages and use their lead magnet delivery tool. I’ve used this solution for the past year or so and have had great success with it, growing my list several thousand people in the process. However, Leadpages is a bit pricey if you’re just getting started, and is more of an add-on than a core piece of software for most authors, self-publishers, and product creators.

With ConvertKit, on the other hand, you can create an unlimited number of form-specific optin incentives which can be automatically delivered when someone subscribes.

ConvertKit's forms are simple, clean, and easy to embed (winner winner chicken dinner)
ConvertKit’s forms are simple, clean, and easy to embed (#winnerwinnerchickendinner)

This is made even more powerful within ConvertKit because you can tag users based on what what form they opted into, what gift they downloaded, or dozens of other variables that can help with segmenting your list.

Now, with the help of ConvertKit, you can figure out what form is resulting in the most subscribers, which free gift is most enticing (and leads to the most downloads), and which type of form placement is the most effective.

#4. ConvertKit Lets You Measure Your Results Easily

Convertkit comes with powerful and easy-to-understand analytics baked into the software.

With Mailchimp I can see how many people receive my email, open my email, and click through a link in my email. This is a good start, but there is absolutely no way to measure exactly where these people signed up for my list, or which form is working the best (not without additional software, at least).

ConvertKit does all of the above, but does one even better – it tracks how many people see and sign up for my various forms or signup pages.

A few months ago, I spent the better part of 30 hours and hundreds of dollars on education to figure out how to track Mailchimp conversion rates on signup pages throughout my website via Google Analytics. While I’m not the most technically inclined person, I can usually figure out a hack with enough time and effort. I simply couldn’t do it with Mailchimp and Google Analytics.

Luckily, ConverKit tracks these conversion rates right out of the box.

convertkit - analytics

Tracking conversion is important for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it lets me know what is working and what isn’t working on my website. For example, if one of my forms only converts at 5%, and a similar form but with different sales copy and a different image, converts at 55%, which do you think I should replace?

Without ConvertKit,  I would still be in the dark about what is working or not, and therefore would have no idea how to fix it to improve my overall results.

#5. ConvertKit Has the Best Price for the Advanced Features Included

ConvertKit has similar pricing to Mailchimp, but with features that are closer to (and some that are on par with) Infusionsoft.

One of these features is subscriber tagging.

Tagging is the process of applying a specific description or keyword to a user / subscriber. Tagging is powerful because you can tag a single user with multiple tags, and then filter your list before sending an email (so you send the right emails to the right people). Tagging users is usually reserved for higher end EMS’s like Infusionsoft.

Another really cool feature is the “resend to unopens.” Basically, what this feature lets you do is resend an email to all of the people who did not open your last email (and automatically removes anyone who opened it, so you don’t hit someone with the same email twice).

I recently used this feature and went from a 35% open rate to a 45% open rate (a 28% increase!). That was an extra several hundred people I was able to share my recent blog post with, who would NOT have seen it had this feature not been available.

Very powerful stuff.

ConvertKit also comes with the ability to create unlimited autoresponders, unlimited forms, and digital product delivery. While not as robust as Infusionsoft (there is no built-in ecommerce solution, for example), ConvertKit strikes a great balance between cost and features (features that actually matter and that you will use).

ConvertKit offers competitive pricing for the features you get
ConvertKit offers competitive pricing for the features you get

#6. ConvertKit Lets You Create Unlimited Courses and Optin Forms

Believe it or not, some Email Marketing Services restrict how many autoresponders and forms you can create.

Not ConvertKit.

This means you could create an automated book sales funnel for every book you’ve written, or create a free course to teach people about a really cool, unconventional pricing technique that actually works.

Tom Morkes makes the best courses in the world...
Tom Morkes makes the best courses in the world…

In this video, I’ll show you how to set up and deliver free courses to build your email list:

#7. ConvertKit Lets You Easily Embed Responsive, Customizable Optin Forms Anywhere on Your Site

Believe it or not, adding a simple email signup to your website can be a nightmare depending on who you’re using for your EMS.

With Mailchimp, the process for embedding a form into a simple wordpress page is overly complicated and doesn’t loos right unless you hire a designer (or have a background in design and CSS). Creating an optin page is just as tiresome and often still looks sloppy (maybe it was just me, but I could never get the optin form to look the way I wanted it to, unless I was using a 3rd party plugin, which slows down your site and adds another layer of complexity to your sales funnel).

With ConvertKit the process is painless and intuitive. Even better, there are multiple types of forms you can embed. For example, you can make any of your forms inline (they sit at the bottom of a page), modal (popup when you press a button), or slide-in (an automated popup where the form slides in from the side of the screen).

These forms are also dynamic if you choose, so once someone subscribers, they won’t see the same form optin incentive. Insted, you could replace it with a link to a new product (“buy my new book”), new blog post, or whatever else you want.

This is really powerful because if you send subscribers to your site why would you want to keep asking them to subscribe? That’s amateur hour.

Before ConvertKit, I would have had no idea how to do this. It would have been expensive and probably wouldn’t have very much longevity (as I’d probably have to keep updating the software over time).

With ConvertKit, you can make any form responsive, which is incredibly powerful.

In this video I’ll show you how to create and embed forms throughout your website:

#8. ConvertKit Turns Your Blog Posts into Email Broadcasts

I remember when I first started writing two years ago, all I wanted was a simple way to email my blog posts to subscribers. Instead of the process being automated or simple, I’d have to copy and paste my work into MailChimp and reformat everything so it would look right. The process took at least an hour per email, on average. That’s several hundred hours I’ve wasted in the past few years just formatting emails. Absurd.

With ConvertKit, new blog posts can be turned into email broadcasts that are ready to send to your list automatically.

convertkit blog to broadcast - 10 Reasons Every Author Should Use ConvertKit for Email Marketing

This means instead of spending hours of your life copying, pasting, and reformatting every blog post into your EMS, ConvertKit does the heavy lifting for you, so all you need to do is click send.

In this video, I’ll show you some of the more advanced features inside ConvertKit:

#9. ConvertKit was Built for Writers, Bloggers, and Online Entrepreneurs

Here are just a few of the things ConvertKit does out of the box:

  1. Build and deploy an unlimited number of email courses to grow your list
  2. Automate eBook delivery of your free books, chapters of books, or other digital gifts / optin incentives
  3. Tag and segment users to get a better picture of who is buying which books, and to make your email marketing more effective and targeted
  4. Rapidly create and deploy optin forms and optin splash pages with powerful analytics built in

ConvertKit also seamlessly integrate with software relevant for authors and product creators, including:

  • Gumroad – so you can sell awesome books, guides, and courses
  • LeadPages – so you can create sweet-looking double-optins, create new splash pages in a few minutes, and A/B split test everything
  • Zapier – so you can connect ConvertKit to just about every piece of software online
  • WordPress – so you don’t have to mess around with html code (the plugin lets you easily embed forms and pages anywhere on your site)
  • And many more (with more added every month)…
convertkit integrations

Each integration only takes a few minutes to set up and then you can create some really powerful automation:

#10. ConvertKit was Built by People who Care

Nathan Barry is the creator of ConvertKit, and the author of several books including one of my personal favorites, Authority.

What’s important to note here is that Nathan built this software to solve his own problems as a blogger and author. He wanted a better solution to connect with and interact with his readers. He wanted a painless way to create automated emails sequences. He wanted a way to offer a gift (free book, free chapter, free course) in exchange for people signing up. He wanted software that just worked and didn’t require dozens of 3rd party apps or plugins to achieve the same endstate.

The result is a very simple, powerful piece of software that is great for authors, self-publishers, bloggers, and product creators (oh, and it’s constantly being improved with new features added every month).

Summary

As you can tell, I’m a big fan of ConvertKit.

It does everything I’ve wanted an EMS to do from the start, and it does it much cheaper than Infusionsoft.

Bottom line: if you’re a blogger, author, or product creator, you should look into ConvertKit – it could save you a lot of time, money, and frustration versus going with bigger, entrenched (but not necessarily better) competitors.

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65 comments on “10 Reasons Every Author Should Use ConvertKit for Email Marketing”

  1. Love it Tom! Epic post!

    A few weeks ago on my wife's blog I wrote a few thousand words about why we moved 30,000 subscribers from MailChimp to ConvertKit. I made the switch for my small list in April before a launch and then I moved my wife's larger list over in June before her big product launch. It was a DREAM to work with for our product launch!

    BTW- you're fantastic in these screencasts. Love how you teach.

    1. Donnie, thanks so much man! Really appreciate the kind words about the blog post and the tutorial videos.

      That's awesome that you already made the move. I feel like ConvertKit has gotten so much better in just the past few months and excited to see how the platform grows in the next 6 - 12 months 🙂

      Keep me posted on what you're working on and let me know where I can help Donnie! 🙂

    1. ActiveCampaign can do more, but it's also more expensive...probably 20 - 50% more expensive depending on the features you want. My hope is that as ConvertKit improves, it will be a competitor with ActiveCampaign (AC is definitely better on the marketing automation side, but i'm sure Nathan is working to improve CK going forward to get it to that level).

      1. The basic ActiveCampaign service without CRM (which is still more powerful and feature rich than ConvertKit) is actually cheaper than ConvertKit.

        As of this writing, ConvertKit starts at $29 for 1,000 contacts. ActiveCampaign starts at just $9 for 500 contacts and $17 for 1,000 contacts. 10,000 contacts with ConvertKit costs $119, whereas the same 10,000 contacts cost just $70 at ActiveCampaign.

        1. Thank you, George, for clarification. I was wondering how CK is less expensive than AC... Thought maybe a lot of features are only available in more advanced version.
          But I don't need CRM as I use another tool... so this actually helped me to made up my mind as I was trying to choose between CK and AC...

          1. Yea, I use Contactually already as a CRM...so for my business model, it makes sense for ConvertKit to handle all one-to-many communication, and Contactually to handle all one-to-one.

  2. Tom - you provide such succinct, useful information and I appreciate it very much. I am definitely keeping this in my folder called 'tools' when I get ready to expand.

    1. Thank you so much Virginia, so glad you found it useful. Let me know when you take the plunge, I'm building out additional resources to help people get started with a website, an email list, and get their first books up and selling 🙂

  3. Hi Tom,

    I can't thank you enough for taking the time to put together this blog post. I've hauled out my credit card for paid content and how-to guides that had a 10th of the "put on the road and drive" kind of work you just gave away.....for free!! If you keep this up you're going to need a bigger web server. You're the real deal sir - Hooah for The Resistance!

  4. Hey Tom,

    Another epic post you have here! Now that I have my rough draft done it's time to start working on marketing while I edit... I'll be sure to go back and check out your videos once I get convertkit.

    You said that aweber is great for affiliate marketing; what makes aweber great for that and how does convertkit compare?

    Cheers Tom!

    1. Daryl, aweber is preferred by affiliate marketers because it gives out a great commission every time someone signs up. That's why you see so many affiliate marketers promote it when it's basically no better than mailchimp (my opinion).

  5. Hey Tom, thanks for this awesome review! How easy is it to switch subscribers from Mailchimp to Convertkit?
    This sounds like the perfect next solution for my biz;)
    joyful blessings, Tina

    1. Tina the Convertkit team handled it for me. I'm notrying sure if they're still doing it but after using the software for a couple months it's pretty clear that a transition is as easy as exporting and importing subscribers from mail chimp to convertkit (and if you want to get advanced you can tag them however you want).

  6. Have you had any issues using ConvertKit with Rainmaker? I'm guessing you can't use the ConvertKit plugin but insert forms with the one line of javascript?

  7. Hey Tom, I was intrigued by your taxonomy. Your blogposts have a single page url structure..?

    please expand on it, thanks.

  8. i did not see anything on here about Insurgent Publishing. I also kept clicking to opt in to see your Pay What You Want downloads and have not had the opportunity to pay. If I send this, will these courses be offered again?
    Thank you for all of the great advice.

  9. Great post Tom, thanks.
    I currently use Leadpages and Mailchimp. I agree Mailchimp could be easier to use , and the automation aspect of this looks great.
    Looking through your post (and the ConvertKit Website) it does look like I could switch to them and scrap both Leadpages and Mailchimp. Am I correct in this thought? I do love my Leadpages but it does look like I would be paying for it unnecessarily if I switch?
    Also finally I have not seen anywhere that ConvertKit automatically sends my list emails for every blog post I create. I think Mailchimp call it an RSS powered Campaign. I assume this is possible with ConvertKit?

    Thanks again.
    Chris

    1. yes, you can have blog posts created as emails in Convertkit automatically...I don't think Mailchimp does this, actually...or at least not as intuitively as ConvertKit does.

      and yes, technically you could ditch mailchimp and leadpages...although I still use Leadpages b/c i love the double optin boxes 🙂

      p.s. just put together a comprehensive course about ConvertKit - if you use my affiliate link, let me know and I'll add you as a member 🙂

      1. Great thanks Tom. I will definitely take a closer look. I love Leadpages too, so think I will keep them for now and see how this integrates.
        Cheers

      2. Hey Tom, just stumbled upon your site(s) while searching for ConvertKit reviews. To say your content is Epic is an understatement...so far I've killed an hour easily. I'm also a NewRainmaker member (signed up for Pro) and still working on my site but you've got it nailed down pretty tight. I'm a fiction publisher (not quite the author) and trying to build my company to sell direct as well as on other platforms besides Amazon so I'm really interested to see your launch approach and tactics within the fiction realm, if you're still going to be exploring that based on your guest spot on http://www.dynneson.com/tag/insurgent-publishing/

        1. Danny, appreciate the kind words.

          couple resources that will help you a lot:

          1. "launch your book to bestseller" - 7(ish) day course on how i launch books...www.tommorkes.com/publishingcourse
          2. the book marketing canvas - a 1 page biz model for your book: tommorkes.com/book-marketing-canvas
          3. the perfect book sales page (self explanatory): https://tommorkes.com/perfect-book-sales-page/
          4. http://www.publishersempire.com - my premium course + weekly mastermind + coaching + book launch platform (with a $2,000 insurance policy that you WILL make $2k from your launch with Publishers' Empire, or I'll personally market and sell the book myself)

          hope those help!

    1. pretty easy. i show how in my advanced training (for people who purchase convertkit through my affiliate link).

      it only gets complicated if you have a ton of groups or segmentation set up in Mailchimp...so that just makes it more tedious, but otherwise it's basically just moving CSVs around.

  10. Thanks for such an in-depth post! The screencasts are also extremely helpful.

    I can't share your enthusiasm however; other than rearranging course emails, I haven't found anything really compelling over Mailchimp.

    For me it's been buggy; I've lost entire emails when the page would freeze because there's no autosave feature.

    I've also found the lack of email formatting, mobile pre-header, and A/B testing capability straying into dealbreaker territory. Testing aspects of email is crucial for optimization, I don't know how this can be missing.

    Do you have any thoughts on how to work around those missing features? I want to love CK but...definitely can't let go of MC just yet. Thanks!

    1. Lea, you pinpointed the biggest drawbacks to the platform. However, I am hopeful that A/B split testing and these other features will be added soon. The platform is growing and improving every week and month, so its just a matter of time before they roll that out. Call me the enthusiastic early adopter, but I'm pretty happy with it knowing that it does autoresponders well and that it will grow from here. But I agree - depending on where you're at with your biz and what you need done, without A/B split testing and these other features, could be a no-go.

  11. I think that you are amazing, very intelligent and creative, nonetheless, I'm not good at technology, also english is not my mother tongue. I just want to know if you offer the service to make my book sell more copies, I mean that you make the book campaign, so I don't have to go on complicated task (at least for me). I have my book on Amazon and it has 5 stars reviews.You can say "Why don't you contract a promoter or something?" Well, I like your enthusiasm and overall your "savoir faire" It seems that you like very much what you do, so I trust you.

  12. Hey Tom! Thanks for such a great review. As always, your work is epic. And the best news is that we're working hard on some improvements that will really make you (and everyone here in your comments) happy! Thanks for being a great partner to ConvertKit.

  13. Awesome post! Thank you. You taught me 2 new things! I just switched from Mailchimp last month and have been salivating over ConvertKit but I didn't know about resending to un-opens or the automated RSS. Totally brill! ☺️

  14. I love all your informative enthusiasm! I am new to the whole realm of leadpages and convertkit -- I just subscribed to both -- and now I'm struggling to figure out how to use them. I will definitely be watching your videos. Thank you!

  15. After reading your post,thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feelhappy about it and I love learning more about this topic

  16. Hey Tom,

    Thanks for the epic detail on this! I have recently made the switch to ConvertKit and jee wizz, there's so much less to worry about.

    Your comparison of the process between sending an email in MC vs CK basically says it all.

    I vaguely remember Convertkit could do the send to unopens so your videos have been of great value.

    The absence of the split test is an issue but I'm pretty confident the CK guys are on to that, and I'll be expecting that soon.

  17. Tom, in your video, you say that to use Modal Opt in form, you need to get help from convertkit team with css. Is that old news or still the same?

    I love how I can setup modals (leadboxes) using Leadpages in 2 mins, without any css/coding etc.

    Would love to hear any updates on this. Thanks

    1. great question...no, i don't think you need that help any more - i just copy and paste the stuff in, and set the timer to 9999 on the popup box (so it doesn't just popup on the page).

  18. One reason not to use them: Censorship. They have a review process for each customer, so you basically have to pass an interview. I write erotica, with a focus on lesbian romance and erotica. My books are explicit, but good quality, and no nudity on the covers. I've been featured by Bookbub, and have no problems with Amazon, so yes, the books are for adults, but no, they aren't generally considered porn. So after paying for a membership, spending 20 hours or so watching videos, reading their instructions, setting up forms, etc, they told me my product violates their "Adult Theme" prohibition. The worst part is they told me that erotica was a "gray" area, implying it isn't always rejected, but they decided to reject me, making me wonder if it was about the erotica or the lesbian relationships.

    This article is right. They offer a great, if a bit unfinished, product, for writers. If I were reading this, I wouldn't reject them just for their censorship. But I'd be nervous if I wrote anything that could be construed as questionable. Would they cancel your membership if you have a lesbian character? If you wrote too vivid a sex scene? Do they have some religious or ideological background that was really behind this? "Gray areas" are usually where bigotry is allowed to flourish. So, just be aware. No one else, from Amazon to Bookbub, has rejected me.

    1. This resonates with my experience with Convertkit 🙁
      Unfortunately I moved from Aweber because of all the good things people had to say. But convertkit has a strange policy of banning accounts. I have been with Aweber for 8 years before. This is the first time I have ever had such a bad experience! Not impressed with the unfinished product of convertkit, and also the their policy of banning if you don't have 30% open rates!

      1. James, yikes. Can you elaborate on "don't have 30% open rates" being banned?

        What type of content were you sharing? Did you manually add people to your list?

        I've actually never heard of this issue from anyone (the first time i heard the issue was the other post on this blog). Would love to get to the bottom of it, as it might be that some content isn't suitable for the platform (but i dont know).

  19. This data is magnificent. I am impressed with your writing style and how properly you define this topic. After studying your post, my understanding has improved substantially. Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic.

  20. Great guide but myself I'm using Mailerlite and I'm very happy with it. It's way cheaper than ConvertKit and even in Mailerlite free plan, you can access all features. Well, I'm more fond of nice colourful emails than text only.

  21. Nice post. I have been reading a lot of stuff on this topic in the last few months, but this article stands out with its simplicity & authenticity. Every passage made profound sense. Thanks a lot for this.

  22. Hello Tom,

    Cheers! for your wonderful article about the best email marketing service for authors, and the interesting reasons why an author should use ConvertKit for email marketing needs. It is helpful!

    Thanks again for sharing this with us!

    With Best Regards!

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