Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is very easy to pick up. It lets you quickly set up email campaigns, marketing automation sequences, and even take payments.
The tool is a bit expensive compared to the market, but it is particularly well suited to bloggers and to creators of content or online courses.
In this article, we go through all of the software’s features to help you decide whether it fits the way you plan to use it.
Kit: feature overview
Email marketing: editing and automation
Kit provides an email editor that is easy to use and customizable. Long limited to plain text, it now offers more than 40 templates, image import from Canva or Unsplash, and embedded videos, polls and countdown timers.
The software stays true to its philosophy: substance over form. But it now lets you design illustrated newsletters, like MailerLite or Brevo (formerly Sendinblue).
It’s much simpler, but a bit limiting compared to tools like MailerLite or Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), which let you design more complex email marketing campaigns.
Kit (formerly ConvertKit) offers a few automation features, and here too simplicity is at the heart of the offer.
The software offers prebuilt automation sequences, and also lets you design your own with a full editor.
But it remains a bit light compared to tools like Brevo or ActiveCampaign, which are more flexible, even though Kit can now send SMS.
Contact management and segmentation
To manage your contacts, Kit gives you two approaches:
- Organizing contacts with tags: very flexible labels that you define yourself and fill in by hand or through the automation platform. It’s handy and simple to use, but once you’ve created a few, it very quickly turns into a mess.
- Creating contact segments: Kit provides an interface to group contacts based on one or more tags with logical operators (include, exclude, AND, OR). It lets you build fairly precise audiences, provided your tags make sense.
The software also lets you group contact segments by similar interests.
Kit is one of the only platforms to provide such transparent data on the growth of your contact list, which is very effective for growing your subscriber count easily.
Website and landing page creation
Kit offers four types of email capture forms:
- Inline: appears within your blog content.
- Popup: displays a window asking a visitor for their email address, based on the settings you define.
- Slide in: appears at the bottom of the web page to catch the visitor’s attention.
- Sticky bar: appears at the top of the web page.
Several customizable form templates are available. You can make a form appear automatically, for example based on scroll percentage or time spent on the page.
Kit also lets you create capture forms that display based on the blog category, for example to promote a CRM benchmark on your pages covering that topic, and a white paper on scraping where it’s relevant.
The software provides more than 40 landing page templates, suited to different categories: ebooks, newsletters, podcasts. The templates are very varied and adapt fairly well to every use case.
Kit’s features are not as advanced as those of a dedicated tool like OptinMonster, but it’s already far more than most email marketing tools offer, and it’s plenty for sites with fewer than 100,000 visitors per month.
Salesdorado’s take
We slightly regret that there are fewer templates than with some competitors, MailerLite or Brevo for example, but overall the lead capture features in Kit are very well done.
Customer support at Kit
Kit’s customer support is available via chat or email, and it’s fairly easy to reach. It’s available 24/7, but only in English.
The help center is fairly rich. It clearly lists several topics by category: automations, landing pages and forms, deliverability. The articles are detailed and well illustrated, with explainer videos available on top.
On the community side, Kit users can exchange on the dedicated forum or learn from the software’s YouTube channel. It’s very active, and in English.
The Kit integrations marketplace
Unsurprisingly, Kit’s integrations are very specific to selling digital products or online courses. It’s quite weak on the CRM and CMS side, with very little choice.
A few of the integrations on offer:
- Stripe: Kit was one of the first email marketing tools to offer custom payment links. It’s a dead simple and highly effective way to sell digital products, relying exclusively on no-code tools. If you want to sell courses, content, or access to certain content, it’s really much simpler with Kit than anywhere else.
- Lead capture: Unbounce, Leadpages, Lead Parrot. Kit offers fairly deep integrations with most landing page builders and lead capture tools.
- Surveys and quizzes: any method is good to generate leads, sometimes including slightly more complex forms, calculators or more advanced questionnaires. Kit integrates with tools like Typeform, Interact or Gravity Forms on WordPress to make that easier.
The upside
Kit integrates with Zapier and has its own API, which makes it easier to connect with third-party software.
Kit: pricing
Kit offers several plans:
- Free plan: it lets you have a list of 10,000 subscribers. It includes unlimited landing pages and forms, unlimited newsletter sends, segmentation and digital product sales.
- Creator plan: at $89 per month for a list of 5,000 subscribers, it unlocks the marketing automation engine, unlimited sequences, A/B testing, integrations and SMS marketing.
- Pro plan: at $139 per month for a list of 5,000 subscribers, it gives you engagement scoring tools, advanced reporting on engagement and deliverability, and the ability to run a referral program for your newsletter.
Pro tip
An annual subscription gets you two months free, i.e. $75 per month for the Creator plan and $116 per month for the Pro plan.
The main alternatives to Kit
Brevo is also an option, with an equivalent depth of features, and it can be very attractive financially depending on how you use it.
ActiveCampaign is one of the most credible alternatives to Kit. The software offers very strong features, especially for marketing automation, lead scoring and lead capture. It’s a very interesting option for those with a large budget.