If you happen to’re searching for your subsequent e mail advertising platform, and also you’re curious if Equipment is best for you, effectively, you’re in the precise place! Right here’s our complete Equipment assessment for 2024, which can cowl:
- What Is Equipment?
- Why do I want an e mail service supplier (ESP)?
- The rebrand from ConvertKit to Equipment
- Equipment Options
- Equipment Pricing
- Key Advantages of Equipment
- Drawbacks of Equipment
- Equipment & Electronic mail Advertising: Extra Assets to Learn, Hear & Study
What’s Equipment?
Equipment is an e mail service supplier (ESP). Primarily, it’s a expertise service that permits you to ship e mail campaigns to an inventory of subscribers. Equipment is one in all actually lots of of ESPs on the market, and—full disclosure—it occurs to be the one we favor and use at SPI.
Though we’re biased, we will nonetheless be goal! On this submit, we’ll cowl the options, advantages, and drawbacks of Equipment as we see them, that can assist you determine if it’s the precise ESP for your small business.
Electronic mail advertising technique: Why you want an ESP
If you happen to’re studying this, you may already know what an ESP is and why you want one. However in case you don’t, an ESP is crucial piece of expertise to help your e mail advertising technique.
Electronic mail advertising is among the strongest strategies to construct relationships and market your services to your viewers. Let’s discuss why that’s.
In its most simple type, e mail advertising entails you sending emails to a bunch of people that’ve chosen to listen to from you by “subscribing” to obtain emails from you. You can technically use a easy e mail program like Gmail to perform this—however we don’t suggest it, since you’ll rapidly discover it inadequate (and since your private e mail account will get flagged as spam if you happen to ship too many emails from it!).
As your small business grows and extra folks subscribe to get your emails, you’ll need the power to do extra subtle issues together with your e mail advertising, like customizing the emails folks get in accordance with their pursuits, and utilizing studies and analytics to find out what’s working effectively or not.
You additionally must be sure to’re respecting folks’s privateness and never spamming anybody. An e mail service supplier additionally lets you keep in compliance with authorities rules around the globe, such because the CAN-SPAM act in the US, the Basic Information Safety Regulation within the European Union (GDPR), and the Canada Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).
Issues can rapidly get out of hand with out the assistance of a devoted e mail advertising platform. That’s the place an ESP like Equipment is available in.
Okay, let’s get into the nitty gritty of Equipment’s options!
Psst… Need to develop your e mail listing and be taught highly effective segmentation and automation methods that enable your small business to run by itself? Check out the Email Marketing Magic course.
Equipment options
These are the important thing options of Equipment, organized by the way you’ll use them.
Sending emails
- Autoresponders/drip campaigns (sequences): Ship a sequence of pre-written emails mechanically to a selected section of subscribers in your listing, triggered by a selected occasion or motion, with the goal of guiding them to take a selected motion.
- Broadcast emails: Ship customary bulletins or one-time emails to your subscribers on a selected date.
- CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL compliance: CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL are legal guidelines that set the principles and necessities for business e mail messages, and provides recipients the precise to have you ever cease emailing them—so compliance is essential!
- Dynamic (customized) e mail content material: Your e mail content material can show completely different textual content or pictures, in accordance with your buyer segmentation.
- Responsive e mail templates: Prepared-to-go e mail designs, in addition to the power to create your individual customized templates. Equipment mechanically codecs your touchdown pages for varied gadgets, reminiscent of desktop computer systems and cellphones.
- WYSIWYG e mail editor: The built-in e mail editor enables you to see how your e mail will look together with your template’s styling utilized when you’re composing it.
Gathering new subscribers
- Customized responsive touchdown pages: Use the included software to rapidly create a touchdown web page to gather e mail addresses. Equipment mechanically codecs your touchdown pages for varied gadgets, reminiscent of desktop computer systems and cellphones.
- Embeddable types: Accumulate e mail subscribers wherever in your web site by dropping in a Javascript or HTML type, or through the use of the WordPress plugin.
- Website builder: Create a web site straight on Equipment to publish newsletters, host a digital storefront to gather fee for one-time or subscription merchandise, and construct customized pages. Arrange a touchdown web page and gather fee for one-time or subscription merchandise proper inside Equipment.
- Visible automations: Equipment means that you can create rule-based paths utilizing if-then logic, in order that when a subscriber takes a specific motion, you may ship them pre-defined emails or add them to a section.
Studying about your subscribers
- A/B testing: Equipment enables you to take a look at completely different topic traces in your emails, and mechanically determines the winner primarily based on their respective open charges.
- Reporting/analytics/ROI monitoring: Find out how typically your subscribers open your emails, click on on hyperlinks, and full varied actions.
- Segmentation/tagging: Segmenting your subscribers into completely different classes (much like however extra highly effective than different applications’ “lists”) means that you can ship them emails which might be higher tailor-made to their wants and pursuits.
- Polls. Add polls on to emails to have interaction with and gather details about subscribers, which you’ll be able to then use to construct segments.
Rising your earnings
- In 2022, Equipment Commerce was added to the platform, permitting customers to strive promoting digital merchandise to their subscribers by creating custom-made product pages that may be embedded in your emails, together with automated gross sales funnels.
- The present iteration of Equipment additionally includes a website builder. You may create a web site straight on Equipment to publish newsletters, host a digital storefront to gather fee for one-time or subscription merchandise, and construct customized pages.
Connecting with and supporting different creators: The Creator Community
- In 2023, Equipment launched the Creator Network, which helps customers information their viewers members to find different creators and get found in flip.
- You too can receives a commission for Creator Community suggestions you make by way of the aptly named Paid Suggestions.
Increasing the platform’s capabilities: App retailer
- As a part of the 2024 rebrand, additionally they launched an app retailer, the place you could find customized apps to do extra with Equipment. The app retailer will launch with 5 apps: KitBoard (add CRM to your account), Wordsmith (flip YouTube movies into newsletters, SavvyCal (add reserving widgets to emails), Mighty (join your Mighty group and content material with Equipment), and SegMetrics (study the way you acquire, have interaction, and convert subscribers).
- Equipment additionally affords a self-service app builder to create your individual add-ons. (As of this writing, the service is currently in beta.)
Begin your Equipment account — free in your first 10,000 subscribers!
That is an affiliate hyperlink
From “ConvertKit” to “Equipment”: Behind the rebrand
In summer time 2024, the corporate beforehand often called ConvertKit formally grew to become Equipment. The brand new identify was introduced in July through the Craft + Commerce Creator Convention and went reside in October. (They’d previously rebranded to Seva in 2018, but considerable negative feedback to the new name triggered them to revert to ConvertKit till this 12 months.)
The change to Equipment was greater than a reputation change, although, as a result of the corporate launched a number of massive new capabilities to their platform as effectively. We coated a number of the new options within the part above, however listed below are the highlights:
- An app retailer the place builders can create add-ons to reinforce Equipment’s capabilities
- A central information hub with enhanced reporting
- An expanded Creator Community to assist customers discover new collaboration companions
Equipment additionally made some extent of rebranding in public by sharing details about the rebranding course of by means of weblog updates, live-streamed design periods, and a four-part YouTube mini-documentary. This transparency offers an fascinating perception into the corporate’s considering. And we expect it’s a wise transfer given how their earlier rebrand went.
With that out of the way in which, let’s discuss pricing.
Equipment pricing
For a very long time, Equipment solely supplied paid plans. However in December 2019, the corporate introduced a brand new free tier if in case you have fewer than 1,000 subscribers. They lately expanded the free tier to incorporate creators with as much as 10,000 subscribers.
Listed here are Equipment’s pricing choices as of October 2024:
Equipment E-newsletter Plan
- $0/month for as much as 10,000 subscribers
The E-newsletter plan consists of:
- 1 primary Visible Automation
- 1 e mail Sequence
- 1 person
- Limitless touchdown pages, opt-in types, and e mail broadcasts
- Viewers tagging & segmentation
- Promote digital merchandise
- Run paid newsletters & subscriptions
- E-newsletter feed & web site
- API Entry
- Free Suggestions (required—at the least one suggestion slot to develop your listing by cross-promoting with different creators)
- Good Suggestions (auto-recommendation of comparable creators that can assist you develop your listing)
- 24/7 help
Equipment Creator Plan
- $9/month for as much as 300 subscribers (paid yearly; $15 if paid month-to-month)
- $25/month for as much as 1,000 subscribers (paid yearly; $29 if paid month-to-month)
- Tiered pricing as much as $1,916/month (paid yearly; $1,916 if paid month-to-month) for as much as 400,000 subscribers
The Creator plan consists of:
- All of the options of the E-newsletter plan
- Limitless Visible Automations
- Limitless e mail Sequences
- 2 customers
- Free migration from one other software
- Free Suggestions
- Paid Suggestions
- Take away Equipment branding
- Third-party integrations
- RSS campaigns
- Polls
Equipment Creator Professional Plan
- $25/month for as much as 300 subscribers (paid yearly; $29 if paid month-to-month)
- $50/month for as much as 1,000 subscribers (paid yearly; $59 if paid month-to-month)
- Tiered pricing as much as $2,166/month (paid yearly; $2,599 paid month-to-month) for as much as 400,000 subscribers
The Creator Professional plan consists of:
- All of the options of the Creator plan
- Limitless Visible Automations
- Limitless e mail Sequences
- Limitless customers
- Fb customized audiences
- E-newsletter referral system
- Edit hyperlinks in despatched broadcasts
- Subscriber engagement scoring
- Superior deliverability reporting
- Insights dashboard
- 24/7 Precedence help
Each the Creator and Creator Professional plans supply a 14-day free trial so you may see if it’s best for you earlier than committing.
We’ll hold this submit up to date with the most recent Equipment pricing, however you may also go to the pricing page on the Kit website.
Let’s get into the explanations we like Equipment subsequent!
Advantages of Equipment
We’ve used Equipment to energy Good Passive Earnings’s e mail advertising for a number of years. In that point, we’ve discovered it to be the best ESP for our wants. We additionally suppose it’s an awesome resolution for a spread of entrepreneurs and digital creators searching for a strong, feature-rich e mail advertising platform.
One of the best e mail service supplier for brand spanking new entrepreneurs.
Simple to be taught, highly effective whenever you want it.
That is an affiliate hyperlink
From the place we sit, the facility of Equipment falls into two important classes: person advantages, and viewers advantages.
Equipment advantages from the person’s standpoint
First, Equipment has every little thing a enterprise proprietor wants to rise up and working rapidly:
- You may gather emails.
- You may arrange a easy touchdown web page to gather emails.
- You may promote merchandise (one-time buy or subscription).
These options enable somebody to begin promoting even whereas they’re within the strategy of establishing a web site some place else. It additionally makes it straightforward to execute on one of many important classes in our Smart From Scratch course: utilizing promoting as a key step within the idea-validation course of.
Second, the Equipment workforce designed their platform to develop with the sophistication of the person. Once you begin, you most likely simply wish to gather e mail addresses and ship emails. However as you develop, you’ll wish to begin tailoring your message and segmenting your viewers. At that time you may make the most of issues like automations and dynamic content material. As you and your small business develop into extra superior, the Creator Professional Plan is the next move—you gained’t have to modify to a distinct e mail service supplier 5 years down the street. This units Equipment aside from another ESPs, significantly Mailchimp.
Some folks discover Equipment a bit daunting (see Drawbacks beneath), however if you happen to’re considerably tech-savvy we expect it’s fairly approachable. Specifically, we just like the accessibility of Equipment’s automation builder, which helps you to create automations in an easy, linear means.
We tried Infusionsoft for a year and located its automation builder revolutionary however overwhelming. You needed to already perceive how automations work, in addition to the varied symbols frequent in automation builders. We discover Equipment’s automation builder, then again, makes it straightforward to string automations collectively in a sophisticated means. With a number of templates to select from, establishing an automation for the primary time is straightforward for any person.
We additionally like Equipment’s method to subscriber administration. With Equipment, all of your subscribers go into one massive pool; there aren’t any lists. As an alternative, subscribers could be put into segments by assigning them attributes utilizing tags and customized fields. These allow you to deal with your subscribers as distinctive people with completely different wants; not all subscribers are created equal. The opposite advantage of the way in which Equipment treats subscribers? You’re solely charged as soon as for every distinctive subscriber, not like another ESPs.
Equipment’s lately launched Creator Community can be an enormous plus in our eyes, from each a business-building and community-building perspective. It means that you can develop your subscriber base whereas additionally fostering connections with different entrepreneurs and creators.
Final however not least, if you happen to’re transferring from one other ESP like Mailchimp or AWeber, Equipment affords a free migration service that may take a number of the headache out of switching.
Equipment advantages in your viewers
Equipment offers you the chance to tailor your messaging to your viewers. You may have as many types and touchdown pages as you need. You may have as many tags, customized fields, and segments as you need. You could be as particular in speaking to your viewers as you wish to be.
As you gather details about your viewers, you can begin to section subscribers so that you don’t trouble folks with issues they aren’t excited by. Equipment makes it straightforward to gather particulars about your viewers alongside the way in which, and also you aren’t penalized for that by means of larger prices, as you’d be with a list-based e mail platform.
Drawbacks of Equipment
No resolution is ideal, in fact. Listed here are a number of the drawbacks we and different Equipment customers have observed.
- Reasonably steep studying curve. The interface generally is a little overwhelming for a newbie. Taking full benefit of all of Equipment’s options—like segmentation, tagging, and automations—requires some studying (and probably coding). You may shorten this studying curve by following their Getting Started video series, in addition to the remainder of the content material on their well-organized support site
- No list-based group. Though we like the way in which Equipment enables you to manage subscribers utilizing tags (and doesn’t cost you for duplicate subscribers, as we talked about above), the dearth of a list-based group system could be complicated if you happen to’re coming from different platforms. Over time, although, we expect you’ll discover this technique extra versatile than managing lists.
- Barebones e mail and touchdown web page templates. Equipment requires CSS coding to create customized superior e mail templates and touchdown pages past the included choices. Some customers report that the e-mail design software could be buggy.
- Analytics might be extra strong. The free and Creator plans don’t supply the identical superior deliverability reporting, subscriber scoring, and analytics options of the Insight function that the Creator Professional plan affords, which is smart however could also be a trouble to some customers.
Fortunately, one of many earlier drawbacks of Equipment, that there was no free possibility, hasn’t been the case since 2019. This free tier makes Equipment comparable on the entry degree to different standard ESP choices like Mailchimp.
Lastly, that is under no circumstances a downside, however as Equipment continues to broaden its choices to incorporate issues just like the Creator Community and Equipment Commerce to its core e mail advertising capabilities, there’s an opportunity that the platform’s worth may get unfold skinny. To be clear, we don’t suppose that is going to occur and have plenty of confidence in Nathan and the Equipment workforce, however it’s price protecting in thoughts.
Our massive takeaway on Equipment
With the current updates, Equipment is coming nearer to being a one-stop store for creators who wish to develop, nurture, and promote to their audiences with a platform that’s largely prepared to make use of and automatable. If you happen to’re searching for your first or subsequent e mail advertising platform, we expect it’s an awesome resolution for rising your viewers and rising your earnings whereas retaining artistic management over what you place out into the world!
Equipment & e mail advertising: Extra assets to learn, pay attention & be taught
So there you’ve it—our assessment of Equipment’s e mail advertising platform! We’ll depart you with just a few extra assets if you happen to’re interested by Equipment, or wish to dig additional into e mail advertising.
Kit [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, we receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]
SPI 825: Behind the Scenes of a Major Rebrand & Lessons Learned After a Hard Fail—my dialog with Equipment CEO Nathan Barry about setting his firm’s sights on extra formidable objectives with the rebrand.
What Is Email Marketing? + Best Practices: An SPI How-to Guide
AP 0712: How Do I Migrate an Email List from AWeber to Kit? – Smart Passive Income
Why I Switched from Aweber to Infusionsoft to ConvertKitI hope this submit has been useful in deciding whether or not Equipment is the precise ESP for your small business. No matter e mail advertising platform you select, nothing is extra essential than having the precise e mail advertising technique, so you should definitely take a look at our essential guide to email marketing and take into account the Email Marketing Magic course if you’d like extra hands-on help together with your e mail advertising, available inside the SPI Community. Good luck!
