If you’re looking for your next email marketing platform, and you’re curious if Kit is right for you, well, you’re in the right place! Here’s our comprehensive Kit review for 2024, which will cover:
- What Is Kit?
- Why do I need an email service provider (ESP)?
- The rebrand from ConvertKit to Kit
- Kit Features
- Kit Pricing
- Key Benefits of Kit
- Drawbacks of Kit
- Kit & Email Marketing: More Resources to Read, Listen & Learn
What Is Kit?
Kit is an email service provider (ESP). Essentially, it’s a technology service that lets you send email campaigns to a list of subscribers. Kit is one of literally hundreds of ESPs out there, and—full disclosure—it happens to be the one we prefer and use at SPI.
Although we’re biased, we can still be objective! In this post, we’ll cover the features, benefits, and drawbacks of Kit as we see them, to help you decide if it’s the right ESP for your business.
Email Marketing Strategy: Why You Need an ESP
If you’re reading this, you might already know what an ESP is and why you need one. But in case you don’t, an ESP is the most important piece of technology to support your email marketing strategy.
Email marketing is one of the most powerful methods to build relationships and market your products and services to your audience. Let’s talk about why that is.
In its most basic form, email marketing involves you sending emails to a group of people who’ve chosen to hear from you by “subscribing” to receive emails from you. You could technically use a simple email program like Gmail to accomplish this—but we don’t recommend it, because you’ll quickly find it insufficient (and because your personal email account will get flagged as spam if you send too many emails from it!).
As your business grows and more people subscribe to get your emails, you’ll want the ability to do more sophisticated things with your email marketing, like customizing the emails people get according to their interests, and using reports and analytics to determine what’s working well or not.
You also need to make sure you’re respecting people’s privacy and not spamming anyone. An email service provider also helps you to stay in compliance with government regulations around the world, such as the CAN-SPAM act in the United States, the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union (GDPR), and the Canada Anti-Spam Law (CASL).
Things can quickly get out of hand without the help of a dedicated email marketing platform. That’s where an ESP like Kit comes in.
Okay, let’s get into the nitty gritty of Kit’s features!
Psst… Want to grow your email list and learn powerful segmentation and automation strategies that allow your business to run on its own? Check out the Email Marketing Magic course.
Kit Features
These are the key features of Kit, organized by how you’ll use them.
Sending Emails
- Autoresponders/drip campaigns (sequences): Send a sequence of pre-written emails automatically to a specific segment of subscribers on your list, triggered by a specific event or action, with the aim of guiding them to take a specific action.
- Broadcast emails: Send standard announcements or one-time emails to your subscribers on a specific date.
- CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL compliance: CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL are laws that set the rules and requirements for commercial email messages, and give recipients the right to have you stop emailing them—so compliance is crucial!
- Dynamic (personalized) email content: Your email content can display different text or images, according to your customer segmentation.
- Responsive email templates: Ready-to-go email designs, as well as the ability to create your own custom templates. Kit automatically formats your landing pages for various devices, such as desktop computers and mobile phones.
- WYSIWYG email editor: The built-in email editor lets you see how your email will look with your template’s styling applied while you’re composing it.
Collecting New Subscribers
- Custom responsive landing pages: Use the included tool to quickly create a landing page to collect email addresses. Kit automatically formats your landing pages for various devices, such as desktop computers and mobile phones.
- Embeddable forms: Collect email subscribers anywhere on your website by dropping in a Javascript or HTML form, or by using the WordPress plugin.
- Site builder: Create a website directly on Kit to publish newsletters, host a digital storefront to collect payment for one-time or subscription products, and build custom pages. Set up a landing page and collect payment for one-time or subscription products right inside Kit.
- Visual automations: Kit allows you to create rule-based paths using if-then logic, so that when a subscriber takes a particular action, you can send them pre-defined emails or add them to a segment.
Learning about Your Subscribers
- A/B testing: Kit lets you test different subject lines for your emails, and automatically determines the winner based on their respective open rates.
- Reporting/analytics/ROI tracking: Learn how often your subscribers open your emails, click on links, and complete various actions.
- Segmentation/tagging: Segmenting your subscribers into different categories (similar to but more powerful than other programs’ “lists”) allows you to send them emails that are better tailored to their needs and interests.
- Polls. Add polls directly to emails to engage with and collect information about subscribers, which you can then use to build segments.
Growing Your Income
- In 2022, Kit Commerce was added to the platform, allowing users to try selling digital products to their subscribers by creating customized product pages that can be embedded in your emails, along with automated sales funnels.
- The current iteration of Kit also features a site builder. You can create a website directly on Kit to publish newsletters, host a digital storefront to collect payment for one-time or subscription products, and build custom pages.
Connecting with and Supporting Other Creators: The Creator Network
- In 2023, Kit launched the Creator Network, which helps users guide their audience members to discover other creators and get discovered in turn.
- You can also get paid for Creator Network recommendations you make via the aptly named Paid Recommendations.
Expanding the Platform’s Capabilities: App Store
- As part of the 2024 rebrand, they also launched an app store, where you can find custom apps to do more with Kit. The app store will launch with five apps: KitBoard (add CRM to your account), Wordsmith (turn YouTube videos into newsletters, SavvyCal (add booking widgets to emails), Mighty (connect your Mighty community and content with Kit), and SegMetrics (learn about how you gain, engage, and convert subscribers).
- Kit also offers a self-service app builder to create your own add-ons. (As of this writing, the service is currently in beta.)
From “ConvertKit” to “Kit”: Behind the Rebrand
In summer 2024, the company previously known as ConvertKit officially became Kit. The new name was announced in July during the Craft + Commerce Creator Conference and went live in October. (They had previously rebranded to Seva in 2018, but considerable negative feedback to the new name caused them to revert to ConvertKit until this year.)
The change to Kit was more than a name change, though, because the company launched several big new capabilities to their platform as well. We covered some of the new features in the section above, but here are the highlights:
- An app store where developers can create add-ons to augment Kit’s capabilities
- A central data hub with enhanced reporting
- An expanded Creator Network to help users find new collaboration partners
Kit also made a point of rebranding in public by sharing information about the rebranding process through blog updates, live-streamed design sessions, and a four-part YouTube mini-documentary. This transparency gives an interesting insight into the company’s thinking. And we think it’s a smart move given how their previous rebrand went.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about pricing.
Kit Pricing
For a long time, Kit only offered paid plans. But in December 2019, the company announced a new free tier if you have fewer than 1,000 subscribers. They recently expanded the free tier to include creators with up to 10,000 subscribers.
Here are Kit’s pricing options as of October 2024:
Kit Newsletter Plan
- $0/month for up to 10,000 subscribers
The Newsletter plan includes:
- 1 basic Visual Automation
- 1 email Sequence
- 1 user
- Unlimited landing pages, opt-in forms, and email broadcasts
- Audience tagging & segmentation
- Sell digital products
- Run paid newsletters & subscriptions
- Newsletter feed & website
- API Access
- Free Recommendations (required—at least one recommendation slot to grow your list by cross-promoting with other creators)
- Smart Recommendations (auto-recommendation of similar creators to help you grow your list)
- 24/7 support
Kit Creator Plan
- $9/month for up to 300 subscribers (paid annually; $15 if paid monthly)
- $25/month for up to 1,000 subscribers (paid annually; $29 if paid monthly)
- Tiered pricing up to $1,916/month (paid annually; $1,916 if paid monthly) for up to 400,000 subscribers
The Creator plan includes:
- All the features of the Newsletter plan
- Unlimited Visual Automations
- Unlimited email Sequences
- 2 users
- Free migration from another tool
- Free Recommendations
- Paid Recommendations
- Remove Kit branding
- Third-party integrations
- RSS campaigns
- Polls
Kit Creator Pro Plan
- $25/month for up to 300 subscribers (paid annually; $29 if paid monthly)
- $50/month for up to 1,000 subscribers (paid annually; $59 if paid monthly)
- Tiered pricing up to $2,166/month (paid annually; $2,599 paid monthly) for up to 400,000 subscribers
The Creator Pro plan includes:
- All the features of the Creator plan
- Unlimited Visual Automations
- Unlimited email Sequences
- Unlimited users
- Facebook custom audiences
- Newsletter referral system
- Edit links in sent broadcasts
- Subscriber engagement scoring
- Advanced deliverability reporting
- Insights dashboard
- 24/7 Priority support
Both the Creator and Creator Pro plans offer a 14-day free trial so you can see if it’s right for you before committing.
We’ll keep this post updated with the latest Kit pricing, but you can also visit the pricing page on the Kit website.
Let’s get into the reasons we like Kit next!
Benefits of Kit
We’ve used Kit to power Smart Passive Income’s email marketing for several years. In that time, we’ve found it to be the ideal ESP for our needs. We also think it’s a great solution for a range of entrepreneurs and digital creators looking for a robust, feature-rich email marketing platform.
From where we sit, the power of Kit falls into two main categories: user benefits, and audience benefits.
Kit Benefits from the User’s Standpoint
First, Kit has everything a business owner needs to get up and running quickly:
- You can collect emails.
- You can set up a simple landing page to collect emails.
- You can sell products (one-time purchase or subscription).
These features allow someone to start selling even while they are in the process of setting up a website somewhere else. It also makes it easy to execute on one of the main lessons in our Smart From Scratch course: using selling as a key step in the idea-validation process.
Second, the Kit team designed their platform to grow with the sophistication of the user. When you start, you probably just want to collect email addresses and send emails. But as you grow, you’ll want to start tailoring your message and segmenting your audience. At that point you can take advantage of things like automations and dynamic content. As you and your business become more advanced, the Creator Pro Plan is your next step—you won’t have to switch to a different email service provider five years down the road. This sets Kit apart from some other ESPs, particularly Mailchimp.
Some people find Kit a bit daunting (see Drawbacks below), but if you’re somewhat tech-savvy we think it’s pretty approachable. In particular, we like the accessibility of Kit’s automation builder, which lets you create automations in a straightforward, linear way.
We tried Infusionsoft for a year and found its automation builder innovative but overwhelming. You had to already understand how automations work, as well as the various symbols common in automation builders. We find Kit’s automation builder, on the other hand, makes it easy to string automations together in an advanced way. With multiple templates to choose from, setting up an automation for the first time is easy for any user.
We also like Kit’s approach to subscriber management. With Kit, all your subscribers go into one big pool; there are no lists. Instead, subscribers can be put into segments by assigning them attributes using tags and custom fields. These let you treat your subscribers as unique humans with different needs; not all subscribers are created equal. The other benefit of the way Kit treats subscribers? You’re only charged once for each unique subscriber, unlike some other ESPs.
Kit’s recently launched Creator Network is also a big plus in our eyes, from both a business-building and community-building perspective. It allows you to grow your subscriber base while also fostering connections with other entrepreneurs and creators.
Last but not least, if you’re moving from another ESP like Mailchimp or AWeber, Kit offers a free migration service that can take some of the headache out of switching.
Kit Benefits for Your Audience
Kit gives you the opportunity to tailor your messaging to your audience. You can have as many forms and landing pages as you want. You can have as many tags, custom fields, and segments as you want. You can be as specific in talking to your audience as you want to be.
As you collect information about your audience, you can start to segment subscribers so you don’t bother people with things they aren’t interested in. Kit makes it easy to collect details about your audience along the way, and you aren’t penalized for that through higher costs, as you would be with a list-based email platform.
Drawbacks of Kit
No solution is perfect, of course. Here are some of the drawbacks we and other Kit users have noticed.
- Moderately steep learning curve. The interface can be a little overwhelming for a beginner. Taking full advantage of all of Kit’s features—like segmentation, tagging, and automations—requires some learning (and potentially coding). You can shorten this learning curve by following their Getting Started video series, as well as the rest of the content on their well-organized support site
- No list-based organization. Although we like the way Kit lets you organize subscribers using tags (and doesn’t charge you for duplicate subscribers, as we mentioned above), the lack of a list-based organization system can be confusing if you’re coming from other platforms. Over time, though, we think you’ll find this system more flexible than managing lists.
- Barebones email and landing page templates. Kit requires CSS coding to create custom advanced email templates and landing pages beyond the included options. Some users report that the email design tool can be buggy.
- Analytics could be more robust. The free and Creator plans don’t offer the same advanced deliverability reporting, subscriber scoring, and analytics features of the Insight feature that the Creator Pro plan offers, which makes sense but may be a bother to some users.
Thankfully, one of the previous drawbacks of Kit, that there was no free option, hasn’t been the case since 2019. This free tier makes Kit comparable at the entry level to other popular ESP options like Mailchimp.
Lastly, this is by no means a drawback, but as Kit continues to expand its offerings to include things like the Creator Network and Kit Commerce to its core email marketing capabilities, there’s a chance that the platform’s value could get spread thin. To be clear, we don’t think this is going to happen and have a lot of confidence in Nathan and the Kit team, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
Our Big Takeaway on Kit
With the recent updates, Kit is coming closer to being a one-stop shop for creators who want to grow, nurture, and sell to their audiences with a platform that’s largely ready to use and automatable. If you’re looking for your first or next email marketing platform, we think it’s a great solution for growing your audience and increasing your income while retaining creative control over what you put out into the world!
Kit & Email Marketing: More Resources to Read, Listen & Learn
So there you have it—our review of Kit’s email marketing platform! We’ll leave you with a few more resources if you’re curious about Kit, or want to dig further into email marketing.
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 conversation with Kit CEO Nathan Barry about setting his company’s sights on more ambitious goals with the rebrand.
What Is Email Marketing? + Best Practices: An SPI How-to Guide
Email Marketing Magic Course
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 post has been helpful in deciding whether Kit is the right ESP for your business. Whatever email marketing platform you choose, nothing is more important than having the right email marketing strategy, so be sure to check out our essential guide to email marketing and consider the Email Marketing Magic course if you want more hands-on support with your email marketing, available inside the SPI Community. Good luck!
