How To Use ConvertKit – 11 Useful Features You Need To Know

This article shows you how to use ConvertKit. You’ll learn how to:

• create an opt-in form
• create an email sequence
• connect an email sequence to a form
• connect your form to a lead capture tool
• send out an email broadcast
• tag subscribers and purchases
• create segments
• use link triggers

ConvertKit is a powerful email marketing service created expressly for bloggers and ‘creative people’ who don’t want to get bogged down with technical stuff.

The automations in some platforms are so complex that you either need to spend a month learning how to use them or hire a specialist to set it all up for you. But this is not the case with ConvertKit.

ConvertKit allows you to automate your email marketing, using email sequences, automations, rules, tags, and segments. But at the same time it’s easy to understand and it won’t take you more than half a day to grasp how it works.

Let’s dive in!

In this tutorial, we’ll be visiting each of these five areas.

On the next screen, click ‘Create New’:

So what are these different types of forms?

• an inline form is an optin box that you embed within an article or blog post
• a modal form is a popup that triggers when your visitor arrive son your page or is about to exit your page.
• a Slide-In is a form that slides in, usually from the bottom right corner, when your visitor reaches a certain point in your page.
• a Sticky Bar is an optin form that sits at the top of your page.

On the next screen, you’ll see four icons in the right-side panel. These are the main customization options for your optin form.

The first thing to do is to give your form a name that will help you remember where you placed the form on your website or what kind of content upgrade you are using with the form.

To do this, click on the pencil icon in the top left corner:

Next, click on the area of the form that says “your email address”, and you’ll see additional formatting options in the right-side panel:

Then click on the ‘Subscribe’ button, and you’ll see some additional formatting options where you can change the color of the button:

Note that the color you choose for the button will determine the button color in the ‘Confirmation’ email.

Click on the second icon in the right-side panel and you’ll see some more customization options:

The most important options here are whether to show a success message or re-direct your subscriber to another page. Re-directing is a powerful feature if you want to present your subscriber with another free resource or even a premium offer.

Just beneath the double optin / single optin option is a powerful feature that explains why so many bloggers **** ConvertKit.

If you click on the ‘Download’ button, you’ll then be asked to choose a file:

Find the content upgrade or lead magnet on your hard drive and upload it to ConvertKit:

Now, your subscriber can download their freebie from the welcome email. ConvertKit has combined email conformation and lead magnet delivery in one easy step:

As far as I know, no other email service provider makes lead magnet delivery so simple.

Then choose ‘New Sequence’:

Next, give your sequence a name and click ‘Create Sequence’:

On the next screen you’ll be able to:

1. Add emails to your sequence

2. Turn each email to ‘active’ or ‘draft’

3. Set the interval between emails

In this screenshot, I’ve added six additional emails, to create a 7-day email sequence:

For each email in the sequence, you need to toggle the ‘status’ from ‘draft’ to ‘active’ once it’s ready to go:

You’ll probably want the first email to go out immediately. In that case, set the value in the interval box to ‘0’:

As I said, this is the most user-friendly UI I’ve seen for creating email sequences. One feature that’s super useful is the hamburger button that allows you to drag the emails up and down and change their order:

If you want to get really granular, you can use filters to decide who gets individual emails in your sequence.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say your email sequence is designed as a funnel to sell blue widgets. If a subscriber purchases a blue widget on Day 2 of your email sequence, you don’t need to send them Days 3 through 7 – that would be annoying for your subscriber.

If you tag subscribers who make a purchase (more about how to do that later), you can use that tag to remove those subscribers (i.e. people who made a purchase) from your sequence. Pretty cool, hey?

When your email sequence is ready, there’s one last step you need to take: connect your sequence to a form.

Next, click ‘Create Automation’:

On the next screen, make sure that ‘Joins a Form’ is selected:

Then, from the dropdown menu, select the form you just created:

And then click ‘Add Event’:

A visual automation will now appear:

Click on the plus sign.

Next, make sure  ‘Action’ is selected, and then click on ‘Email sequence’:

Then, from the dropdown, select the email sequence you just created:

Then click ‘Add Action’:

And that’s it – you now have a simple automation that adds new subscribers to an email sequence:

Now let’s do the same thing using a ‘Rule’ instead of a visual automation.

On the ‘Automations’ screen, click on ‘Rules’:

On the next screen, click ‘Add Rule’ and then choose ‘Subscribes to a Form’:

From the dropdown menu, select the form you created:

In the right-side panel, you now need to click on ‘Subscribe to a sequence’:

Now choose the email sequence you just created:

And then click ‘Save Rule’:

You now have a rule that says when somebody subscribes to the ‘demo optin form’ they will also be subscribed to the ‘demo email sequence’.

So, that’s how you join an email sequence to a form.

Click on ‘Go to the API Dashboard’:

Then click on ‘Add new Connection’ and follow the instructions:

Once you’ve connected ConvertKit to Thrive Leads, you’ll be able to choose it from the dropdown menu:

Next, select the form you created in ConvertKit:

And then click ‘Apply’:

And that’s it: your Thrive Leads optin form is now connected to your ConvertKit account.

Next, click ‘New Broadcast’:

On the next screen, you have two options:

• Send the broadcast to your entire list
• Send the broadcast to a subset of your list

The number of people who will receive your broadcast is shown at the top right of the broadcast:

If you want to send the broadcast to a subset of your subscribers, you need to add a filter.

Let’s say I want to send my broadcast only to people who didn’t purchase my product ‘Jump Start Your Blog’.

To do this, click ‘Add Filter Group’:

From the dropdown, choose ‘Matching none’:

Then choose ‘Subscribed to tags’:

Next, choose the tag that you want to exclude:

You’ll notice that with the filter applied, the number of subscribers who will receive this broadcast has reduced:

Now, compose your message and choose a style template:

Then, send yourself a preview email:

And then click ‘Send Broadcast’:

Now click on the plus sign in the right-side panel, to add another action:

Now click on ‘Add a Tag’:

From the dropdown menu, select the tag you just created:

Now click on ‘Subscribers’ in the top menu, and you’ll see a list of your tags in the right sidebar:

Next, click on the Teachable card:

From the dropdown, choose ‘Purchases on Teachable’:

Choose the specific course that you want to tag and then click ‘Add tag’:

Then, simply follow the procedure I outlined above for creating a tag to be added to that trigger.

In the next dialog box, select ‘subscribed to tags’:

Then choose the tag from the dropdown:

If we only want to email people in that segment, we now need to apply that segment as a filter to our broadcast. Go back to the demo broadcast we created before, and add a filter with the setting ‘all’:

Next, select ‘within segment’:

From the dropdown, choose the segment you want your email to go to:

You can see that with the segment selected, the number of recipients for this broadcast has dropped down to zero (because the segment is empty).

In the left panel, choose ‘Clicks a link’:

Give your link trigger a name and a destination URL (this is where your subscribers can get more information about your proposed Instagram course). And then, in the right-side panel, click on ‘Add tag’:

Click ‘Create a new tag’:

Give your new tag a name and then click ‘Save Rule’:

Here’s how to use your link trigger in an email.

Create a new broadcast and compose your message. Then highlight the text where you want to add the link trigger:

In the dialog box that opens up, click the blue ‘Link Triggers’ button:

Then select the link trigger you just created:

And that’s it – people who click on that link will now be tagged as ‘Interested in new Instagram course’.

When your course is ready to launch, instead of emailing your entire list, you can just email those subscribers who expressed an interest.