I have long held the philosophy that There Is No Best when it comes to putting together a stack of tools to get your creative business up and running. I tell students that the best tools are the ones you use. I have my favorites, of course, but if you have picked something different from what I have picked, I don’t want you un-doing your stack just because you learned about something that does the same job and is just marketed to you differently.
Overall, I feel that way about most email platforms, too. When you are growing your list from zero, you’re not going to need as many features that a platform like Kit has right away. But as soon as you start growing, as soon as you start needed any kind of automation, as soon as you want to sell a thing, you’re going to want what Kit’s got.
Kit’s Landing Pages are Lovely
There have been a handful of clients for whom we ultimately decided to just skip building a website all together. Turns out a nice-looking landing page was really all they needed.
I do not love most page builders, but I’m not most people. When you are looking at a WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get,” pronounced “wizzy-wig” ) page builder, you want one that doesn’t leave you scratching your head at how to use it. That sort of defeats the purpose. I find it very straightforward to piece together a simple, elegant, and mobile-friendly landing page to convert traffic into subscribers with Kit’s landing page builder.
Email Automation with Kit is Straightforward and Easy to Implement
I held a partner certification for a much more complicated CRM platform for a few years (which I let lapse because it was nearly a thousand dollars to maintain, and I was sending more of my students to Kit anyway), so please understand that I’m speaking with some experience.
Most people do not need the complexity of the more sophisticated automation builders out there. BUT, in the time that I was a Certified Partner elsewhere, Kit caught up!
In my time building other people’s email funnels, there were only a handful of functions that most people needed. Specifically, there were two:
- An if/then path that sends a subscriber one way or another depending on subscriber behavior
- One email that gets sent out on a repeating looping schedule
Does Kit make it easy to do both of those things? You bet!
Checkouts Turn Subscribers into Customers
If you are selling one or two things, Kit’s integrated checkout is probably all you need. (If you’re selling more than a few things, I have other recommendations for you).
Once again, beautifully formatted checkout widgets make it easy to securely capture payments, and integrate with your automations to deliver the content. I use this for my premium newsletter subscription for my Art and Illustration subscribers. See it in action here:
These checkouts integrate with Kit’s tagging system and allow you to push customers automatically into new email sequences, immediately download content, and if you’re feeling ambitious, integrate with a fulfillment partner using something like Zapier to ship real products. This
Subscriber-Only Content that Integrates with WordPress
Guys. GUYS. This is huge.
So, remember that other CRM I was talking about? In order to turn a WordPress site into a content platform with member-only areas, you needed
- the CRM ($129/month minimum)
- a WordPress plugin that integrated the tagging system ($60/ month)
- ANOTHER WordPress plugin that organizes your content into a course ($120/month)
Kit just made a huge update to their WordPress plugin that allows you to gate and organize content for customers who have bought through their checkout pages.
So, imagine you want to set up a paid newsletter like the one I have above. I can have exclusive content on my WordPress website for those subscribers in addition to the newsletter content. Or, I can offer a class with sections divided up and progress saved. And if a non-subscriber or a non-customer visits those pages? They get a notice encouraging them to make a purchase.
While less savvy people are shouting about “you should get a Substack,” or “you should open a Skool” or whatever other platform is hot right now, they all are just slickly marketed ways to get between you and your people. Substack owns your list of subscribers. Skool can shut you down at will.
This is just like running your whole business off of Facebook, only with platforms like this, you are paying for the privilege.
(I will talk at length about this, partly because it makes me mad, and partly for the SEO. “Best alternative to Substack?” Yeah, that’ll play.)
In short, Kit has has released one of the simplest ways to turn your WordPress site into a paid content platform, with all the benefits of a traditional mailing list. You own your list. Your subscribers are yours and no one else’s. You don’t share revenue. You don’t lose them if you move off their platform.
Try Kit