1. Remember Your Subscribers Are People

Remember that your subscribers are people just like you and me. Whether you send them down a funnel of opt-ins and thank you pages with upsells or downsells, whether you send them a broadcast email, always remember that you’re speaking with a person with dreams and hopes and challenges and so write your emails accordingly.

2. Respect Your Subscribers

Always remember that by reading any one of your emails your subscriber is taking time to pay attention to what you have to say. Respect that commitment and share value. Help them solve their challenge. Also, always give them an option to opt out of your sequence or unsubscribe from your list.

3. Utilize the “Resend to Unopened” Feature

Make use of the “Resend to Unopened” feature. ConvertKit has a very powerful feature which is really easy to use, the resend to unopened. It’s a function that lets you resend an email broadcast to those subscribers that have not opened your email. When using this, I strongly recommend making some slight changes to the subject and the body of the email so that you don’t send out the exact email twice.

4. Track Your Numbers

ConvertKit provides us with a bunch of metrics that we can use to better understand how emails are performing. If we look at some of them under email broadcasts, we get metrics for recipients’ open rate, click rate, clicks, and unsubscribers. For sequences, we get metrics for subscribers’ open rate, click rate, and unsubscribes. And for forms, we get visitors, subscribers, and conversions.

With forms, this is assuming that you are using the ConvertKit forms. I know that some of you might be using integrations, and you might be using other apps as your landing pages. For example, using Thrive Leads with WordPress. If that’s the case, then you obviously won’t see these metrics inside of ConvertKit. You’ll need to find these stats within your other application, assuming they provide these metrics. If, for example, you’re using Thrive Themes, then I know for a fact that you can find these metrics in the backend of Thrive Leads.

So, track these numbers. They’ll give you the insight that you need to understand what’s working and what isn’t working, what’s resonating with your subscribers, and what they don’t care much about.

5. Get to Know Your Subscribers

Get to know your subscribers and store that information using tags. Every time we send our subscribers an email, we have an opportunity to learn something about them and tag them accordingly. But the thing is, we need to build this into our emails using links. We need to give our subscribers the option to give us feedback by clicking on links.

So, whenever you include a link in an email, make sure to tag the user if they click this link. You don’t want to overdo this, but tags are there to add additional information about each one of our subscribers. So, make use of tags to better understand each subscriber.

6. Use a Descriptive Tag Naming Scheme

Use a descriptive tag naming scheme. So when setting up your tags in your account, make use of a naming convention that makes sense to you and then document the process so that you can share it with your team or with whoever needs to understand it.

So, some examples you might want to use are: LM for lead magnet and then LM: followed by the name of the lead magnet. You might want to create a tag called purchased: followed by the name of the product. Another one that I use is AS: followed by the name of the sequence. AS stands for active sequence, so that if a subscriber is actively inside a sequence, then I use that tag to indicate that.

Another one is do not send: followed by the name of the sequence. If someone opts out of a specific sequence, you can obviously create as many tags as you need. This is up to your imagination and to your preferences and your requirements.

My recommendation is to keep your tag standard and keep a record of these names in your own internal documentation.

7. Utilize Trigger Links

Use trigger links to save time and avoid errors. When including a link inside an email, you can either set this up once inside the actual email or you can first create a trigger link as a rule. You’ll find that under automations.

If you’ll be using the same exact link and associated tag in multiple emails, then set this up as a trigger link under rules. It’ll save you time in applying this inside multiple emails, and you’ll avoid making mistakes. Also, if the link changes that you’re sending your subscribers to, you’ll be able to change it in one location, and it’ll automatically update in all emails where you’ve made use of that specific trigger link there.

8. Use Sequences and Automations

This seems like an obvious recommendation, but I believe some ConvertKit users purely use broadcasts, and they don’t use the power that ConvertKit offers. So, what makes ConvertKit so powerful is sequences and automation. Let’s face it, if you just want to send out email broadcasts, you could have done that with some simpler and cheaper email application.

But in ConvertKit, you can set up sequences and automations that will run based on events and triggers. This might be a simple onboarding sequence that you send to subscribers or new buyers after they’ve signed up for something or made a purchase. It might even be a more complex automation of some kind of a sales funnel.

So, my recommendation is just make use of the power of ConvertKit, play around with things, and implement these powerful features that will work for you while you sleep.

9. Broadcasts versus Sequences

Broadcasts versus sequences. This is also a common confusion and mistake. Broadcasts are time-specific, and sequences are event-specific. So, if you need to send an email at a specific time, send it or schedule it as a broadcast.

If, however, an email needs to be sent out after a specific event has happened, for example, someone opts in to something or someone buys something, then set it up as a sequence. I often see people get confused with these two, so understand the difference and use them accordingly.

10. Automations are Powerful

I’ve set up an email course as an automation in ConvertKit for a client of mine. That takes into account engagement. When a subscriber opts in for the email course, they immediately receive the first lesson. But what happens next depends on the engagement.

If the user, for example, clicks the link in the first lesson, then they’ll receive the next lesson 24 hours later. If, however, the user doesn’t click the link in the lesson, then they’ll only receive the next lesson 72 hours later. We build in a delay because the idea is to reward a user for engagement by sending them the next lesson sooner.

I’ve seen different variations of an email course that includes engagement. You can also make use of forms on your website where you might send out the first lesson of the email course and then send the subscriber to a page on your site where they need to fill out a worksheet and submit that worksheet. You can do that using Gravity Forms. That is something that you can also consider.

And based on the feedback that you receive from the subscriber, you can then send them down a different fork in the automation or you can send them the next lesson immediately or 24 hours later. And if a subscriber doesn’t take any of those actions, then you can delay the next lesson further. Depending on the use case, you can build all sorts of different scenarios and experiences for your subscribers.

11. Make Use of ConvertKit Integrations

Make use of ConvertKit integrations. I’ve used ConvertKit with many other apps including Thrive Leads, SendOwl, Wishlist Member, and Gravity Forms to just name a few. There are loads of integrations that work with ConvertKit they all integrate slightly differently and some of them provide full functionality and some of them provide limited functionality so it’s important to look into that but the key is you want to make use of these integrations because it expands on the functionality of ConvertKit.

12. Cleaning Your List

Our main aim is obviously to build a list with as many subscribers as possible. But the other thing is, we want to make sure that we build a quality list. A quality list has a high level of engagement, so a high open rate and high click rates. We don’t want subscribers that have gone cold on us. We don’t want people to just sit on our list, they don’t open any of our emails, and they don’t click on any of our links.

There’s a simple way of deleting these subscribers to increase the quality of our list. ConvertKit actually has a support page for the specific topic. It’s called “How to prune cold subscribers from your list”.

The first thing you want to do is select all your cold subscribers. You do this on your subscribers’ page, where you have a long list of all your subscribers. You can use this drop-down menu here to select cold subscribers, and this will filter your subscribers down to only show the subscribers that haven’t been engaging with your content.

Then what you want to do next is you want to select those all and you want to tag those subscribers with some kind of tag. For example, “cold subscribers”.

Then next you want to create an automation rule, and you want to set up a trigger link that takes the subscriber to a specific page on your website. The content on this page simply needs to say, “Thanks for letting us know. We won’t delete you off our list.”

When someone clicks this trigger link, then what you want to do is remove the “cold subscribers” tag. So, you set that up in rules and automations.

Then the next step is to send out a breakup broadcast to your cold subscribers. You only want to send this to cold subscribers. And you put a message in there that you know you’ve noticed that they haven’t been engaging with your content, you want to find out if they still value your emails and if they want to remain on your list.

Then you want to ask them to click the link, and this is where you insert that trigger link. When a subscriber clicks on this link to stay on your list, then you automatically remove that tag from that subscriber.

After you’ve sent out that email, I would say wait a few days. I maybe wait 7 days or so, and then I would actually use the “resend to unopened” feature to resend a similar or the exact same email to those people that didn’t open that email, to just give them another chance to click that link.

And then I’d probably wait another 7 or 14 days just to be safe, and after that, I would delete everyone that is still tagged as being a cold subscriber. And that’s how you clean up your list and increase the quality of your list.

13. Exclude Subscribers from Irrelevant Emails

Make sure to exclude subscribers from broadcasts and sequences that are irrelevant to them.

The best example of this is sending a buyer someone that has made a purchase of a product of the remaining emails that are inside a sale sequence that are promoting the product that they have already purchased. You definitely don’t want to do that.

So, as soon as someone becomes a buyer, they should no longer receive emails promoting the product they’ve already purchased. You do this by always tagging a subscriber whenever they’ve made a purchase. This will depend on what system you use for your e-commerce, for your online sales.

I’ve set this up using SendOwl and Wishlist Member, and it will work with all the other e-commerce integrations that ConvertKit offers. You might need to look into some of them just to see how exactly that works. But assuming you tag buyers with a “purchase” tag, then when setting up a sequence, you can add that tag to the exclusion field.

That means that any subscriber that is tagged with that tag won’t receive future emails within that sequence. So, it’s simple enough to do this, but unless it’s set up correctly and configured correctly, buyers might still be getting sales emails, which is what you want to avoid.

This also obviously applies to other scenarios. If, for example, someone has registered for a webinar already, you don’t want to keep promoting that same webinar to someone that has already registered.

14. Use Segments to Group Subscribers

Make sure to use the segment’s feature to group subscribers this can be very useful when it come that is made up of all the subscribers that are tagged with those different tags and then having that segment you can simply exclude that segment from that broadcast instead of every time selecting all the different tags that need to be excluded so it’s just grouping your subscribers into different groups or buckets which simplifies your work when it comes to managing your account.

15. Important Considerations for Sequences and Automations

A few important things to remember and consider when setting up sequences and d to remember and number five is subscribers can be in multiple workflows or automations so one subscriber can be in multiple automations at the same time cool so keep those things in mind when planning and developing your sequences and automations inside of convertkit because I know from my experience that it can get complicated and confusing at times and my last bonus tip is keep it simple at first build things up over time and you can always make your sequences and automations more complicated.

If you found this useful and if you have any other questions I’m happy to answer. Feel free to reach out.