Why Kit Beats MailChimp for Authors: 5 Game-Changing Reasons

You're an author or an aspiring author, so you've probably already heard it 100 times. You need to build an author platform. But what is at the foundation of that platform? Your email list? Building one all starts with having the right tool to support you in that journey. And while there are many I have used in my 19 years of having an email list, yup, I started my first email newsletter back in 2006. While I've used many, the one we recommend to all our author clients is Kit formally convertkit. If you're wondering whether you are on the best system or you need to choose one for your most important piece of your author platform, well, good news. This video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, Founder of Book Launchers. We're your first choice in book publishing and book promotion for self published nonfiction books. And because we help launch and promote books, we've helped authors write, edit and design a lot of books. And we're involved in setting up a whole lot of author websites, email funnels and email lists. You can check out our author website packages@book launchers.com if you need an author website. But today I want to share the five reasons why I'm a KIT fan over mailchimp and mailchimp is fine. It's a totally fine service. But there's reasons why I prefer Kit over mailchimp and that's what I'm sharing today. Now, if you're on the fence, the first thing I'm going to share is that they both have a free plan. But I actually think KITS is more generous allowing up to 10,000 subscribers and unlimited emails on that free plan. Mailchimp's free plan is 500 subscribers and 2,500 emails. Now as I say that, it's important to understand there are limitations with what kits free 10,000 email subscribers allows you to do. The free plan still gets you the heart of what you want and need. So when you're just starting out, I think it's fantastic. It gives you tagging, emailing, landing pages and automation. But you have kits branding and you're limited to one automated email sequence. Now truthfully, most authors I know barely have one at all, so this isn't a big limiting factor for most. But if you're like our author Todd Nyhome who has written a bunch of different books, he may want different opt in pages and automated sequences for each of these books. In that case, the free plan won't work for him. Second, as you scale, Kit is flexible. Well, some of you might be choking when you see this screenshot at the thought of spending 373 per month if you have a list of 45,000, which is what my list is. Well, actually this is even worse if you pay monthly because that's their annual rate broken out monthly. It's actually $440 monthly. But this is for unlimited emails sent. That is great value. Many providers, including Mailchimp, start to limit the volume of emails you can send or they charge you a whole lot more when you get up to that level of a list. Third, this can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on what matters for you. I think it's an advantage because most authors just want the fundamental pieces in place without a lot of complexity and Kit does that. What I'm talking about is intuitive email designs and templates and automation tools. They help authors engage with their audience effectively. But they do have less stuff, less bells and whistles as far as templates go than mailchimp. But I don't think you really have to worry because you don't have to be a coder. And just look at how fast and easy it is to create a really lovely email from one of their templates. Here's a peek at their free library of templates. You can find one that you like and send it over like this and start editing it as simply as you would edit a Word document. As mentioned, some features aren't available in their free offering and and one of them is multiple sequences. So you can only create one automated sequence. But that gets you started. Now, fourth reason I love Kit and one of the bigger reasons I think this puts Kit over mailchimp is the fact that you can tag your contacts in Kit in mailchimp, they can only belong to one list. Now what does this mean? Well, let's go back to Todd as an example. His first book. He may have people who have purchased one book but not the other. Cause he now has three and he's working on another one. He may have people who have purchased all his books when his new book what the Bleep Brain released. He probably would want to target people who had bought one of his past books like Ah Brain, why do you trouble me so much? So once somebody buys a book, he may want to change their tag so he's not promoting the same book to them that they just bought. When you have three books and you're only allowed one person per list, this is impossible. Now I know this is a lot of details and if you're just starting out this seems sophisticated. Just trust me that tagging people is better. And I also use tagging for keeping track of where I met them or what promotion or what thing brought them into my list. For example, you might use one URL for people who find you on a podcast, so you might want to tag them accordingly. Or if they met you at a certain book fair, you might want to tag them with that because now you can look back later on to see where your readers and maybe clients or other kind of relationships have come from so you know what to do more of in your promotional efforts. With lists, you don't have that kind of flexibility. Lists are limiting when it comes to that, especially when somebody can only be on one list. It's still possible, but it's a lot more complicated. Fifth, and it's hard to pick because I have two things I want to mention, but neither are features I've personally used, but I like the idea of them for authors. The first is that the creator level allows you to edit links that you've sent in an email so you don't have to resend the email. How many times have I had this issue where I've sent a broken link or a link that doesn't go to the right place? If I could have edited it after it was sent it would have saved me from the dreaded sorry, this email has the right link follow up email that has to go out. This is a great feature, but more valuable to authors is their robust commerce options. Mailchimp has these as well, but Kit is built for creators and as such it's set up to support your subscriptions, your book sales and even membership based services. Kit integrates with popular e commerce solutions like Shopify, WooCommerce, Samcart, allowing authors to easily connect their online stores. They also integrate with Teachable and MemberPress, which is beneficial for selling online courses or offering membership content. Ultimately this all comes down to preference and of course who actually delivers your emails to your readers. But I am a Kit fan and I wanted you to know about it. And of course we have an affiliate link with them but because any program that I love I sign up for their programs. So go to booklaunchers.com kit now if you're doing the free plan. We're going to make nothing but we still love Kit. To know who we sent their way helps us with long term partnership building. Anyway, check out both providers and let me know who you will use or who you are using in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released you get entered to win some of our fabulous swag and you move a step closer to being one of my besties like Darla Mondragon, Debbie Martin, Kevin Hall, Susan Montgomery, and Steven Searle. Thank you for your support. Okay, next Video. Well, you might be wondering how to create a quick but lovely reader magnet. I talked about this tool in a live stream that you might want to know about, and this is the video YouTube recommends you watch next. I'm certain you'll have fun no matter which direction you go, so grab a drink and let's hang out some more. And if you're watching Mobile wondering where those videos are, I'll put them in the link in the description below.