Email is the backbone of any online platform. Why? Research (and loads of personal experience) proves that email subscribers are the most engaged members of an online audience. But conventional email clients are not designed to handle large-scale communication.
If you want to email hundreds or thousands of people at once, you need a purpose-built tool to do it. You need an email marketing platform.
Keep It Together
When you’re building your online audience, you need a central hub to keep track of all your email subscribers. There are several key reasons for this:
- Personal data. You need each person’s email address, at the very least, but it’s helpful if you can also keep track of each person’s name, key interests, and what resources they’ve downloaded from you. Once you start offering products, you need to make doubly sure that you’re tracking customer purchases within each subscriber so you don’t try selling products to people who already bought.
- Personal convenience. Imagine the mess if you tried to keep track of all this info in your Gmail or Outlook contacts. And as your audience grows, it will only get harder and more time-consuming to send emails this way.
- Personal protection. You legally need each subscriber to “opt-in” to your communication before you email them content, but you also need a clear option where they can click to “opt-out” or unsubscribe. Again, Gmail or Outlook don’t handle this well, but failing to comply could result in the suspension of your account or a hefty fine from the FCC.
- Personal communications. To serve your audience well, you need each email to arrive feeling personal, as a 1-to-1 conversation with each subscriber—rather than a mass email blast. You need to be able to customize content and merge audience data, such as first names, into your emails.
There is simply no way to manage all of these responsibilities out of your standard email client. Only an email marketing platform can check all these boxes, and thankfully, a stellar option is available and affordable to you today.
Meet ConvertKit
While we will extensively explore the in’s and out’s of email marketing in other blog posts, we think it’s important to have all of us on the same page. Platform University uses ConvertKit and counts on it every day.
Here’s why an email marketing platform ConvertKit can revolutionize your platform:
- Created for creators. Today, what sets ConvertKit apart from the alternatives is that it is the only email service provider designed primarily for content creators and building an online platform.
- Intuitive content creation. With ConvertKit, it’s easy to created emails, built-in forms, and even landing pages for building your email list (including easy-to-add downloads automatically built in).
- Elegant emails. ConvertKit blends into the background when you’re creating content, allowing you to send beautiful broadcasts or create advanced automations (even if you don’t know what that means).
- Clear data collection. ConvertKit allows you to track subscriber-specific information based on purchases, downloads, or even which content on your website each subscriber reads.
- Created by creators. ConvertKit was founded by people who were looking for a better way to do what you are doing: building an online platform. That means their software development, customer support, and training are all built for people like you.
As we discuss how to build your platform with email marketing, we will reference ConvertKit again and again.
