- Today, I wanna show you how I use ConvertKit
as a design content creator.
Now full disclosure, before we get into it,
in case you are new around here,
and this is one of the first videos you've seen,
I actually work for ConvertKit.
I'm the creative director there.
I lead our brand team,
but one of the things that I love
about my job is that I get to get genuine value
out of the product
that I'm designing a brand for,
designing marketing materials for.
I am out of the target audience
and that makes my work really fun.
ConvertKit is a create marketing platform
and it's an essential part
of how I run my design content creation business.
And today I wanna walk you through
how I use it for my weekly newsletter,
the Marketing Design Dispatch,
selling my font, building my email list in general,
and sending emails,
including some automated ones,
and learning more about my audience.
So let's get into it and I'll show you around.
(gentle upbeat melody)
So welcome to my ConvertKit account.
This is my dashboard where you can see
the performance of my emails and my products
over the past seven days, 30 days, of all time.
Let's start by talking about my newsletter though.
So the Marketing Design Dispatch
is a weekly newsletter
that's all about marketing design.
This right here is the landing page for it.
So this is the main way
that people can sign up
to receive the Marketing Design Dispatch
in the inbox.
Pretty simple page,
but this is one that I built entirely in ConvertKit,
and I'll show you that in a second.
But something I love about this page, especially,
is this bit here.
This is called a newsletter feed.
This lets people get a taste
of what kind of things I send emails about,
so they can read it and check
if it's something that they're gonna want
to receive in the inbox before they sign up,
which is pretty cool.
So let me show you this page in ConvertKit itself.
So we'll come into my landing pages and forms.
Now, as you can see,
I have quite a lot of landing pages and forms
'cause one of the things
about ConvertKit that you can create
as many as and so I take full advantage of that.
So this one here,
Marketing Design Dispatch.
Making landing pages in ConvertKit
is with this like wizzy wig,
what you see is what you get editor.
So you can change the fonts,
change the colors, of course.
And so I make everything match my brand
with my purple, with my teal buttons.
Here's the newsletter feed
that I was talking about earlier.
So I have this set up to only display
the latest issue but I could add to this
and display the latest five, if I chose,
but I choose to have it...
Let's just keep it at one,
get people to check out the latest one.
And I added this through this little thing here
that lets you add newsletter feed.
You could add your Instagram feed
to a page, a timer if there's like
a thing you're selling.
But yeah, this is my page
that I have for my newsletter.
So this is what the Marketing Design Dispatch looks like.
And my process for this
is usually I will write the email in Notion,
draft it up, save it in there for my VA
to then import over and add it into ConvertKit.
And she'll add in all the links,
embed the images, embed the videos,
anything like that.
As you can see here,
we're using a special Marketing Design Dispatch template.
So it's always got the logo on it
and it's always branded to match
everything else that I do.
Sometimes I will A/B test a subject line,
especially, if there's two different ways
I think I could frame the topic of the newsletter
or maybe I'm wanting to learn what works best.
Like something I learned from A/B testing,
subject lines is that asking a question
can sometimes lead to more clicks.
So yeah, that's something that I will try out
every now and then is come up
with an idea of what to test
and run that as an A/B test.
I just have to write
the second subject line in here,
if I wanna do that.
And then what ConvertKit would do
is send out both subject lines
to a portion of the audience for the first few hours
and then send the winning subject line
to the rest of the people in your audience.
So that they're gonna receive
the one that was leading
to the highest open rate.
I send it out to my whole email list,
but I give people this option here
to opt out of receiving it,
if they only wanna be on the list for,
I don't know, something different.
So the way this works,
let me show you with this one here, for example.
I can add in a link
and then click tag subscribers
who click the link.
I can create a new tag here
or choose one that's already in my list.
So in my case, what's connected
in my footer there is
the don't send marketing design weekly.
So it means that whenever someone clicks this link,
it adds a tag saying,
"Hey, I don't wanna receive this email."
And then let me show you
how I end up using that tag.
So over here in my subscriber panel,
we can see my list and how it's been growing.
And these times here are
where I send out an email
that's when most people tend to unsubscribe,
which is fine.
We don't wanna be emailing people
who don't wanna be receiving my emails.
So here my list of tags,
I have a lot of them,
because as well you can like create
as many as you want.
So it's this one here,
"Don't send Marketing Design Weekly,"
451 people have clicked this
from the footer in that email.
And what I have set up is this segment
called Marketing Design Dispatch.
A segment is different from a tag
because in a tag it's kind of like
you have it or you don't.
But with a segment you can set up
different structures for it.
It's set up as all of my subscribers
except the ones that have this tag.
So basically, I end up with this list
of all the people who haven't said
they wanna opt out of receiving
the Marketing Design Dispatch emails.
So then when I come in here
to send the email or more accurately,
when my VA does that,
I can come in here and choose
to send it to anyone
within the Marketing Design Dispatch segment.
So it means that people can opt out
themselves of receiving this weekly email
but I don't have to change anything
to make sure I'm sending it to the right people.
It's all gonna automatically happen
based on that tag.
This bit down here is important as well.
So this posting of my public feed.
This is the feed that ends up on this page.
So I send lots of different
types of emails through ConvertKit,
but the official issues
of the Marketing Design Dispatch
are the only ones that I will ever turn on
this post to my public feed.
So it means it's only ever these emails
that I'm gonna show up on my landing page.
Next, let me show you
how I sell my font through ConvertKit.
So this is my sales page for my font,
which is built in Webflow.
And I'll show you how I connect a ConvertKit form
to Webflow a bit later on.
Basically, for my font, I have two versions,
a standard license or an extended license.
So if you choose to click one of these,
it'll take you through this page here.
And this is a ConvertKit Commerce page
where you can click to buy it
and enter your payment information.
So I've basically set up
one ConvertKit commerce product
for the standard license
and then one for the extended license,
which we can see in here.
We've got extended, we've got standard.
And then this one here was
someone wanted to upgrade their licenses.
So I made this product in here as well,
which I can send out to anyone else
who wants to upgrade their license.
It's pretty simple.
It's this product page
where you can edit the colors and things
to of course match how you want.
But that's why I have my full sales page here,
so I'm giving a lot more details here.
And once we it into the buying flow,
things are a lot more simple.
Yeah, my checkout,
the confirmation page, the receipt email,
which will also include
a link to download the font.
And this is why I use ConvertKit Commerce to sell my font
because it kind of automates this sales flow.
I don't have to be fulfilling orders
or anything like that.
It'll automatically email the digital file
that I'm selling to the buyer
when they make a purchase.
And that's something that I just have set up in here,
just uploaded my zip file
and ConvertKit will send it out.
As you can see here,
I've also used ConvertKit Commerce for other things.
Me and some of my fellow design content creators
did a live event last year in last February.
Wow, that was a long time ago now.
We sold the tickets for it through ConvertKit Commerce.
So yeah, people signed up here
and we could automate
the process of sending them emails
when we were going live, et cetera.
And then we also sold access
to a replay as well,
which was pretty cool.
Actually, let me show you
the landing page for this event,
'cause that was something else
that I made in ConvertKit.
Yeah, so this was a landing page
I made in ConvertKit,
giving us bios each.
We put link in here, of course,
to buy tickets before the event.
But now that the event is over,
we're collecting email addresses.
So in case we ever wanna do another one,
we can contact people.
And this was one where I set up
a custom domain for it.
Let me show you that.
So here we see all of the different domains
that I have connected my ConvertKit account,
creatingdesigncontent.com.
This was just a cheap $12 domain
that I bought for the event.
I thought it would add this extra air of quality to it,
to have something custom, as the URL,
which I think worked out well.
So I just connected this domain and it...
You add the DNS records in your domain provider
and then choose which landing page
you want to show at that URL.
I think this, having a custom domain,
plus having that custom landing page,
really did help our event perform better
because, yeah, it did look
so custom and professional.
As you can see here,
I also have this pages.charliemarie.com.
This is a sub domain for my site
that I set up for all of my ConvertKit landing pages.
And then of course I snagged charlie.ck.page
as my ConvertKit domain. (chuckles)
Okay, I've gotten slightly off track from my font,
but this actually does lead
into the next piece of sending automated emails.
A visual automation is kind of like a funnel
that you send a subscriber through
based on an action you choose that starts it.
And then, whatever you wanna do next.
I mostly have very simple one set-up
but one I wanna show you
is this font purchases one,
whenever someone purchases
either the standard or the extended license,
it sends them this font follow-up email sequence,
which is actually just one email.
And it asks for their feedback,
asks to see anything that might have made with it yet.
And I've had a few really
cool responses from this,
of people sharing things they've worked on.
So that's been fun.
And this is all automated.
So I'm not having to remember
to get in touch with the people
who have bought the font.
The system just does it for me.
So those are a few specifics.
But like you saw before,
I have many, many different landing pages and forms
where people can join my email list.
Something that I like to do
is whenever I have an idea for something,
and I wanna gauge people's interest
or start building up a list of people
who are interested in this thing specifically,
I would just quickly make a landing page for it.
So a recent example is this one here,
YouTube live streams.
People were saying
that the YouTube notification system
wasn't letting them know
when I was going live on YouTube
for a design coworking stream.
So I just spun up this landing page,
picked a template that I liked,
made it my colors.
So now whenever I go live,
I can send out an email
just to the people who signed up
on this landing page.
I'll just show you that very quickly.
We'll use this one here as an example
but I'll just change who we're sending it to.
So I can come here and say people subscribed
to the YouTube live stream form.
And now it's only gonna send to those 14 people
who have said they wanna
be emailed when I go live. (chuckles)
I use a ConvertKit landing page
for my LinkedIn bio as well.
So this is something that my VA
will come in each week when I upload a new video
and she will add it in here.
So that the page is always showing my latest video.
I have links to my other projects
and a little Instagram feed on it as well.
And of course it is purple, like all of my pages.
And this really is something
that I've just added the content to
and changed the colors.
The layout itself just comes
from our ConvertKit template library.
So if I click here, you can see
there is just a bunch of different templates
based on, yeah, whatever you need to do.
This is my starting point.
I'll just come in and pick one
that I think will best fit
the content that I wanna share at that moment.
But another way that a lot of people
join my email list is on my website.
So I think you saw before I have this form,
in the footer of all of the pages on my site,
I also have forms at the bottom
of each blog post.
Well, this is a long one. (chuckles)
And I have a different form
that shows up for each different category
of posts on my blog as well.
So let me show you how you can get
a ConvertKit form onto a web flow site.
And we'll just start
by showing you the form itself.
So this is the form in ConvertKit.
It's very simple.
Just first name, email address.
So what I do is I take the JavaScript here.
I'll just copy this.
And then in Webflow, this is an embed block.
So you just would drag this onto your page.
And then I just paste the JavaScript in there.
And so you don't see the form in Webflow itself
but you see it on the live site
or when you publish to staging.
So that's how I get my ConvertKit form
onto my Webflow site.
And actually, I don't think
the thing I showed you before
was a great example of the normal type
of email I'd send.
Normally, I would send out
just a text-based email for an update.
So this would be what I'd send out.
If I was going live,
I would use this text-based email
instead of the fancy template.
That's just because I think
that the text-based email
feels a little bit more personal.
I think the template makes lot of sense
for my newsletter when the content
is much more structured
and there's a regular format to it.
But yeah, I like just sending
an email little looks like
I could have opened it up in Gmail
and typed it for other things.
So this will actually
be what I use for sending out
the live stream updates.
And yeah, any other updates.
And then the last thing I wanna show you
is how I use ConvertKit
to learn more about my audience.
So you might have actually noticed this already
when I was in this part here of all these tags.
I have ones that say Design Experience Leadership,
junior, mid-level, senior, et cetera.
This is information that I really like
to collect about my audience
so that when I'm sending out something in particular
that might be aimed at someone
at a certain level in their career,
I can be sending it to the right group of people.
And also it's just really interesting
to know what the split is of the people
who are in my audience
and signing up for my I stuff.
So one way I collect this
is sometimes I'll have this on landing pages.
You can add a drop-down to a form
and ConvertKit that will then
add a tag automatically
based on what someone picks.
So if someone picks this one here,
that I have one to two years of experience,
it'll automatically add
that designing experience junior tag to them.
This page here is one I made to a company.
My self-promotion is not a dirty word talk
that I've given it a few conferences.
I like to give people a worksheet to download
and work through the things we discussed
in the talk later on themselves.
And so, yeah, this is the landing page
where they can come and get that worksheet.
So yeah, that's one way that
that level of experience gets added
to people on my list.
But another way is through another automation
'cause as you saw on my site,
I don't have that drop-down,
I just wanted to keep the form as simple as possible.
I feel like you can ask for more information
when you are giving like a free PDF, a worksheet,
a free digital file, whatever in return.
But for this one here
where it's just a little more general,
I wanted to make it as easy as possible.
And then what I have set up here
is this design experience automation.
So this sends out an email
to anyone who signs up from these forms.
So this is some on my site, and one landing page.
And what it will do is
it sends this email
that asks how much design experience do you have?
And this is another link trigger
like I showed you right
at the start of this video,
where depending on what they click,
it'll add the tag that relates
to their level of design experience.
And that my friends are some of the ways
that I use ConvertKit as a design content creator.
Hope you enjoyed this tour through my account.
And I don't know, getting to see all my stats
of where things are at the moment.
Check out this engagement score.
That's pretty good, huh?
If you wanna try ConvertKit out for yourself,
check out my link in the description.
We do have a free plan.
So you can use it completely for free
until you earn your first 1000 subscribers.
And there is a limited feature set though,
you can't do the automated emailing things,
but yeah, you've can still use it to get started.
I think, it is very important
for all of us content creators
to be building up an email list
because we can't put our full faith
into social media platforms
and places like YouTube,
and rely on them to reach our audience properly.
So yeah, that's one of the main reasons
that I focus on building up my email list.
And you can join my email list
also link in the description.
Thank you for watching.
Please give the video thumbs up
if you enjoyed it.
And hit subscribe,
I make design videos every single week
and I would love to have you here for the next one.
(upbeat music)