Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Before you write a single email, do three things. Authenticate your sending domain so your mail lands in the inbox rather than the promotions tab (Kit walks you through the DNS records, and skipping this is the most common reason a new sender's open rates look broken). Decide your core tag vocabulary: a small, deliberate set like source tags (where someone came from), interest tags (what they signalled), and customer tags (what they paid for). And set up one real opt-in form connected to a genuine incentive, because an empty list teaches you nothing.

Keep the tag list short at the start. You can always add a tag later, but a sprawling, improvised taxonomy is hard to clean up and harder to trust. Confident, minimal structure beats clever, complicated structure every time.

How to actually use it

The core loop in Kit is: capture, nurture, broadcast, and the order you build them in is the order I just listed.

Start with capture. Build a form or a landing page (Kit hosts landing pages for you, so you do not need a website to start collecting subscribers) and wire it to a tag so you always know where a subscriber entered. Attach an incentive worth the email address: a template, a checklist, a short course, a real thing.

Next, build the nurture. This is where Kit earns its keep. A Sequence is an ordered series of emails that goes out automatically over days or weeks after someone subscribes, and a Visual Automation is the flow chart that decides who enters which sequence and what happens at each branch. The pattern that works: a new subscriber triggers a welcome sequence, the welcome sequence delivers the incentive and tells your story, and by the end of it the person knows what you do and why they should care. Build this once and it runs for every new subscriber forever.

Then broadcast. A Broadcast is a one-off email to a segment of your list (a launch, an announcement, this week's essay). The discipline that separates good senders from spammers is sending broadcasts to a SEGMENT, not to everyone, so the people who already bought do not get the pitch aimed at people who have not. Kit's segment builder lets you filter by tag, so "everyone interested in X who has not yet bought Y" is a few clicks.

Run that loop weekly: keep capture live, let the sequences nurture, broadcast on a rhythm your audience can rely on.

Power moves

The non-obvious power in Kit lives in automations and link triggers. A link trigger tags a subscriber based on what they CLICK inside an email, which means your list segments itself by behaviour without anyone filling in a form. Put two links in an email ("I want the founder track" / "I want the team track") and your audience sorts itself into the right future sequences.

Use automations to move people between sequences based on what they do, not just what they signed up for. Someone who clicks a sales link but does not buy can be dropped into a short objection-handling sequence; someone who buys can be removed from every promotional sequence the moment the purchase fires. This is how the same list feels personal to thousands of people at once.

Two more pro habits. Re-engagement: periodically build a segment of subscribers who have not opened anything in months, send one honest "are you still here?" email, and remove the silent ones, because a smaller engaged list deliverds better than a big dead one. And the Creator Network plus recommendations: Kit lets creators recommend each other at the point of subscribe, which can grow a list faster than any single form, and it is worth turning on once your welcome sequence is genuinely good.

Where it fits your stack

Kit is the email brain, so it should be the place your audience data converges. Connect your checkout (Kit has its own commerce for digital products, and integrates with the main payment and course platforms) so a purchase automatically tags the buyer and triggers post-sale flows. Connect your forms and landing pages, whether Kit's own or an external site, so every entry point writes a source tag.

For B2B teams, the integration that matters most is to your CRM. Kit handles the audience and the nurture; your CRM handles the deal and the pipeline. Pass tags and events between them (directly or through an automation layer like Zapier or Make) so a sales conversation is informed by what the contact has been reading and clicking. Kit's API is open enough to push tag and subscriber events anywhere you need them, which keeps it from becoming a silo.

Pitfalls to avoid

The first pitfall is the list-not-tags mistake: do not build separate lists when you mean tags, because you will end up paying for and emailing the same person twice and your reporting will lie to you.

The second is launching broadcasts to your whole list instead of a segment, which annoys buyers and trains people to ignore you. Segment before you send, every time.

The third is a tag sprawl: tags created on the fly, never documented, never cleaned, until nobody trusts what any tag means. Keep a written tag dictionary and prune it.

The fourth is treating the welcome sequence as an afterthought. It is the single highest-leverage asset in the account because every subscriber sees it. Write it as carefully as you would write a sales page.