Digital Marketing for Creatives

I need to tell you about an email platform. I know. I know how that sounds. Like I’ve become the guy who talks about email platforms at parties. I haven’t. I still have some dignity. Barely.

But here’s the thing. For years, I used whatever email service was easiest. Mailchimp, mostly. Because that’s what everyone used. And Mailchimp is fine. It’s like the IKEA of email platforms. Gets the job done. Comes with a monkey mascot for some reason. You send your emails, people get them, everybody moves on with their lives.

But somewhere along the way, I started to notice something. Mailchimp is built for e-commerce. For people selling products in bulk. For businesses that need to send “20% off” emails to thirty thousand people who never asked to be on the list in the first place. Which is great if you’re selling widgets. Not so great if you’re selling you. Your voice. Your weird creative thing that doesn’t fit neatly into a template.

That’s where ConvertKit comes in. Or Kit. They changed the name recently. Probably because “ConvertKit” sounded like a tool for turning people into customers, which is exactly what it does, but they wanted to soften it a little. Make it feel less like a funnel and more like, I don’t know, a kitchen? A place where you actually make things? I’m not sure. I didn’t name it. But the platform itself? Solid.

Here’s why it works for creatives.

It’s built for writers, artists, and people who hate marketing.

Most email platforms are designed by marketers for marketers. Everything is about open rates and click-through rates and segmentation and automation sequences that sound like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. And yeah, Kit has all that stuff if you want it. But it doesn’t force it on you. You can keep it simple. You can just write an email and send it. Like a normal person.

The interface is clean. Uncluttered. When I open it, I don’t feel like I’m being yelled at by a hundred different buttons and metrics. I feel like I’m sitting down to write a letter. Which is what I’m actually trying to do.

Visuals are easy, but they’re not the point.

Here’s something that always drove me crazy about Mailchimp: everything is a drag-and-drop module. You spend forty-five minutes trying to get an image to line up correctly, and by the time you’re done, you’ve forgotten what you were even writing about. Kit is mostly text-based. You can add images. You can make it look nice. But the default is words. Because at the end of the day, that’s what people are there for. Your words. Not your perfectly centered hero image.

It treats your audience like people, not numbers.

The way Kit handles subscribers is different. You tag people based on what they’re interested in. You create segments that actually make sense. So when I send an email about a new book I wrote on email marketing—which, full disclosure, I did, I’m not sending it to everyone. I’m sending it to the people who actually care about that stuff. The people who downloaded the free guide. The people who said “yes, tell me more about this.”

That’s respect. That’s treating your audience like human beings with actual interests and limited attention spans. Which they are. Which you are. Which I am.

It grows with you without getting in the way.

When I started, I had maybe a few hundred subscribers. Now I have more. Not a million. I’m not trying to be Mr. Beast over here. But the platform didn’t penalize me for being small, and it didn’t get clunky when I got bigger. It just… worked. At every stage. Which is rare for software. Usually, software either demands you grow up too fast or punishes you for staying small. Kit doesn’t do that. It just sits there, being useful, waiting for you to write your next email.

And the people who made it actually understand creative work.

This is the part that matters to me. The founders, the team—they’re not tech bros from Silicon Valley who decided to disrupt email. They’re builders. Creatives. People who understand that marketing isn’t something you tack onto your work after the fact. It’s part of the work. Or it can be, if you do it right. And they built a tool that reflects that understanding.

Look, I’m not saying ConvertKit is perfect. No software is perfect. Every platform has quirks and frustrations and moments where you want to throw your laptop across the room. But for what it is—a tool for creative people who need to communicate with their audience without losing their minds—it’s the best I’ve found.

So if you’re out there using Mailchimp or Constant Contact or, God help you, some custom WordPress plugin that sends emails through your shared hosting server (I’ve been there, it’s a nightmare), maybe give Kit a look. It won’t turn you into a marketing bro. It won’t make you spend hours designing templates. It’ll just let you write. Send. And get back to making the thing you actually want to make.

Which is the whole point, isn’t it?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an email to write.

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Talking of email newsletters, if you want more in-depth marketing advice aimed at creatives like you, why not subscribe to my email newsletter and in return I’ll send you a free pdf copy of my book Digital Marketing for Creatives: Email Newsletters. Here’s the link.