ConvertKit Affiliate Program Review

What is ConvertKit?

ConvertKit is one of a growing number of email marketing suites. They currently have a monthly recurring revenue of over $2 million.

It began back in 2013 when its creator Nathan Barry was looking for a new venture following a couple of small-scale online successes.

He decided to create an SaaS product and actually went about it in a very public manner using the ‘web app challenge’ to document his progress.

This became ConvertKit that we know today.

As with most of the other email marketing products, ConvertKit offers a number of functions to help you in your business. These include email signup forms, an email designer, landing page designer and email automation.

ConvertKit Affiliate Program Details

Probably the most important number for any affiliate program is the rate of commission. ConvertKit will pay you 30% recurring revenue on monthly fees which start from $29 per month.

As with most affiliate programs you do not need to actually use the product yourself. It is generally best to promote products that you do use and are therefore most familiar with, however .

A visitor to your website would rightly ask why you are recommending the product if you don’t use it yourself.

You can find a link to the affiliate page in the footer of ConvertKit’s website.

Unfortunately, the affiliate page is a little light on detail. I have applied to join the affiliate program and will update this page when I have more information. At the moment some sources suggest the program has a 60-day cookie duration while others suggest as little as 30 or as much as 90 days.

While a long cookie duration is a definite benefit, it should be noted with this program that the last click gets the referral. This means that should someone sign up with ConvertKit having clicked one or more affiliate links after yours then you will unfortunately see no commission.

Payouts will take anything up to 60 days to reach your PayPal account in order to allow for any refunds. Unusually ConvertKit don’t have a minimum payout threshold. Once you start getting referrals you should have money coming in every month.

In order to help you promote the product, ConvertKit will provide their affiliates with a number of creative assets. You can use these on your website or in other promotional methods. They have also created a free video tutorial for new affiliate’s. This features the famous affiliate marketer however.

They also offer some online training to help their customers build up their email lists.

You can create links to any page on the ConvertKit website, although it would only make sense to link to a certain number of pages.

ConvertKit recently changed their pricing structure so that they now offer a free tier of membership. This should make promoting the product a lot easier since prospective users can test drive the product for as long as they want.

The only downside to the free tier membership is that some of the features aren’t available and you are limited to 1000 subscribers. Even with these limitations ConvertKit is still an attractive option for beginners. They won’t yet have a subscriber base and will probably be reluctant to spend money on one of the paid options.

ConvertKit Pricing

Subscribers	free	Creator	creator pro
up to 1000	$0	$29	$59
Up to 5000	n/a	$79	$111

How to Promote

• If you are using ConvertKit in your own business then the most obvious way to promote it would be to use your own email sequences. For example at the end of your emails you could offer a link to a short tutorial on how to perform a task in ConvertKit. This could include an affiliate link.
• Write a review of ConvertKit showing how a business could use its features to their advantage. Don’t merely list the features. You need to show prospective purchasers how those features will benefit their business. Explaining the benefits is more likely to lead to them making a purchasing decision.

• Even better than a written review would be a video review. Video content is becoming increasingly important. Videos tend to convert better than written content. If you don’t currently have a YouTube channel, you should give it some serious thought. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google.

• Create an email marketing website. Develop a website with information on how to perform email marketing for any product. Create different articles explaining how to perform particular tasks in a generic way. You could then do reviews of different email marketing suites and offer affiliate links for those you believe to be the best.

• Write comparative reviews. Compare the features and benefits of ConvertKit with other leading email marketing suites. For example Aweber, Getresponse, ActiveCampaign and Drip.

• Case study. Write a case study explaining how your business has grown since you implemented ConvertKit. Showing potential customers how ConvertKit helped grow your business is a great way to prove to them what it could do for their business. As an added bonus case studies are often ideal link targets for other websites. Having back links to your article would add significant SEO benefit.

• Produce a mini ConvertKit tutorial course. Create screen recordings of you using the software to perform various email marketing tasks. E.g. creating a landing page or an automation sequence. You could then upload them to YouTube and place an affiliate link in the description of each video.

• Put together a resource page listing all the software that you use in your business. Explain why you chose it and the sort of business that you think it would be suitable for.

Alternatives

Getresponse Affiliate Program

With Getresponse you have the choice of either a 33% recurring commission or a one-off payment of $100.

Their cheapest plan starts at $15 per month for 1000 subscribers so this would work out a little cheaper than ConvertKit. They do offer a free trial but don’t have any free membership tiers.

You have the advantage of a 120 day cookie and Getresponse will provide you with a number of creative items to promote their product.

It is a solid if unspectacular offering.

Aweber Affiliate Program

A long-standing email marketing solution offering its affiliate’s 30% commissions on the monthly fees.

Prices are similar to Getresponse with their pro plan starting at $19 per month.

Aweber now offer a free membership tier but it is limited to only 500 subscribers but it does offer more features for example automation.

ActiveCampaign Affiliate Program

With plans starting from as little as $9 per month for 500 subscribers. You would earn 30% commission on any monthly payments for your referrals.

Pabbly Affiliate Program

Pabbly offer an excellent value for money product, their cheapest plan costs only $9 per month for 2500 subscribers.

As an affiliate of Pabbly you get 30% commission.

LeadPages Affiliate Program

LeadPages offers a little more than just email marketing. Including tools such as their website builder.

Affiliates could earn up to 50% commission with LeadPages. However, that appears to be only on the first months payment. The ongoing rate would appear to be only 10%. With pricing starting at $37 per month this is likely to be a difficult sell to many businesses.

MailChimp Affiliate Program

This is only worthwhile if you are a MailChimp user. The affiliate commission is payable as a bill credit on your MailChimp account. If you are looking to earn a side income from email marketing then MailChimp is not the answer. In addition, MailChimp is not particularly keen on affiliate’s using their service.

Mailerlite Affiliate Program

Mailerlite is another value for money offering with charges of only $10 per month for up to 1000 subscribers.

If you choose to be an affiliate for Mailerlite you will earn a 30% commission of the monthly fees.

ConvertKit Pros and Cons

Pros

• Reasonable commission rate of 30% (Monthly recurring)

• Up to 90 day referral.*

• Free membership tier (up to 1000 subscribers)

• No minimum payout threshold

• Modern user-friendly interface

• Lots of training and helpful guides

Cons

• Only PayPal available as payout method

• Potential for payout to take as much as 60 days

• Referral-based on last click

ConvertKit Affiliate Program Review: Summary

There is a wide variety of email marketing software available. This makes it difficult for anyone to choose the right product. While many of the products do have free trials it is not always easy to determine in a short space of time if the product is right for you.

With ConvertKit you can take as long as you want on their free plan to see whether the software is right for you. This will undoubtedly be a major selling point if you are trying to promote ConvertKit.

Undoubtedly, most affiliate will be looking at the commission rate of 30% and monthly fees starting at $29 as well.

Emailtooltester only gives ConvertKit score of 3.5/5.

I think based on that assessment you would have to be a fan of ConvertKit already in order to sign up for their affiliate program and promote the product.

As I said earlier in this article it is generally advisable to promote products that you use and are familiar with. My advice would be to try a number of products on the market and then promote the one that you end up deciding to pay for yourself.

James

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