There were four key reasons that led us to move back to ConvertKit after using Drip for the past 6 years.

🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️ Disclosure: Throughout this article we’ll be sharing our ConvertKit affiliate link. If you switch to or sign up for ConvertKit after clicking this link, we get a small commission. We were not paid by or asked by ConvertKit to write this article, and everything we share in this article is our honest experience and authentic opinion.

Here’s a quick history of our email provider journey:

• 2013-2015: We started in Mailchimp, as everyone did back in the day! 😂

• 2015-2017: We used ConvertKit and it did an okay job 🤷

• 2017-2018: We moved to ActiveCampaign which sucked 🙅‍♀️

• 2018-2024: We move again to Drip and it was overkill but solid 🪨

• February 2024: We switched BACK to ConvertKit ✅

Having used a good handful of email provider platforms, we can tell you with confidence that no email provider is perfect.

They all claim to be intuitive, simple, and offer great customer support. Some are better than others and instead of wasting your time going over the limitations and issues we had with other platforms, instead we’re going to share the four things that brought us back to ConvertKit.

We’ve also included a short list of things we think ConvertKit could improve upon to wrap up this article. Again, no platform is perfect 😉.

Reason #1 We Switched Back to ConvertKit: It’s Built for Creators

Out of all the email providers out there, ConvertKit has evolved over time and really nailed what the modern digital creator needs to run their online business with email marketing.

When we were using Drip from 2018-2024 it always felt a bit like we were the round peg in their proverbial square hole 😅. As the years went on, Drip transitioned to focus more on e-commerce features and the product didn’t feel like it matched our business needs anymore. It became harder to see simple metrics at a glance and spin up simple forms quickly.

One of the BIGGEST features that we loved about ConvertKit and were happy to get back is the Landing Page & Form Signups dashboard:

This dashboard, with the ability to hover over all the different bar chart sections, shows you at a quick glance what forms (or lead magnets) are actually converting.

If you’re a digital creator, having this Landing Page & Forms dashboard will change the game for you.

You no longer need to track the conversion of your form/lead magnets, and you can also see them listed out in a grid (or list) that shows total views, subscribers converted, and conversion rate:

Reason #2 Why Switching to ConvertKit was a No-Brainer: Free Migration

We don’t have the biggest email list in the world (12,000+ as of writing this article), but what we did have was years of email marketing clutter 😬.

The longer you spend with an email provider, the more your tags, segments, rules, automations, email templates, etc get jumbled up. Think of it like your closet… the longer you go between cleaning out your closet the more clothes, shoes, bags, etc pile up.

Here’s what our email clutter looked like before switching to ConvertKit:

• Email Forms: 27

• Email Rules: 49

• Email Automation Workflows: 74

• Tags: 2,300+ 😱

• Segments: 80

• Email Templates: 23

Those numbers (maybe besides the Tags 🙊) may not look too daunting, but the thought of trying to migrate and clean that stuff up was paralyzing for us.

That was until… ConvertKit’s FREE migration!

As soon as we created our ConvertKit account, we filled out the migration form. Now, as of writing this article, if you have less than 5,000 subscribers they don’t handle everything for free:

That may hold you back if you have less than 5,000 subscribers, but honestly, just taking the action to commit to migrating is like grabbing the big plastic bags and stepping into your cluttered closet.

🚧 IMPORTANT NOTE: Just because we had 5,000+ subscribers didn’t mean we weren’t going to be doing any work! We had to spend plenty of time getting all our ducks in a row and cleaning up all our forms, tags, sequences, etc — it’s not possible for someone to know the intricacies of your email marketing setup and migrate it without your input.

Once we were assigned a ConvertKit migration specialist, the process was verrrrrry smooth!

All-in, the process took us about three weeks to migrate everything from Drip to ConvertKit. We setup a Notion Doc to organize everything from our side and to give the migration specialist (Hi, Natalie 👋) a helpful document to work from:

Note: ConvertKit didn’t provide this Notion doc, we just created it ourselves based on all the different “features” of our email strategy and used it with Natalie. You could easily do this in Google Docs, etc.

How did all our email clutter end up after migrating?

• Email Forms: 11 (down from 27)

• Email Rules: 33 (down from 49)

• Email Automation Workflows: 20 (down from 74)

• Tags: 122 (down from 2,300+!)

• Segments: 8 (down from 80)

• Email Templates: 9 (down from 23)

The best part about reducing all of those things is that our email account and strategy feels way more concise and organized now. We went from an overflowing closet that was about to burst at the seams to a nice, tidy, and refreshing system.

Again, we cannot stress enough how awesome it was to have ConvertKit’s migration done for free. We spent plenty of our own hours, but it easily saved us 40+ hours of work and a ton of headaches and tasks we didn’t want to do.

Reason #3 We Were Pulled Back to ConvertKit: Their Email Builder

For years while using Drip we were writing snippets of HTML and CSS for…. every weekly email we sent 🤣🙈. Sure, Drip had an email builder, but the experience was really lackluster and we always wanted our emails to feel custom, branded, and easy to create.

When we explored moving to ConvertKit, the first thing we did was create a new Broadcast email to see how flexible and intuitive the email builder was. And, friends? The email builder was SOLID. 👏👏

We are big Notion users, so having the “/block” shorthand in the email builder was fantastic. You can quickly add a paragraph, heading, image, etc without having to do multiple clicks.

The other things we loved immediately about the email builder:

1. How easy it was to add styling (colors, alignment etc)

2. How flexible the options are for spacing (margin and padding)

3. How fast you can crop or add a border radius to an image

4. How quickly you can inject an HTML block

5. How easy it is to add/remove sections and format an email for easy consumption

When we sent out our first email from our shiny new ConvertKit account, many of our subscribers who knew we had moved to them asked us, “You created these emails with just the ConvertKit email builder??” So, they’re doing something right!

Reason #4 Why We Switched to ConvertKit: The ConvertKit Creator Network

This is, honestly, a game-changer in the email marketing world. ConvertKit actually helps our subscriber base grow with almost ZERO effort on our part.

And when we say grow, we saw a 100% increase in new subscribers from our previous month without using the ConvertKit Creator Network 📈🤩.

We can illustrate the awesomeness of having the Creator network in this 30-day subscriber chart:

We gained 263 new subscribers in a 30-day period.

Nearly 50% of those subscribers came from the Creator Network and happened with very little additional effort on our part!

Previously, we were averaging ~130 new subscribers every month. If the Creator Network continues to deliver at 50% over our previous growth rate, that’s an extra 1,500+ new subscribers we’ll accrue in the next year just from the Creator Network alone. We reached out to one friend in the network and added each other as recommended creators. We plan to do more outreach to related creators in our business niche and keep experimenting with this feature.

We do want to add a small caveat about the Creator Network...

While it IS awesome, it is also about who you can get to recommend you, so your results will vary based on who you know. However, you could easily start recommending other ConvertKit creators and building relationships with them to earn their recommendation in the future. This is a new opportunity for engagement and list growth that hasn’t previously been possible in other email platforms.

Small Ways We Think ConvertKit Could Improve

As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, no email platform is perfect and we have a few recommendations for ways ConvertKit could continue to improve the product:

🏷️ Tag Management

• Probably the biggest area for improvement, if you have more than 20-30 tags, it’s a real pain to comb through them

• It would be nice to have a better way to search tags, edit it them, import people to them, etc in one organized place that isn’t the Subcribers’ page sidebar

🖼️ Image Management

• If you’ve uploaded more than 12 images to ConvertKit’s image library, it’s almost unusable 🤣

• We’d love to see the ability to search images by file names (Drip had this and we used it often)

• The ability to search by upload date would be a nice to have (last 7 days, 30 days, etc)

• Being able to create folders to organize images would be cool

• These are just a few things we interact with often, so it’s what is most top of mind for us. But, overall, we’ve really enjoyed our experience using ConvertKit so we’re happy to deal with these small nitpicks.

Should You Switch To ConvertKit?

We trust putting our email marketing efforts in the hands of ConvertKit, and if you’re a digital creator, we believe you’ll be very happy if you make the move.

We hope sharing our reasons for switching back to ConvertKit has helped you!