About ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a SaaS marketing company that helps independent creators grow their businesses using email. ConvertKit empowers their creator market to grow and monetize their audiences with ease. They are quickly becoming a market leader in this space and aim to become the go-to marketing hub for the broader creator economy.
Problem
In order to reach market leadership, it's important to educate, illustrate, and teach your audience about the path they need to follow to reach their growth goals—how to be a productive creator, how growth happens, how revenue acceleration happens, where revenue can come from, and the various ways that you can monetize your content.
Historically ConvertKit has done this by generating a steady stream of written and video content for their creator audience, but they were looking for a more effective way to educate their audience about becoming a profitable creator and turning their work into a sustaining business.
Solution
ConvertKit chose to use Summit for the task. They decided to create a suite of Creator Tools as an engaging way to teach and educate their audience about nuanced, dynamic, and context-sensitive topics. Starting with their Creator Calculator, they wanted to help their audience understand the monthly revenue potential of their ConvertKit email list and content.
The calculator works by allowing a creator to input details and basic information about their mailing list such as number of subscribers, new subscribers, unsubscribes, open rate, and how often they send emails. ConvertKit then lets the creator toggle on/off various options for monetizing their mailing list—paid newsletters, sponsorships, paid recommendations, etc.—and using that data, generates quantified results and charts over time to show the creator their specific revenue-earning potential.
Benefits & Results
Audience education & engagement
ConvertKit’s marketing team loves the Summit solution. For one, it fits their mission to educate their audience about the paths available for creating a growing business. It also creates an opportunity for engagement with their audience and demonstrates market leadership, which is critical in their heavily competitive industry. Instead of generalized, static written information or videos, ConvertKit can leverage Summit to provide an educational tool and insights uniquely contextualized to the needs of the creator and helps their audience better educate themselves about a dynamic topic like content monetization.
Thirdly, Summit gives ConvertKit’s marketing team a new asset to utilize in their own existing content distribution channels, such as email, social media, before a webinar, etc. as a specialized piece of content with a higher likelihood of generating attention and engagement.
Supporting sales conversations
The Creator Calculator is also an effective tool for ConvertKit's sales team. During initial conversations with content creators, sales reps can quantify the value of the monetization opportunities that are only available through ConvertKit’s network. And the ability to model revenue-generating potential over time for prospects using Summit’s clean and easy-to-understand UI is far more enjoyable than a clunky spreadsheet.
Lead capture & CRM Integration
When ConvertKit’s audience uses these tools, they not only get engagement and strengthen their market leadership position, but they also get leads. Summit has a native integration with their CRM of choice, HubSpot, so we’re able to send data about calculator users and their input values directly into the associated contact record. ConvertKit can then leverage that creator-submitted data (e.g. number of subscribers, newsletter frequency, etc.) to inform segmentation, personalized outreach, and an array of sales and marketing sequences orchestrated through HubSpot.
Data Analysis
As a large growth stage company, ConvertKit does a significant amount of data analysis to support their sales and marketing efforts, so they asked Summit to create a data solution for them as well. We built a custom integration to allow data to flow from their Creator Tools into their data warehouse. ConvertKit’s data team is enthused by their ability to easily analyze the inputs their receiving through the calculator and even supplement existing analysis efforts with fresh data they couldn’t previously access, giving them a wave of new insights to explore.
ConvertKit has been an ideal partner for Summit and we look forward to launching the next wave of tools later this year. We’re proud to support ConvertKit’s goal of empowering the creator community with knowledge to create sustainable businesses!
