Summary: You may already use a system to collect emails so you can communicate directly with readers who want to hear from you. If you’re unfamiliar with email marketing systems, they offer a powerful way for you to interact with your audience.<br> <br> If you have a new book coming out, for example, these are the people who would want to know about it. If you’re doing a poetry reading, you can send a note and readers in that city will be glad to hear about it and might make plans to attend. If you have a special price on an e-book, you can let them know about the sale.<br> <br> If you haven’t started yet, I highly recommend you begin building an email list comprised of ideal readers.<br> Start List-Building with MailChimp<br> I started out with MailChimp and used it for years. MailChimp was free, and free sounded like a good place to start.<br> <br> I liked MailChimp’s option to pull content from my website’s RSS feed so people could automatically receive my latest blog posts. I chose from one of their many templates and tried to tweak the code, but messed it up. I read articles and watched videos in their vast knowledge base to try to fix my mistake, but even when I stop-started the video to break down each tick of a box or tap of a character, I still ended up with something wonky. I lost hours trying to solve my problems. Attractive templates ended up looking goofy.<br> <br> I limped along with MailChimp by choosing a simple template and avoiding any customization. I didn’t want to touch any code for fear of breaking something. I stayed in set-it-and-forget-it mode for years, with MailChimp automatically sending emails featuring nothing more than my blog content.<br> <br> Over time, I realized I wanted to send emails more a personal tone. And, if possible, I wanted a simpler system that made more sense to me. I periodically tried to tweak my MailChimp templates only to mess them up again and have to start over from scratch.<br> <br> Then I heard about the new kid on the block: ConvertKit. It’s not new any longer, but at the time it sounded like it might offer almost all the features I wanted without the elements that troubled me in MailChimp.<br> The Pros and Cons I saw in ConvertKit and MailChimp<br> Every system comes with its own set of pros and cons. Here’s what I observed at the time I was deciding.<br> Templates<br> ConvertKit didn’t offer a wide variety templates like MailChimp did, so if I wanted pretty emails, I'd have to get creative. But I wanted to send simple emails anyway, so that wasn’t a huge concern.<br> Emails Generated from RSS Feed<br> ConvertKit draws from a blog’s RSS feed to generate an email, but doesn’t automatically send it like MailChimp does. You have to go in and manually send it.<br> <br> I thought that was a weakness when I first signed up, but now I see it as a strength because I actually want to look at the email before sending it, to personalize it. It supports my reason for having an email list in the first place: to interact with people, encourage them, and support their writing goals.<br> Unsubscribe System<br> One big drawback of ConvertKit was its unsubscribe option. If readers click on the link in the footer, they're immediately unsubscribed and removed from the system. They don’t have any way to manage their subscription; they're just out. I didn’t like that.<br> Stats<br> ConvertKit didn’t show much in the way of stats at the time I considered it. That, too, made me hesitate. I wanted to know how many people were signing up and through which pages or forms. MailChimp did well with that.<br> Simplicity<br> Compared to MailChimp, though, ConvertKit was lean, clean, and simple both visually for the reader and behind-the-scenes in the dashboard. That was a plus.<br> Subscriber-Centered vs List-Driven<br> ConvertKit takes a subscriber-centered approach, whereas MailChimp organizes by lists,
