We’ve talked a lot about emails on the podcast lately. And for the 406th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I interviewed ConvertKit’s Creator Growth Manager, Morgan Kitzmiller about newsletters, referral tools, and how to use email service providers like ConvertKit in ways you might not have thought of before. There’s a lot of good stuff in this episode. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

ConvertKit

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: We’ve talked a lot about email on the podcast over the last ten or fifteen episodes. How to write them. How to make sure the emails you write end up in your reader’s inbox. How to add personality and sell with emails. In today’s episode, we’re going deeper into how to work with an email service provider to do more with your emails.

Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I talked with Morgan Kitzmiller. Morgan is the Creator Growth  Manager at ConvertKit. And she’s the owner of her own business, Root and Rise. Morgan works with creators to help them grow their audiences and their businesses. We talked about how to use automations and other tools to make email a bigger part of what copywriters do. And we talked in depth about what’s going on with newsletters… which tools like substack, beehiiv and convertkit are making so easy to start and run as a business. We covered a lot of ground in this interview, so make sure you stick around for all of it.

Before we hear what Morgan had to share…

You’ve heard me talk about The Copywriter Underground often on the podcast. Along with the monthly coaching, weekly copy critiques, the community and courses you get as a member, each month we bring in a special guest to go in-depth on a business or copywriting topic. This August 14, copywriter Francis Nayan who was a recent guest on the podcast will join us in The Underground to share the ins and outs of what we’re calling the one-email-a-day business. He’s going to break down his business model and show you how to sell digital products with a daily email. It can be a great way to diversify your income and if you want to work with fewer clients, what Francis will be sharing could be pivital to creating a business that supports you and your lifestyle. To join us for this workshop. Go to thecopywriterclub.com/tcu and sign up. 

And with that, let’s go to our interview with Morgan Kitzmiller.

Okay, Morgan, welcome to The Copywriter Club. We like to start with your story. So tell us, how did you become the creator growth manager at ConvertKit? And I suppose it’s probably connected to this business that you built for yourself, Root & Rise, as well.

Morgan Kitzmiller: So actually, kind of the other way around, I built Root & Rise as a result of being involved and working with ConvertKit for a long time. Starting off at the beginning, this takes us back eight years ago. I had graduated college and was looking for new opportunities. I was an art major. I did not want to go into the art world and was just learning about different jobs or things that were out there. And I stumbled upon ConvertKit. Learn that they were hiring and really growing up the team in many ways at that point in time that was like 2016 was when Nathan our CEO hired a ton of new people like I believe the team went from. maybe four people, four or five people at the beginning of that year to closer to 20-ish by the end of that year. So there was a ton of growth in the company that year. And when I learned about ConvertKit at the time, the tagline was email marketing for bloggers. And that was a world that I had definitely consumed a lot of content in, not a world that I was directly a part of myself. I did not consider myself a blogger, did consider myself a creative being an art major. And just got really intrigued with the mission of serving bloggers, serving creators, and went through the interview process to join the team as a on the customer success team. So I was doing support at the beginning.

Then after not even a year of doing support, I transitioned into migrations, where I helped our new large customers migrate over and get started using ConvertKit. And then a couple years into that transitioned over into account management. And then I want to say, A year and a half ago, we rebranded Account Manager to Creator Growth Manager because we felt that fit more of what we do at ConvertKit. Really, our mission is to help creators grow, help them build an engaged audience, help them monetize, help them really find success doing what they love every day in whatever facet that looks like for each different creator. And the story with the root and rise there is that like when I first joined even back eight years ago, the team was built of creators. So regardless of where people were in the company, if they were in marketing, if they were in success, if they were engineers, people across the entire company were creators themselves. They had side hustles. They had businesses. People were in lots of different stages of their creator journey. But a lot of people had their own projects and had their own things that they were working on. And I always wanted something like that for myself. And it took me four years of working at ConvertKit, being inspired by the creators that I work with every single day, to realize that I had this passion for fitness, wellness, for helping women specifically, build sustainable, healthy lives that they can actually keep, or sustainable, healthy habits they can actually keep to lead long, healthy lives.

And so Root & Rise was born as a result of being inspired by the work we do at ConvertKit and by the people on my team that were creators themselves, and then also by working with so many creators. So Root & Rise is just a little side hustle that I have, but that’s the story. That’s how that all got started.

Rob Marsh: We may come back to Root & Rise because I’m sure that you can give me some advice on how I stick with those habits. Totally. Yeah, let’s talk about creators and this whole evolution with newsletters. Before we started recording, I mentioned a couple of the other newsletter companies that have really gotten popular and people are talking about them. And I’ve seen ConvertKit create some new tools. And in fact, I think you guys just launched a plan a few weeks ago for newsletters that like, I think it’s 10,000 subscribers for free. It’s a pretty cool plan. Tell us about what’s going on in the newsletter industry right now.

Morgan Kitzmiller: Yeah, I think just in the industry as a whole over the last few years, like, I mean, like I said, I’ve been working with creators for eight years now. I’ve been working at ConvertKit for eight years. With people all across the board, that could be people with newsletters, people that have had newsletters for that amount of time. And there were also people that haven’t necessarily had newsletters, but maybe they were just still relying on email to sell their products, services, courses, you name it. But I think as we’ve seen some of these other players step up into the newsletter space, we’ve just seen the rise of publishing, writing online. I think COVID was also a pretty big Component in this of people were stuck at home people wanted something to spend their time in. And people were also finding more success online, growing their audiences. We also saw the rise of TikTok during that time.

There were so many things that happened during that time where I think a lot of people really just saw what was possible to be a creator, to grow an audience, to make money by publishing your writing and cultivating an engaged audience and building relationships through publishing. Yeah, now with now with a lot of big players in the game, we’re just seeing that become more and more popular. And our newsletter plan that we just launched free up to 10,000 subscribers, we really created that so that there’s a really low barrier to entry for people that want to get started. And even with 10,000 subscribers, like, I don’t think I’ve seen so many people, even with lists of 1,000 subscribers, build multiple six-figure businesses, make millions of dollars. I don’t think list size is necessarily correlated to the amount of success that you have. I think there’s so many different components that go into the success that you see. And so us creating that is just like opening the door for so many people to get started, to really invest in their creator business, whether they’re just starting off or whether they’ve been in it for a while and they have less than 10,000 subscribers, they can still send all of those emails for free.

Rob Marsh: