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You may already use a system to collect emails so you can communicate directly with readers who want to hear from you. If you\u2019re unfamiliar with email marketing systems, they offer a powerful way for you to interact with your audience.\n\nIf you have a new book coming out, for example, these are the people who would want to know about it. If you\u2019re 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.\n\nIf you haven\u2019t started yet, I highly recommend you begin building an email list comprised of ideal readers.\nStart List-Building with MailChimp\nI started out with MailChimp and used it for years. MailChimp was free, and free sounded like a good place to start.\n\nI liked MailChimp\u2019s option to pull content from my website\u2019s 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.\n\nI limped along with MailChimp by choosing a simple template and avoiding any customization. I didn\u2019t 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.\n\nOver 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.\n\nThen I heard about the new kid on the block: ConvertKit. It\u2019s 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.\nThe Pros and Cons I saw in ConvertKit and MailChimp\nEvery system comes with its own set of pros and cons. Here\u2019s what I observed at the time I was deciding.\nTemplates\nConvertKit didn\u2019t 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\u2019t a huge concern.\nEmails Generated from RSS Feed\nConvertKit draws from a blog\u2019s RSS feed to generate an email, but doesn\u2019t automatically send it like MailChimp does. You have to go in and manually send it.\n\nI 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.\nUnsubscribe System\nOne 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\u2019t have any way to manage their subscription; they're just out. I didn\u2019t like that.\nStats\nConvertKit didn\u2019t 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.\nSimplicity\nCompared 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.\nSubscriber-Centered vs List-Driven\nConvertKit takes a subscriber-centered approach, whereas MailChimp organizes by lists, and a single person may be on multiple lists. I found that list-philosophy harder to manage and organize. I could easily tag a subscriber in ConvertKit to indicate the things that reader is inte...