I've been got!!!

There’s been a lot of chatter on the interwebz lately about Mailchimp’s upcoming price increase… and about how Kit is swooping in with a very slick, well-timed counteroffer.

Now, here’s my confession to you, friend: I’ve been got!

After literal years of having Kit on my radar – and finding just about every reason under the sun not to make the switch – I’m finally taking the plunge.

And I want to tell you why. Not necessarily to encourage you to switch, but because it’s a fascinating lesson in “getting inside your audience’s heads” that you can borrow for your own business.

To start, you should know I’ve wanted to leave Mailchimp (for Kit, specifically) for a while.

With Mailchimp, I was running into deliverability issues I couldn’t get straight answers on. A few tech limitations that I knew Kit handled more elegantly. And a general sense that Kit was just… built better for people like me.

(I mean, I like them enough that I’m literally going to the conference they host, Craft & Commerce, this summer in Boise. Anyone else??)

Despite knowing all of this (and knowing it for quite a while), I still hadn’t made the switch.

The pricing felt comparable enough not to bother. Learning a whole new system didn’t feel like the right use of my time. And of course, there was the Big Bad: migrating everything I had built in Mailchimp over the years to Kit. (Yikes!)

Frankly, I was convinced I’d botch something irreparably, lose subscribers to the internet void, and emerge from the other side a broken woman.

Which meant “make the switch” remained firmly in the back of my brain as a “when I get around to it” task.

But then Kit did something smart.

A P.S. in a newsletter caught my eye: Kit was offering 25% off annual plans for new customers making the switch. But, more importantly (as least to me), they were offering migration support from a real human on their team.

I clicked through to the landing page, and found myself reading through to the bottom.

The page wasn’t just “here’s why Kit is great" or written to appeal to anyone.

It was specifically, deliberately written for Mailchimp users who had been meaning to make a switch for the last X years.

Every single section addressed one of my hesitations. My fears around pricing, around migration. And just the right amount of urgency about switching before my next Mailchimp bill came in.

Subheads that could have been pulled directly from my internal monologue. (I mean, I’ve quite literally said “I’ve been meaning to make the switch” out loud before.)

Even this glorious microcopy under the CTA button (“we’ll help you move over so nothing gets left behind”) is doing objection-busting work.

For context: it turns out I’m not even going to be affected by the Mailchimp price increase!

Didn’t matter. With the limited-time discount, I had an incentive to act. And when that was combined with migration support* that eliminated my biggest barrier? This to-do that was a “maybe someday” box became a top priority overnight.

The lesson you can steal from Kit for your own business

Kit didn't reinvent their product; they created a specific offer, for a specific person, at a specific moment. And then used their copy to systematically dismantle every reason that person might still say no.

Which is easily one of the most underrated moves in marketing.

Most of us spend our time focused on why someone should buy (the benefits, the outcomes, the features, all that jazz).

And yeah, that stuff matters! But it was Kit going directly after the reasons I was using not to buy that finally got me over the line. After all, I already knew the logic for buying. I just needed my excuses taken away.

So here's the question I'll leave you with: do you know what's actually stopping people from saying yes to you?

And no, not what you think is stopping them. What they've actually told you. In a sales call, in a reply to your email, in a "not right now" response to a proposal.

You don't always have to overhaul anything. Sometimes, it’s enough to get more specific about who you're talking to… and directly call out whatever it is that’s actually getting their way.

~Nicole