Yes, you read that headline right! Grow now officially has a direct integration with ConvertKit, potentially saving you lots of money and time over using our Zapier connection.
But even bigger than this exciting announcement? How we got there and where we’re going from here with Grow!
If you can believe it, Grow, our first-party data solution and user engagement suite, is now two years old.
We’ve always designed Grow to be a flexible toolkit that natively integrates with your site, so that you can provide value to your reader in exchange for them logging in and consenting to personalized ads, in order to make sure our publishers make more money NOW and even more after third-party cookies go away.
But what truly makes Grow the first of its kind is that we’re doing all of this with a single sign-on across thousands of sites.
Now companies have built single sign-ons. They’ve built user engagement suites. But no one has combined them with the intent to usher in a new privacy-centric Web3.
There has never been a product like this before. And it’s why we’ve always remained flexible, taking publisher feedback to drive our roadmap.
After all, how could we create native experiences for sites without talking to those sites? And how could we deliver value to readers when no one knows readers better than publishers?
That’s what led us to invest so heavily in our Subscribe features, from Spotlight Subscribe to the newsletter-changing Exclusive Content.
And most importantly — and what this blog post is about — is how we ended up with a ConvertKit direct integration.
Our Zapier integration came quickly on the runaway success of Spotlight Subscribe, as publishers quickly wanted to automate their incredible growth in sign-ups.
But we heard that Zapier can become both pricey and complex and that we needed to start adding in ESP integrations.
Who better to start with than ConvertKit, the most popular ESP used amongst the top Grow publishers, and one designed around the same publishers as Grow, content creators?
After adding your ConvertKit API to our new Integrations page under Settings in the Grow Dashboard, you’ll see the ability to add an action under each Subscribe widget.
You can now directly connect your ConvertKit Sequences, Tags and Forms to your Grow Spotlight Subscribe, Action Pack and Exclusive Content widgets.
For example, you could put users that sign up for one Spotlight Subscribe widget on your travel posts and put them inside a custom top destination ConvertKit sequence, while having a different Subscribe widget for your recipe book giveaway running on your food content.
By supporting multiple actions per each individual Subscribe and Exclusive Content widget, the possibilities with tags, sequences and forms are endless.
You can read more about the full power of the ConvertKit integration in our help doc.
We recognize that there are hundreds of different ESPs that Grow publishers can use, and we promise that ConvertKit is just the beginning.
Our plan is to work our way down the list of the most popular providers to make sure we’re helping the most publishers.
Up next, it’s looking like we’ll be adding integrations for MailerLite and Mailchimp, but this is, of course, subject to change, so make sure you request your ESP under the Integrations tab.
You may have searched high and low to find that ConvertKit integration in your Mediavine Dashboard and likely came up fruitless.
That’s because we have some incredibly exciting news to launch alongside our ConvertKit integration, and that’s the brand spankin’ new…
As promised since the beginning, our plan was to build a full fledged Grow dashboard, and we’ve delivered the start of that with Grow Publisher Portal.
This new portal is going to let us release new features and even the much anticipated analytics that our publishers have been asking for.
To access new features like ConvertKit, you will have to migrate your Dashboard account to your new Publisher Portal account, but don’t worry, we take care of importing your settings and make the migration as easy as possible.
Oh and one more thing you may have noticed while in the Grow Publisher Portal: It’s a pretty different coat of paint. And that’s thanks to our NEW Grow branding.
As part of the launch of the new Grow Publisher Portal, we’re unveiling a new Grow logo, color scheme and identity for Grow.
You’ll see it looks a lot less Mediavine than our typical products and maybe a little more akin to something you’d see out of Google.
Why? First, we were looking for a simpler, more trustworthy feeling for readers as they begin to encounter this logo on pages such as a login page asking for their email.
And second, it’s because — as we’ve been teasing for a long time — Grow is going to be for more than just Mediavine publishers and we needed a brand that reflected that.
We’ve been busy testing Grow with hundreds of external testers in order to ensure Grow works for sites that aren’t monetized by Mediavine.
Well, first, if you ever launch a second site (or third or tenth for some of you), you can start off growing your newsletter, traffic and first-party data right out the gate with Grow before you even qualify for Mediavine.
But more exciting is it’s important to remember that with Grow, we’re all in this together. The more sites that run Grow, the more readers will have accounts, and the more benefits readers will get by having an account.
Think about it from a reader’s perspective. If you consistently see Grow throughout the web, won’t you be more likely to create that account to gain Exclusive Content from all of your favorite sites versus just one?
To be truly successful, Grow will have to be ubiquitous across the web, going beyond Mediavine publishers. So please, tell your friends that aren’t with Mediavine (yet), it’s coming soon and they can sign up here.
Hopefully by now you see we’re serious when we say it’s your feedback that drives Grow. It’s what led us to double and triple down on our Subscribe features and build this ConvertKit integration.
What do you want to see next from Grow?
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Eric Hochberger
Over 20 years in business, Mediavine has been an independent publisher and the voice of thousands of independent publishers. Forging a path of innovation within digital publishing and advertising, Mediavine …
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