Do you have a newsletter? If so, you might want to know this.Photo from DepositPhotosI’m not someone who likes change.Once I’ve learned how to use software or tech, I’m usually reluctant to abandon it. Yet this summer, I moved from my old email sending platform Mailerlite to the more sophisticated Kit (in case you were wondering, this is the platform formely known as ConvertKit).When it comes to all things tech, my mental shutters come clanging down and I lose the ability to think rationally. So the move has been a struggle. But I didn’t want to pay someone to do for me: I wanted to learn the software, and what it could do.It’s been a steep learning curveAnd it’s been frustrating, at times. But the tech support staff at Kit have been.. extremely patient.I’m pretty much there now: if you want to see how it all looks, feel free to subscribe to my weekly newsletter for creative professionals (and those who want to be).The move will make things much easier for me on the back end. But there are also a lot of new things I can now offer my readers. I have some exciting ideas for the rest of the year!Newsletters are still the best way to build a business.Unlike social media, you own your mailing list or following, and you have control over your content.You can use a newsletter to build relationships, to serve your audience, to sell your products or services without being beholden to an algorithm. Or a billionaire taking your favourite social platform and turning it into a binfire of bigotry and hate.If you already have a newsletter (or if you’re considering it), I thought I’d share why I moved, in case it’s useful.I started out collecting email addresses and sending out newsletters with Mailchimp. But I just didn’t get on with it. Nothing felt intuitive, and I found it hard to use. So I moved to Mailerlite, which I would still heartily recommend for beginners. (It’s also free, for up to 1000 subscribers.)The how-to videos are very clear, and once you grasp the basics, it’s quite easy to design a nice-looking template, make simple automations, and schedule newsletters to your list.So why leave Mailerlite?They recently upgraded the platform. This should have been good news. But though the new version looks great, they expected existing users to migrate from the classic version to Mailerlite 2.0 themselves.None of my previously sent newsletters would be saved, or the templates and automations I’d spend hours creating. I’d have to rebuild everything.This is a terrible way to treat loyal customers.I’d been comfortable with Mailerlite for years, and probably would have continued with it — even though I kept finding things I wanted to do, as my business grew, but couldn’t do without complicated workarounds.This finally gave me push to look elsewhere, and see what was on offer. (Note to anyone selling services online: if you don’t look after your current customers well, they’ll leave. And it’s much harder finding new clients for your services and products than it is keeping the existing ones happy!)How did I choose Kit?I read reviews of different newsletter platforms. I asked fellow coaches and writers for their opinions. And I played with the free trials from a couple of providers.I found that Kit has lots of features I wanted, good technical support, and really clear how-to videos as well as longer workshops on different aspects of growing a newsletter and an online business.As I had to rebuild everything anyway, I decided I might as well do it in Kit. It’s a tad more expensive than Mailerlite, but it also enables me to do a lot more.Features I’m enjoying:Setting up automations is very smooth, easy and intuitive. So over the next few weeks, I’ll create new, longer welcome sequences that will send automatically when people sign up for my newsletter or free course on growing a creative business, or when they buy specific products.I can easily sell products within emails and from their own landing pages. Uploading them was so easy. Mailerlite offered this, but as an additional paid service.It’s much easier for me to offer free resources for readers to download. Which means I’ll make more, and be able to support more of the creative professionals I love working with.It’s easy to send an automated thank-you email once someone has been on my mailing list a while. I’m planning to send rewards, freebies and discount coupons to people who have been opening my emails for three months, then every year after that.There are lots of resources Kit has created to help you grow your newsletter and business. Now I’m set up, I’m looking forward to diving into these!Why not SubStack?I’ve been asked this a lot lately. And to be clear, I have no particular axe to grind, and we should all use the tools that suit us best.I read and subscribe to several writers on the platform, including Austin Kleon, Daisy Buchanan and Ted Gioia. But SubStack just doesn’t feel right for me and my business.Partly, it’s aesthetic. I’m not a designer, but I do care how things look. There’s very little scope for customisation on SubStack, so all the newsletters created on the platform look very similar.My second objection is that SubStack seems to be far more intent on establishing its own brand than helping creators establish theirs. Users don’t have a newsletter, for instance: they have a SubStack.I want my readers to find out about creative process, building an audience for their work and making money from it. I also want them to learn about my coaching services, my books and the workshops I’ve recorded to support them. I don’t want to put my time, energy and focus into producing a newsletter that mainly promotes SubStack.Finally, the company recently raised an additional $100 million in investment capital. As a result, I suspect the business model will gradually get tweaked so it’s more about making money for shareholders than for the users.They already take a hefty 10% of everything you earn on the platform. In contrast, Kit takes nothing but its annual fee (though there are the usual processing fees for credit card payments).The results so far.I’ve sent out three weekly newsletters via Kit so far. They go out on Fridays at 11am, the same time I delivered via Mailerlite.My open rate is up 4%. This is impressive for newsletters sent out in August, when my open rate often falls below my more usual 50–60%.My click rate has nearly doubled, to 1.94%. Again, given that many of my readers are in the middle of the summer holidays, that’s impressive.I’ve only uploaded two products so far. My ebook, Creative Play; and my workshop on taming your inner critic. I’ve barely promoted either. Yet I’ve sold six books, for £35.94. Not bad! Once I’ve uploaded more of my workshops and books, this might become a real income stream, rather than a mere trickle.This has been a real time-suck! I’m still learning my way around Kit, so doing things far more slowly. But I can already see how I’m going to save time in the long run: it’s much easier to save blocks and insert them in different places, rather than remaking the same sections, again and again.Why I left Mailerlite for Kit. was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.