How to Set Up an Email Automation in Kit (ConvertKit Tutorial)

If you’ve ever opened your Kit account, clicked into Visual Automations, and stared at a blank canvas wondering where to even start, you’re not alone. Setting up Kit email automation trips up almost everyone the first time, and it’s not because you’re bad at tech. It’s because most tutorials teach the steps out of order.

Here’s the golden rule before you touch a single automation: don’t start with the automation. You need the building blocks in place first, or you’ll end up staring at empty dropdown menus with nothing to select. Let’s walk through the right order, one piece at a time.

Why Your Kit Automation Feels Stuck Before You Even Start

Picture this. You open the Visual Automations builder, ready to connect your welcome sequence to new subscribers. You click to add a trigger, and the dropdown for “which form” is empty. So is the dropdown for “which sequence.”

That happens because an automation in Kit is just a connector. It links two things that already have to exist: a form, where people join your list, and a sequence, what they receive once they do. Without those two pieces built first, Kit email automation has nothing to connect.

So before you open the Automations area at all, build these two pieces in this order:

1. A form
2. A sequence

Then, and only then, go build the automation that ties them together.

Step 1: Create Your Form First (The Entry Point)

Every automation needs a starting point, and in Kit, that starting point is your form. It’s how someone actually gets onto your list. Without one, there’s no trigger for your automation to watch for.

Log into Kit and head to Audience Growth, then Landing Pages & Forms. Click New, and choose Form from the dropdown.

You’ll be given four layout options. Choose Inline, then pick the Claire template as your starting style.

Building Out the Fields and Button

Click the plus icon to add a new entry field. On the right-hand side of the screen, choose Custom Field, then select First Name. This gives you a simple two-field form: name and email.

Scroll down and find the “Built with Kit” logo. Click it, then turn it off using the checkbox on the right so it doesn’t show on your published form.

Next, select the button itself and change the wording from the default “Subscribe” to something more action-focused, like “Download Here” or “Get Your Free Guide.” Then use the button style option on the right side of the screen to change the background color to match your branding and your website.

Naming and Publishing Your Form

Click the pencil icon in the top left corner to rename the form to something you’ll recognize later, tied to what it’s actually for. Something like “Welcome Sequence Opt-In” or the name of the specific lead magnet works well.

Quick tip: try putting the word FREEBIE or LEAD in all caps at the front of your form names. When you’re scanning your full list of forms in Kit later, everything groups together at a glance instead of getting lost in a random list.

Once you’re happy with it, hit Save and Publish in the top corner.

Adding the Form to Your Website – Watch Video

Adding the Form to Your Website

A published form in Kit isn’t live on your site yet. You still need to connect it. Make sure the Kit plugin is installed and synced with your website, then go to the page or post where you want the form to appear.

Add a Kit block directly to that page or post, then select the form you just created from the dropdown menu inside the block. Once that’s saved, your form is officially live and collecting subscribers. If you’re still working out where a form like this should live on your site overall, our beginner’s guide to starting a website is a good next stop.

Step 2: Create the Email Sequence (The Content)

Now that you have somewhere for people to join, you need something for them to actually receive. That’s where a sequence comes in. Think of a sequence as a folder that holds a series of emails, sent in order, on a schedule you control.

In Kit, head to Automation, then Email Sequences. Click New Sequence and choose a template. If you’ve saved one before, it’ll be waiting here. Otherwise, pick whichever starting layout you tend to use most.

Writing Your Emails

For each email in the sequence, you’ll get a subject line field and a space to write the content. You’ll also see a “Send this email” setting. The default is one day, but if you want the very first email to go out immediately when someone subscribes, change that to 0 days.

Once you’re finished with an email, toggle on Published in the top left corner. This part is easy to miss, but it matters. If an email isn’t toggled to published, it will not send, even if the automation connecting to it is live.

Adding More Emails and Naming the Sequence

To add another email, click Add Email on the right-hand side of the screen. Write the subject line and content, then set the number of days between this email and the one before it. Toggle it to published, just like the first.

Quick tip: a simple 3-part welcome series covers what most new subscribers need:

• Email 1 (0 days): Deliver the freebie or lead magnet, and introduce yourself.
• Email 2 (1–2 days later): Share value or tell a story. Teach something useful, or open up about why you do what you do.
• Email 3 (1–2 days after that): Show how you can help them further, kept soft rather than salesy.

Once all your emails are written and published, click the pencil icon in the top left to rename the sequence itself, so it’s easy to find later.

If writing three emails from scratch feels like the hardest part of this whole process, the Email Marketing Sprint walks you through exactly what to write and when to send it, so you’re never staring at a blank sequence wondering what comes next.

Step 3: Connect Them with a Visual Automation (The Engine)

Here’s the step everyone wants to jump to first, and now you’re finally ready for it. With your form and your sequence already built and published, the automation becomes almost embarrassingly simple.

In Kit, go to Automation, then Visual Automations. Click New Automation in the top right, then choose Start from Scratch and hit Start Building.

Setting the Trigger

Your first block will be an event. Choose Joins a Form, then select the exact form you created in Step 1 from the dropdown. Click Add Event to lock it in.

Setting the Action

Click the plus icon directly underneath the form event you just added. Make sure Action is selected as the type, then choose Email Sequence. From the dropdown, select the sequence you built in Step 2, and click Add Action.

That’s the whole engine. Your automation now reads like a simple sentence: when someone joins [Your Form], add them to [Your Sequence]. No complicated branching logic is required for a basic welcome automation, though you can absolutely layer in tags or conditional splits later as your strategy grows.

Naming and Activating

Click the pencil icon in the top left to rename the automation to something relevant, so future you knows exactly what it does at a glance.

Then, in the top right corner, toggle the automation on. This is the step that trips up more people than any other part of this process, so it gets its own section below.

Troubleshooting & Testing Your Kit Automation

Kit has two separate “on” switches, and they live in two different places, which is exactly why this trips people up:

• Your sequence emails need to be toggled to Published, found in the top left of each individual email.
• Your visual automation needs to be toggled on, found in the top right corner of the automation itself.

Both switches have to be flipped, or nothing will send. You can have a perfectly built automation connected to a perfectly written sequence, and still get silence in your inbox because one of these two toggles got skipped.

Testing Your Setup

Once everything is toggled on, test it. Submit your own form using a personal email address separate from the one connected to your Kit account. Confirm your Day 0 email lands right away, then check the timing on the following emails as their delays pass.

If your test email never arrives, check these in order:

• Is the visual automation toggled on in the top right?
• Is each sequence email toggled to Published in the top left?
• Does the trigger point to the correct form?
• Does the action point to the correct sequence?

Nine times out of ten, the fix is one of those four things.

Wrapping It Up

Kit email automation only feels complicated when you try to build the engine before you have any parts for it to run. Build your form first, write and publish your sequence second, and the automation itself becomes the easy part: a simple trigger connected to a simple action.

Once this basic version is live, you can layer in more later, like tags for segmenting subscribers or conditional paths based on what someone clicks. But for now, start small. Form, sequence, automation, in that order, every time. And if growing and converting that list is the piece you want more help with, the Email Marketing Sprint is built for exactly that.

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