In this blog post I will be sharing my affiliate link for Flodesk. If you would like to give it a go use my link to access the free trial and then get 50% off your first month or year. If you’ve been a long time listener of the Building your Brand podcast then you will probably have heard me talk about my love of Flodesk. I think I mentioned it for the first time in Episode 3 back in 2022 and at that point I had already been using it for quite a while.
I’ve had a mailing list for over 10 years now, but I used to be with another email provider 🙊. I only joined that one because it was the one that everyone was with. I was on the free plan, which was fine but even though I would consider myself a fairly technology savvy person, me and this particular email tool didn’t get along. My brain just couldn’t make sense of how it worked, and it didn’t feel intuitive to me. As a result it caused a barrier for me and I was that annoying business owner who would send emails maybe once every 6 months. People must have been so confused, lol!
My list didn’t grow, I didn’t feel excited about sending emails and frankly I wasn’t effectively marketing my business.
In 2020 it all changed
The pandemic was in full swing and I was hunkering down getting nerdy about all things ‘marketing’ for my business. I did a marketing course taught by Menekse Stewart. In one of the sessions Menekse mentioned Flodesk. At the time I hadn’t heard of it before, but studying on this course had convinced me that email marketing was going to be important for my business.
I had just come out of maternity leave with my second child and I was ready to take my business that I had had to pause, and grow it. I wanted to great a business I felt proud of and a business that supported me and my family.
As I have mentioned, I was already not a fan of the email marketing provider I was with at the time and I was rarely showing up for my business in that space. So with the promise of beautiful templates and a fixed monthly or annual fee that wouldn’t change as my email list grew I eagerly jumped ship and honestly I have never looked back.
At the time it was in beta and didn’t have all of the functionality that some of the email platforms had, but I didn’t need anything complicated so it worked perfectly for me. It had a really great affiliate programme which was appealing for me as I was doing more teaching and working with small business owners who were often asking for my recommendations.
I’m honestly so glad that I stuck with it as a tool for my business. It’s been developed even more; the features it now has and the new features being released regularly are absolutely brilliant.
So how has it transformed my email marketing?
Since signing up to Flodesk nearly 3 years ago I have been consistently emailing my subscribers. I’ve gone from emailing once every 6 months to weekly. My email list has grown from 250 subscribers to over 5k organically and I’ve sold lots of courses and found new clients thanks to my mailing list. It is the backbone of my business and something I am determined to continue to invest time in. Unlike followers on social media your email list is something you own so is a much safer marketing tool for your business.
(Top tip: make sure you back-up your email list regularly so that you always have access to an up to date list of your subscribers! Flodesk makes this super easy to do!)
And that hobby/side business that I mentioned at the start is now thriving and a growing business that I do indeed feel so proud of!
Let me share with you my favourite features:
- There are super easy to use customisable templates. As a graphic designer I want to create emails that look beautiful. The drag and drop layouts and the pre-designed templates make this so easy to do in Flodesk. There is no coding involved and you can make sure everything is on brand by saving your logo and brand colours in your profile so it all looks consistent and is enjoyable for subscribers to read!
TOP TIP from a designer: When you create your email newsletters make sure you don’t centre-align large amounts of text as it makes it really difficult for people to read and most will give up reading so you might miss out on sales. Click here to see a post where I explain in more detail.
- LINK ACTIONS. This is a fairly new feature but I am obsessed already. Basically you can create an action when someone clicks on a link. I found this really handy when I launched my course recently. I set up a link action that if people weren’t interested in hearing about the course but wanted to stay on my list then they could click on a link in the email and automatically be added to a ‘not interested’ segment. This then excluded them from receiving future emails about the course.
- WORKFLOWS. I use the workflows in Flodesk in so many ways. The main one is my welcome sequence. When someone signs up to my list they usually get a lead magnet sent to them automatically, (At the moment it’s my Rejection Trello Template – sign up here if you want it) and then they get a sequence of emails following that which introduce me to them and let them know what I do. I get some lovely replies to those emails which is always a reminder how important a welcome sequence is.
- SIGN UP FORMS. This might be an odd feature to highlight because surely this is just a given with any email platform, which, yes it is. But as with everything in Flodesk there are really beautiful and customisable forms so when people visit them (either a page of its own or embedded on your website) they look great and on brand. Flodesk have also recently released some really fun and creative new form features like video forms, spinner forms and also countdown forms! These really make an impression and make potential subscribers more likely to sign up.
There are so many more features you can use and explore like checkouts which I haven’t even mentioned so I would definitely recommend giving the free trial a whirl.
If you are struggling with your email marketing at all, Flodesk might be the boost you need in the same way it was for me!
Let me know if you give it a go!
