Flodesk review: a good email marketing tool
In this review, I’ll explain why I think Flodesk is a good email marketing tool for small business owners, and tell you how you can get 50% off your first year using my referral discount 🎉.
Before we dive into the Flodesk review and its pros and cons, a few words on email marketing. Email is a GREAT way to build long-lasting relationships with your clients or customers and drive repeat traffic to your website. Done well, email marketing is actually one of the most effective digital marketing strategies you can use - it easily outperforms search, social and influencer marketing, delivering interested visitors to your website where you can engage with them on your terms, drive sales and ultimately grow your business. Having a good email list also frees from the tyranny of social media algorithms that can turn off the taps on your traffic at any time.
And now for the Flodesk review…
There are a lot of tools to choose from for managing your email marketing - Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ConvertKit etc., but Flodesk is the one I use in my business and that I recommend to my clients who are mostly small business owners running service-based businesses. The reason? It’s easy to use, affordable and helps you manage your email with professional campaigns, automated email flows, flodesk segments, and designs that easily match the polish of much bigger brands.
Below are some of the key things you can easily do with Flodesk - these are the main reasons I love the platform and I think you will too, but you should be following these suggestions, whatever tool you decide to use, to supercharge your email marketing.
1. Set up automated emails to run your marketing on autopilot
If you’re a small business owner, you probably wear many different hats on a day-to-day basis - marketer, sales person, finance director etc, as well as providing whatever service it is that you offer your customers. I’m guessing the last thing you want is to have to learn complicated new software or systems. Great news, and one of the things I love most about this tool is its sheer simplicity. The Flodesk functionality could not be easier to master. The minimalist interface has a simple and intuitive menu that includes the four key functions of the tool:
Creating your emails
Setting up forms to capture subscribers
Managing your subscribers
Setting up automated email campaigns
Flodesk is a super easy platform to master, even for people who are new to email marketing.
2. Create compelling opt-in forms that help you grow your email list
To do email marketing, the first thing you need is a list to market to! Starting or growing your email list begins with enticing your audience to sign up in the first place. And to get people to hand over their email address, you will need to provide them with a compelling reason to do so. How you phrase your opt-in message matters, and clearly communicating what value you will provide to subscribers is undoubtedly important. But even if you nail both of these, having a lacklustre design, or just a form that fails to catch the eye or capture the imagination may mean your message gets ignored. With Flodesk’s beautiful forms, this is one hurdle you can avoid. With gorgeous templates to choose from, you can create high-impact forms in mere minutes. Below is a screenshot of the popup form I created for my website, which took me all of five minutes to create, test and launch on my Squarespace website.
Once you have the basics in place, you might also want to set up some lead magnets to further build up your list.
3. Use forms on your site to capture subscribers
Squarespace makes this easy - under the Forms menu item, you can create two different form types to capture subscribers:
Popup forms can be used on the home or landing pages on your website to capture new visitors
Or inline forms, to display throughout your site, in the footer area, on blog posts etc.
As well as customising the forms themselves, you have complete control over the success message that appears after someone signs up to your mailing list, ensuring that every last detail of your email marketing is completely within your control, and totally on-brand.
Each form adds users to the segment that you specify, so you can clearly analyse and measure what’s working and what you need to tweak. You can use these segments later when you set up your automated campaigns and workflows.
Once you’re happy with all elements of your form, you just paste a simple piece of code into your website - Flodesk provides instructions for how to do this in all the major content management systems (Squarespace, WordPress etc.). You don’t need to know a lick of code, or even have any design skills to create gorgeous, impactful and high-performing email capture forms. Lovely.
4. Create well-designed emails to stand out from the pack
With more and more emails competing for our ever-dwindling attention, having highly-engaging design is important. Flodesk’s templates are immaculate, they are optimised for mobile (which of course is how most of your audience will read your emails these days), and they couldn’t be easier to create.
For every email you want to set up, you can choose from a selection of really attractive pre-designed templates under themed topics, including:
Welcome
Thank you
Share news
Make money
Inspire
Within each of these themes, you’ll find a selection of appealing designs and layouts, that beautifully combine text and image blocks to create a ‘wow’ factor your audience will love. Each one is fully customisable with your font, logo and brand colours (which you can save within the colour palettes, for easy selection as you create additional templates). You have full control over text alignment and spacing, and you can customise your layouts to include elements like link bars, social icons, buttons and so on, maximising the opportunities for engagement with your subscribers.
5. Automate your email marketing with custom flows
Email is not a one-size fits all medium. Timely, relevant and personalised campaigns are key to making this channel a success. Automated email campaigns triggered by subscriber behaviour not only have better open rates, but they also account for over 75% of all email marketing revenue (source: Digital Marketing Institute). As with the forms and emails, Flodesk allows you to automate your campaigns using common workflow sequences.
You can create your own unique workflow from scratch, or choose from templated workflows that are based on specific campaign sequences (a welcome sequence, a nurture sequence, a sales sequence etc). You select triggers that begin each workflow, (eg: when a new user signs up to this segment, send them a welcome message) and customise each step in the sequence (after 2 weeks, send a follow up message, after 4 weeks send an offer email etc).
These automated campaigns are a great way to nurture leads and turn interested browsers into committed customers, and they work for you around the clock, without you even having to think about it.
So these are just a few of the reasons I think Flodesk will really appeal to small business owners or time-poor marketers. If you are ready to raise your email marketing game - give it a try and let me know how you get on.
Get 50% off Flodesk here (only $19/month)*
* Disclosure: I didn’t write a Flodesk review for this reason, but I do get a small referral fee if my readers sign up to Flodesk using this link. This doesn’t change what you pay to use the service (other than earning you a 50% discount). And please be assured I don’t recommend products unless I rate them highly and use them myself). Affiliate links and referral programs help fund the free content I provide on my website.
