My Flodesk journey, From email ghoster to confident Email Marketer

This blog post is sponsored by Flodesk who I am proudly a partner of, and I have shared affiliate links in the article. All the words and opinions are my own though and this is a tool that I very happily use every day in my business.

When I started running my business full time about 6 years ago one of the aspects I had always struggled with was email marketing. I was using a tool that my brain just didn’t get, and because I found it difficult to use, I pretty much just didn’t.

I was that person who popped into my subscribers inbox once every six months promising consistency but never delivering. 

One day everything changed. 

I was taking a marketing course and the teacher mentioned Flodesk as an option. I had never heard of it before but she talked about how this new company was an industry disruptor, founded by women, and prioritised creating beautiful email templates. As a graphic designer who was already unhappy with her current set up my interest was piqued. 

I decided to sign up for a trial and give it ago and not to be too dramatic or anything but it was an utter revelation. It was simple enough that I found it very intuitive to use, the templates were beautiful which made my little graphic designer heart very happy and when I signed up and was committed to paying for it, it actually meant that I was committed to actually using it (comforted knowing that the price wouldn’t change as my list grew).

I created a welcome workflow, set up some lead magnets and in the last 5 years I have slowly grown my list from 250 neglected subscribers to 5000+ engaged subscribers with an open rate that I am really happy with. 

Favourite Flodesk tools 

When I started out, the reason that I loved it was that it felt simple. Other email tools were intimidating to me. At this point in my business I didn’t need complex and difficult to understand tools, I just wanted to be able to segment my list and send emails out regularly, with easy to use templates. 

Now that I am further along in my business journey and since so many new features have been added I can do more complex tasks, but I still find Flodesk so intuitive and easy to use. 

Some of my favourite tools that I rely on now are:

Link Actions: So for example when I am in a launch I can include a link people can click if they no longer want to receive emails about the launch but want to stay on my list, and it adds their email to a specified segment

The templates: Even as a designer sometimes I can feel overwhelmed by a blank page and so being able to start from a template and then customise them to fit my brand saves me so much time. As a result I always know my emails are going to look great. 

Workflows: I’m always looking for ways to be able to automate aspects of my business, and so being able to set up workflows has been so valuable. In so many different cases I can set up a series of emails for my subscribers to work through and it means they don’t miss out on any of the important information. 

Lessons learnt 

I’ve also learnt quite a few lessons over the last 5 years of sending emails and am still learning every day. Here are some of the most important lessons:

Being consistent: I’ve realised that as with most areas of my business, consistency really is rewarded. Aside from a few small minor gaps I have been sending emails weekly to my list. It has helped to bring in clients, has meant people can get to know me, and also has brought me money when I’ve promoted various offers. 

Tell stories: I’ve often heard so many people talk about how storying telling is so important when you run a business (check out this podcast episode with Hilary Salzman if you want to learn more about storytelling) and from writing these regular emails to my list it has taught me how to write better stories. I still have a lot to learn, but I think they are far more engaging than they were in the past and now I really enjoy that aspect of writing emails. 

Growing an audience: I was going to call it a community, but let’s be honest an email list isn’t a community, because they don’t interact with each other, but one of my absolute favourite aspects of having a mailing list is getting to know the people on it. I absolutely love when something I send resonates with people and they reply and share something of themselves with me, or somethings even introduce themselves and tell me more about what they do. These connections are precious and so appreciated! 

Safety: I don’t know if anyone else relates to this, but every time I see a big (or small business) share that their instagram account has been hacked and they have all over a sudden lost access to their main marketing channel, it makes me very nervous. That is why I have been very intentional about diversifying where I grow my audience, and I have actually prioritised growing it over the last few years just in case that was to ever happen to me too. 

If you want to hear more about the ways I have grown my email list and what has been the most successful you can listen to this solo episode of the Building your Brand podcast.

I’m hoping that through this blog post I have 1. Convinced you of how important email marketing is for your business and 2. That Flodesk is a brilliant email marketing tool worth checking out. I will keep raving about it thanks to the impact it has had on my business. 

If you have any questions about it then feel free to pop me a message and I would be happy to answer them and if having read this you want to give Flodesk a go (and I really recommend you do) then you can use my affiliate code to get 50% off your first year.