Let’s accept it! Email marketing is mighty helpful for all businesses, including lifestyle bloggers.
Unfortunately, spending hundreds of dollars a month for sending automated emails isn’t a smart business decision, especially not for new bloggers with limited resources.
If you are searching for a reliable and low-cost email service provider this review of Flodesk email marketing software will tell you everything you need to know.
What is Flodesk?
Flodesk is an email marketing platform, which, unlike other email service providers, offers a flat rate pricing model for unrestricted access. Both beginner and expert-friendly, Flodesk is a perfect choice for small business owners with a limited budget.
It offers stunning templates and allows you to send unlimited emails. Using the platform, you can even automate the workflow. There is no limit on how many subscribers you can have or how many emails you send per month.
Flodesk Review: TL;DR
- Powerful email marketing platform with an intuitive email builder.
- Offers beautiful email templates that you can use to design emails.
- You can connect Flodesk with multiple third-party services.
- Pricing is independent of the email list size or the number of emails you send.
- You can use a landing page from its collection to collect email addresses on your website.
- Offers a 30-day free trial without a credit card.
- Allows unlimited usage against a flat fee per month.
Who is Flodesk for?
Anyone who needs email marketing software can use Flodesk. Bloggers, affiliate marketers, e-commerce store owners, authors (selling books through their websites), etc., can all use this platform.
As long as your business requires communicating with your readers and customers, you can use Flodesk.
Flodesk Pros & Cons
Flodesk Pros:
- Unlimited everything for a fixed monthly price.
- Easy setup.
- Full email workflow automations.
- Allows you to create beautiful emails.
- Customer support is excellent.
- Allows easy list migration from other platforms.
- Offers third-party integrations. You can even connect with Zapier.
Flodesk Cons:
- Workflow tags are a bit difficult to use.
- Email automation is not very advanced.
Flodesk Review: Features
Flodesk offers many features offered by other famous email service providers. Let’s look into some of the most important features.
Intuitive Email Builder
The Flodesk email marketing software offers an intuitive email builder. Its drag-and-drop interface will allow you to design emails people love to read. You can always start with a premade template.
You can quickly customize the template using the drag-and-drop feature. There are various elements available that you can add to your email. There are options for changing colors, fonts, images, etc.
With this flexibility, you can design stunning emails in just minutes and also ensure that they match your brand’s look and feel.
Stunning Templates
If you don’t want to create emails from scratch, Flodesk offers a wide range of templates that you can use to design emails people love to read.
You just need to select a template and start customizing its design to ensure that it reflects the design language of your business.
There are different categories of templates available such as:
- Welcome
- Share news
- Say thanks
- Make money
- Inspire, etc.
All templates have responsive designs so that you can send beautiful emails to both desktop and mobile users. You can preview your emails for both desktop and mobile devices before sending them to your subscribers.
Beautiful Forms & Landing Pages
How many subscribers you get will depend on how well you attract them to sign up. This is where you will need a well-designed opt-in form or a landing page. These are tools to capture email ids.
You can use Flodesk to create beautiful opt-in forms and landing pages that you can easily embed on your website. There are templates available for these tools that you can edit any template with a custom message, font, color, etc., to create a stunning form to grow your subscribers or contact list.
Flodesk allows different types of forms such as inline, popup, and full-page forms. You can even decide when and who to show these forms. You can decide to get notified when a subscriber opts in.
These forms and landing pages are all responsive, and hence, they look fabulous on any device.
Email Automation
To ensure that more people are subscribing and your business earns more profits, you must automate your email marketing efforts. Unfortunately, the email automation features of Flodesk are not as robust as its major competitors.
Email automation can be used to send welcome emails or other emails based on various actions taken by subscribers. These actions are called triggers. For example, every time there is a new subscriber, you don’t need to manually send a welcome email or perhaps a video guide for your courses or products.
You can use Flodesk to decide when to shoot an automated email workflow. There are four available workflow templates. You can create a custom workflow if you want.
Creating workflows is simple. You start by selecting a trigger and a subscriber segment and then build a workflow using conditions and actions.
For subscribers and potential customers who need a lot of nurturing, you can create lengthy workflows. However, remember not to send too many automated emails in quick succession because those who join your email list can consider that spam.
Subscriber Segmentation
For any small business, subscriber segmentation is important to send hyper-personalized emails. With the Flodesk email marketing platform, you can segment your subscribers in various ways.
Flodesk will even allow you to color-code each segment. You can segment your email list based on factors like the link they clicked on, the channel through which they subscribed, and more.
However, if you want to segment your subscribers based on the links they click, you can do so only during a workflow. There are options available for adding new subscribers to an existing segment, removing subscribers from a segment, and even merging segments.
Segmentation helps you to manage your email list way more effectively and ensure that highly targeted emails land in their inboxes. This ensures that your subscribers find you relevant and also feel as if you are talking directly to them.
Organizing Folders
You may build hundreds of beautiful emails, workflows, and forms that perform well. But keeping them organized is necessary. This is where Flodesk folders come in. You can organize your emails, workflows, and forms in different folders.
For example, you may send out a specific type of newsletter every Friday or once every week. So, you can organize all those newsletters in an aptly named folder.
Creating folders is simple. You start by navigating to your email or workflow or form listing page, click on the large ‘Folder’ button and then create a folder and fill in a name for your folder. Finally, you can easily move your content to a folder either during the folder creation or later.
Flodesk Analytics
Flodesk doesn’t have advanced analytics features, but whatever they provide is enough to help you develop a more effective email marketing strategy.
It provides various important data points such as:
- How many emails were sent and delivered?
- How many people opened your emails?
- How many times a particular email has been opened?
- How many clicks were made?
There are more options like open rate, click rate, opens by device, bounces, unsubscribes, spam, etc. You can get an overview, but you can drill down further and find details like time of delivery, opened, clicked, etc.
Based on the details, you can adjust email delivery timings, create different email designs and write more engaging emails.
To check your email analytics, log in to your Flodesk account from any browser and visit your ‘Emails’ dashboard. Hover your mouse cursor on any sent email and then click on view results.
You can also see analytics data for individual subscribers including lifetime open & click rates, the total number of emails they opened, and so on.
Integrations
This is where Flodesk needs to improve. They have direct integrations available for Shopify and Instagram, but that’s all! However, they do have Zapier integration available, which allows you to connect to additional third-party apps like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, WebinarJam, and more.
If you are interested or if you need, you can see the full list of integrations here.
Flodesk Pricing
Flodesk has simple pricing. There is only one plan that costs $38 a month. If you select annual payment, you need to pay $418 (one month free).
For that price you get:
- Unlimited emails
- Unlimited subscribers
- Unlimited landing pages
- Unlimited automations
However, if you purchase through the link below you’ll get 50% OFF your first year.
Flodesk Alternatives
Flodesk vs Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the oldest email marketing apps. It can get incredibly pricey as your email list grows. Though Mailchimp offers templates for forms and emails, the options are quite limited.
Unfortunately, their forms aren’t very intuitive and visually appealing. But unlike Flodesk, Mailchimp has more integrations and powerful automation options that are suitable for professional email marketers.
Flodesk vs Convertkit
Similar to Mailchimp, Convertkit is also very pricey and you can end up paying up to $2,166 a month. That’s insane when compared to $418 a year for Flodesk.
Though Convertkit offers more advanced workflows and a greater number of templates & integrations, it has a very steep learning curve, making it unsuitable for rookies.
Flodesk vs ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a highly advanced email marketing suite that offers CRM integration, SMS marketing, contact scoring, split automations, and more. It comes with a very steep learning curve and is perfect for advanced marketers and medium to big companies.
Flodesk, on the other hand, is much simpler and focuses on email marketing, making it suitable for individuals, like travel bloggers and small business owners. Also, it is much cheaper considering that they charge only $38 no matter the size of your email list.
Flodesk FAQ
What is Flodesk used for?
Flodesk is an email marketing program that you can use to send promotional emails, newsletters, offers, and much more to your email list. It can even help you to create email lists using opt-in forms and landing pages. You can use email automations to supercharge your email marketing efforts.
Is Flodesk a landing page?
Flodesk is a SaaS application for email marketing. It has options to create landing pages that you can use for capturing emails. You can either be creative and build landing pages from scratch or you can use one of their many templates and customize them as per your needs. You can share the landing pages on your website, Facebook, or Twitter account.
Does Flodesk have a free version?
No, Flodesk does not have a free version, but they have a free trial that you can use for 30 days without giving up your credit card details. You can sign up to join Flodesk and test all its tools and functions for 30 days before giving them a dime.
Flodesk Review: Summary
Flodesk is a powerful email service provider that is perfect for small businesses on a tight budget.
It allows you to be creative and design beautiful emails, opt-in forms, and landing pages, all of which have responsive design and look great on every device.
Its single flat-rate model is perfect for lifestyle bloggers who cannot afford to pay a hefty price for growing email lists. It offers a decent amount of analytics data and automation capabilities that are sufficient for most users.
