Email Marketing for Service-Based Businesses
Whether you're a coach, creative, or consultant, you need to showcase your services in a polished way–that's why I love Flodesk.
Flodesk has totally changed the way I run my business - maybe that’s because it is specifically designed with small business owners in mind. Instead of trying to create sales pages in one software, run my email marketing on another platform, and then integrate my newsletter sign-up on my website to feed into my CRM - I can do this all now through Flodesk.
My newsletter signups now come from an embedded Flodesk form that seamlessly feeds into my audience list on Flodesk (with the ability to tag where the contact is coming from). They are sent an email automation sequence when they sign up. My clients are tagged separately and fed into Flodesk from my email contacts. Anyone who signs up for one of my group coaching courses is automatically added to their own segment - whether they come from a sales page, also hosted on Flodesk, or a form that I’ve created on Flodesk that’s embedded on my website or posted on social media, or in a paid ad. Flodesk helps me track my customers and how much each person has spent.
Here are some of my favorite Flodesk features:
Emails (what I use to send out my newsletter each week)
Flodesk offers professional-looking, graphic design-level templates that are drag-and-drop, so there's no coding needed.
You can also share and save whole templates, workflows, and even sections of your emails (for instance, like your footer block) as Favorites to re-use. This feature has saved me a TON of time in not having to reformat every single aspect of every newsletter every time.
While designing your emails, you can also preview in desktop and mobile views, unlike other software that has you do this at the end, and you must continually navigate back to make any corrections.
Flodesk also gives you the ability to include or exclude different segments, individuals, or even a specific list of contacts uploaded as a CSV file in each email campaign, which is great to make sure you’re never spamming or overwhelming your audience, and for keeping unsubscribe counts low.
Forms (what I use for newsletter sign-ups, webinar registrations, and lead magnets).
Forms can be embedded into your website, so that any signups feed directly into your email list.
You can create pop-up forms, embed forms, video forms, and link in bio forms.
I love using forms for lead magnets in particular - you can set it up so that if someone signs up through your form, they’re added to a segment in your contacts, and then an automation is triggered.
The other way I love using forms (in conjunction with Workflows or automations) is for quiz results. Flodesk also has an integration with Interact Quiz software and Typeform, so if you use that for building more robust quizzes, it works seamlessly.
Checkouts (what I use to sell my subscriptions and group coaching programs)
Checkouts are great for offering your services, such as a course or a group coaching program (like The Social School)!
You can create sales pages and offer discounts, upsells, waitlists, and more.
There are also e-commerce blocks to sell digital products and downloads (also great for lead magnets!).
You can also include features like count down timers, limit the quantity of people who sign up, set end dates, and include waitlists.
Workflows (what I use for group coaching reminders and welcome sequences)
Workflows help you nurture your client relationships without having to do everything manually.
If someone clicks on a certain component of an email or checkout, you can set it up so that they're added to a segment, which can trigger an automation.
These automations are a HUGE time saver. While I am at the stage of my business where this kind of task might be handed off to my virtual assistant, since it’s automated, my VA can spend time on helping me with other tasks!
Analytics (what I use to see what is performing and where tweaks can be made)
Flodesk’s robust analytics help you dig into the performance of each aspect of the platform.
When I send out my weekly newsletter, I really like seeing how many clicks each component receives. Did the how to video section perform best this week? Did the reminder that my group coaching course is opening up again perform best? Did the news section have the most clicks? Or were people more interested in the tools section that week? The ability to review this data at such a detailed level has helped influence how I design my emails and what kind of content I put out on social media as well.
Branding (what I use to maintain visual consistency)
If you’ve ever taken one of my courses, you know that brand consistency is very important to me, so I love that Flodesk has global brand settings, so you don’t have to update your brand colors, fonts, logos, and social links every time!
You also have the ability to create a custom handle so that your sales pages don’t seem completely off brand when you’re being (subtly) pinged over from your website.
Integrations (what I use to make sure all my systems and softwares work together)
Flodesk connects to Stripe, Apple Pay, and Google Pay (as well as Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay) so that you can accept payments directly from your Checkouts.
And they recently launched an integration with Canva so you can import your designs directly into Flodesk. No more saving, downloading, and re-uploading! You can import these as a
I have also set up a lot of integrations with Zapier so that my contacts are synced across my email, Flodesk, and CRM.
I love that you pay one set monthly price – your plan never increases as your email list grows. When you are trying to keep costs low, especially in the early days of business, this factor was a major plus to me.
Flodesk helps make running my business simple, polished, and streamlined!
Get 50% off your first year of Flodesk!
https://flodesk.com/c/I1NEX6 (affiliate link as a Flodesk Partner)
PS - I also hear rumors that they’re going to add a subscription feature… woohoo!
