Have you tried Flodesk Free trial yet? If not, you should. Here is why.
Flodesk is a new email marketing service provider that comes with a promise saying "You’ll never be penalized for successfully growing your list again"!
The flat rate offered by Flodesk is really the highlight of this email marketing service.
Most email marketing services offer a pricing based on the number of contacts you have or the number of emails you will be sending in a day or in a month. For example MailChimp offers certain free emailing services for upto 2000 contacts and charges a monthly fee after that.
Though Flodesk offers a flat rate of $38 per month or $418 for a year for unlimited number of contact, unlimited number of email sends and all of its features.
If you ask me that is a great deal, if you have good email list and you are expecting to grow the list in the coming days and want to use email automation features.
Of couse, email marketing providers like MailChimp offers free plan for contact upto 2000 users but when you start to use other advanced features, you will need to pay.
So let's quickly look at the features offered by Flodesk
If you are a small business owner and your email marketing needs are sending welcome mail, sending special offers, creating a email drip campaign, send a nurture sequence, send sales sequence etc, flodesk can be your best friend.
If you aren't sure, you can try it on its free trial with all the features.
Flodesk offers 30 days of free trial and it includes all of their features. Plus no credit card information is needed. All you need is your name and email address.
Let's gets started with flodesk free trial
Step 1 : Click on the link to go to Flodesk
Click on 'Try it Free' and begin the signup process.
Type your email address from which you want to send email campaigns and your preferred passoword. In case you want to send email from a different sender email, you can change it from the settings.
Once you sign-up with the details, you will receive the confirmation email on your inbox. Once you confirm it, you are ready to get started with flodesk.
Once you click on the confirmation email from Flodesk, you will be taken to flodesk signin and later to email designing page. It will look like this.
On the left side of the screen you can see options to pick your goal. Those are email templates suitable for various categories.
By clicking on various goals and scrolling through the templates, you can familiarize yourself with all the email templates that are readily available for you.
We are going to explore "Welcome" emails.
If you're a small business owner, content creator or similar, sending welcome email can be very powerful in creating your brand identity and brand awareness.
When you select "Welcome" from the list of email goals, you will be presented with a list of templates to choose from.
I have scrolled all the way down and selected the las template.
By clicking on the icons you can preview how the email will look on desktop and mobile. Click on 'Customize' to start editing the template and making it your own.
Flodesk customization offers options to edit every single element on the template. So you have a lot of creative control on the process of making the email template aligning with your brand identity.
You can edit the email template fonts. Most of the popular fonts are available. On top of that you can also edit the font weight as well.
In case you want to change the layout, you can do that too. Click on the gear icon on the block and pick another one.
Flodesk follows the latest block editing capabilities, hence you can edit pretty much anything you see on the block - background colour, padding, layout and more.
If you want to add image to a block, you can easily achieve it with a couple of clicks.
The best part is that you can select pictures from Unsplash- a royalty free stock image sharing platform, right from flodesk itself. You can also add Gifs too.
You can also add buttons, edit its links and do quite a lot of things.
Similarly you can add all your social media profiles in your email body.
Select the social media block and click to edit the links. There are more social media icons to choose from in case you want to add more.
If you are keeping the social media block but you haven't added the social links, flodesk will send you a notification to add the links.
When such notification comes, click on 'Continue' and add those links.
In case if you don't want the social media block or any block for that matter you can 'Delete' them. If you delete any block by accident you can 'Undo' the action as well by clicking on the undo button on the right bottom corner.
Once you are done with all the edits, click on the 'Next' button on top right corner to finish creating the email.
When you do that, flodesk will send you popup notifications, if you've forgotten to do any steps.
You can see, flodesk here came up with a notification to add address in the footer. It is by law to add address of the publisher when sending promotional emails. You can just click on continue to add the address and it will be shown on the footer.
Alternatively you can go to settings and add your address.
You can click on the footer and on the right side window select 'Address' and 'Manage Address' button to add your address from Flodesk settings. You can also do that from account settings too.
If you have done everything correctly and happy with how the email template looks, you can go ahead and click the 'Next' button on top right corner.
It will take you to a page where you have to confirm the Sender information.
"From Name" will be the name shown when someone receives your email and 'sender email address' would be the email you've used to sign up for flodesk.
You can choose the name you want to show your email recipients. Some people it keep it simply their full name or company name or a combination of both.
Sender email can be changed if you want to send emails from a different email address than the one you've signed up for. Click on the link where it says it can be edited to change it.
Next step is to add a subject line for your newly created email.
Add a catchy subject line that will make someone open the email. Even if you have the most amazing content or the prettiest design, they are all of no value if the email has not been opened by a user. That is why Subject lines become very important.
If you can entice people with your subject line, the recipient will open it. If they don't open it, there is no email marketing!
The Preview text field is an optional field. If left blank, it uses one of the first paragraphs from your email body and show as a preview of your email.
Though you can cleverly use the preview text option to support the subject line and to make people open the emails. Though only first 90 characters of the preview text will be visible in most cases. It also depends on the length of your subject line.
So come up with a short, smart, succinct, clever subject line and preview text to ensure higher open rates for your emails.
Since we are just started using flodesk, we still haven't added any contacted yet. So we do not have any recipients for our emails yet.
In the next step, flodesk will ask us for the email recipients.
You have three options
Since we don't have any contacts yet, we haven't created any segments yet. So we can't use the first option. So we are left with 2 options at the moment.
If you click this option, you can add email addresses one by one.
Just type the email addresses you want to include in the right field and click save once done.
This method will work if we only have a few emails to send. But we don't want an email marketing service to send only a few emails. We want to send in bulk (provided we have created an email list and we have a lot of contacts).
In order to send emails in bulk, we will have to select 'Upload CSV' method
If you want to import contacts to flodesk via csv, you need to select 'Upload csv' option.
When you select that option, you will be asked to select the csv file. So before we go to this step, we need to have a .csv file with our contacts. Also it needs to be in a certain way to work efficiently.
A sample .csv file screenshot of email contacts suitable for flodesk standard is added below.
Apart from first name and last name, a few fields related to opt in time and confirmation time can be found in the sample file. These double optin details makes it quicker to get these contacts accepted into flodesk systems and improves your email deliverability.
By giving these details you're in a way saying that you have permission to send promotional emails to these contacts and hence it improves your email deliverability.
When you have selected/added the recipients, it is time to decide when you need to send this email. Before that you will be given confirmations and options to edit your campaign before finalising it.
I have added one individual contact and hence it is shown to me.
I am happy with what I have and everything looks good so far. So I click on 'Continue'.
So the next question is when to send the email
You can choose now or later. If you choose now, it will be send immediately. So I am choosing 'Later'.
Then it gives me option to set my own custom time, or to select the best time for morning, afternoon or evening decided by flodesk on a certain day that you've chosen. I've decided to go with a custom time.
Once you select the date and time, make sure the right timezone is selected. You can change it if you want. And then click Schedule.
It is Double checking time. Check all the details one last time before scheduling it. If everything is fine, click on the schedule it button!
Once it is done, after a couple of second's delay, flodesk will take you to your dashboard and show your first successful email that you have just created.
Congratulations! You have successfully created your first email - a welcome email that you can send to your new customers.
Next in line is to learn how to create Form to capture email contacts, how to create workflows and harness the power of automation and how to smartly segment your audience.
Hope you learned something from this post. Do let us know in the comments.
If you want to use Flodesk, use this affiliate link, so that you will get 50% off on your purchase.
