Email marketing is a must-do for business owners looking to engage a loyal audience. Another necessary evil in the world of marketing. I know, I know, I’ve got a headache too!
But I recently jumped on a bandwagon to meet the marketing demands of the day – and I’m here to tell you that email marketing can actually be fun. It might even be my favorite piece of the marketing pie! And the stats for the ROI on email marketing compared to social media marketing make me want to delete my Instagram forever…if only…
Enter Flodesk, a tool that helps you to “design emails people love to open” (their words, not mine, but I happen to agree!). Flodesk is crazy-super easy to use and comes with a bajillion templates that give you a great starting point.
It also allows you to add some of your branding (your logo and your colors) so that you can make sure you’re hitting your audience with a message that is easy to recognize as yours. (Plus, Flodesk was started by two women, if you didn’t need another reason to be intrigued…)
Allow me to walk you through how to set up Flodesk with your branding and provide you with a few tips that will help you to get the most out of your subscription. And click here if you’re already in and want to save 50% on your subscription.
How to Add Your Branding to Flodesk
After you create an account, you’ll see a little circle icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Click that and navigate to “Branding”.
From here, you’ll be able to upload your logo (PNG, JPEG, or GIF) and you’ll be able to input the HEX codes for 5 of your brand colors. (Those are the 6 numbers and letters following the # symbol.)
Flodesk doesn’t allow you to upload your own fonts yet, but I suggest scrolling through and finding 3 or so fonts from their options that closely resemble your brand fonts and then sticking to using those in all of your emails. Consistency is key, here!
Opt-in Setup
You’ll also want to make sure that your opt-ins are branded – these are the pages that people see after they sign up to subscribe to your email or when they click “unsubscribe”.
To do that, navigate to the “Opt-in Setup” tab. From there, you’ll be able to update the Double Opt-in page, the Thank You page, and the Preferences page.
Adding your colors, logo, and similar fonts will go a long way in making your audience feel like they were considered (and like they just joined a super fun club!), which means more customer loyalty for you!
Left: Flodesk-branded opt-in
Below: Custom-branded opt-in
Getting the Most Out of Flodesk
Forms (and their friends, lead magnets)
You have to get people to sign up for (or opt in to) your email subscription somehow – and Forms are the Flodesk method for collecting those opt-ins.
With Flodesk, you can create
a pop-up form (a box that pops up on your website when someone enters)
an in-line form (like a footer on your website!)
a landing page form (a separate page on your site)
And you can have several different forms for different opt-ins.
Now before you start thinking “who in the bloody universe is going to want to sign up to read my emails” – keep reading! The answer is people that want free / discounted stuff! Which is pretty much everyone.
And these free / discounted shiny and beautiful email-attracting things are called lead magnets! A lead magnet is something of value that you provide a site visitor/follower with in exchange for their subscription to your email list.
There are a thousand ideas for lead magnets out there, but to give you an example – one of my lead magnets is a free Archetype Workbook download, which helps business owners, marketing professionals, and people that like free downloads to understand their target audience so that they can speak more directly to the people that they want to attract. Another common lead magnet is a discount code.
So – the tip here: make the most of branded forms to attract email subscribers with lead magnets!
Don’t reinvent the wheel - use the templates, for goodness’ sake!
One of the most intriguing things about Flodesk is how beautiful their templates already are. Somebody did all of the painstaking work to make them! Use them! Change out the colors, change out the fonts, bada-bing, bada-boom! Done!
Don’t spend hours (like me) redesigning them to match your branding to perfection! Just get the thing done, my friend. And pray for me.
Send a test to yourself, plz.
Before you send your email out to the masses, send it to yourself first. Then, send it to your mom.
There’s a little paper airplane icon to the left of the editor when you’re designing an email that will send one test email to whoever you’d like. Proofread, proofread, proofread!
I’m one of those annoying people that cringe at every typo or slip-of-the-tongue (ask my friends, they love it). Don’t let yourself be gliced! Don’t do it!
Hope this was helpful!
Email marketing has such a huge ROI compared to social media - it’s staggering. So, jump on the bandwagon, friend – and do it for 50% off!