"Flodesk is an email marketing platform designed with small businesses, like photographers, in mind. Its user-friendly interface and beautiful templates make designing painless."
Photo Breakdown is a podcast in which we explore the world of photography with a trusted guide, host Scott Wyden Kivowitz. His expertise and passion bring the industry to life as we explore the stories, trends, and ideas shaping it today. Join us as we dissect everything from incredible photographs and creative techniques to the latest gear releases and hot topics in the photography community.
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Flodesk
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Scott Wyden Kivowitz: Welcome back to another episode of Photo Breakdown. Today I want to talk about the world of email marketing. Email marketing is something that we as photographers need to be doing. I mean, all small businesses need to be doing email marketing. And I've tried every email marketing platform. [00:01:00] I've tried the most popular MailChimp, I've tried some of the most advanced like customer IO and ActiveCampaign, and I have tried the simpler, not necessarily simpler, but the.
Most, most cost effective being like a wordpress plugin that can do email marketing. When I say I've tried them all. I have tried them all. I even have a course that I once sold and I might bring it back. It's called more leads, more clients. And it's all about lead generation for photographers. And. In that course, I talk about email marketing pretty heavily.
It's a big part of it. And I show how to set up what I talk about, what I teach in the course, in many different platforms, including Flodesk. Now, let's dive into Flodesk, which is my preferred choice for an email [00:02:00] marketing platform. And I, I'm going to preface this with, I'm recording this on January 14th, 2025.
I'm recording this on January 14th, 2025. It was about five days ago when I was officially made a partner of Flodesk, so if you click a link and you sign up for Flodesk, right, there's free trial, right, they even have a free account where you don't even have to pay a thing, but if you wind up subscribing, yes, I make a commission, so let me get that out of the way.
Okay, Flodesk is an email marketing platform designed with small businesses. Like photographers in mind, it's best known for its extremely beautiful user friendly experience. Its interface is just the easiest thing to work with. There's blocks that you could add to your emails that just make designing painless.
There's beautiful templates. It's powerful features that let you [00:03:00] customize things like colors, your brand, adding social, you know, integration in there. There's, there's, there's Instagram, deep Instagram integration where you can show your latest Instagram posts within your emails, all without needing to code, all without needing to second guess.
It's just easy. Okay? So here's why you should consider Flodesk for your business. Floresc! It has a huge library of professionally designed emails. These are templates that you can utilize on the fly for individual emails, or for what they call workflows, which are like a series of emails. This allows you to create visually appealing emails that truly reflect your brand identity.
You can even work with designers to have a, to have custom templates made or you could access free templates that exist that people can share because you [00:04:00] can share templates. Some people are charging for templates. Now even if you're not a tech whiz, if you're not super technical, you'll find the Flodesk interface incredibly easy to navigate, to work with.
It's platform is designed for simplicity in mind. It's designed to not confuse you. To not overwhelm you. It's designed to make it easy to create, schedule and send emails. Now compared to its competitors, Flodesk is also extremely competitive with pricing, making it accessible for any business of any size.
Here's the, here's the thing, you go to a MailChimp, you go to a ConvertKit, which is now called Kit, you go to any other email marketing platform, you're paying not only for the size of your list or multiple lists, but you're also paying for how many emails you send. So [00:05:00] for example, with MailChimp, you can get a free account with a whole lot of people on your list, but you're limited to how many emails you can send.
So you may have 10, 000 people on your list, but you can only send it to 500 of those.
For one price, you get unlimited people on your list, and you can segment it however you want, unlimited workflows with the automations, and unlimited amount of emails that can be sent. For one very affordable price, and again, it does start free. Now, automation wise, Flodesk does offer some pretty basic workflow automation, allowing you to automatically have like welcome sequences, drip campaigns, or other workflows.
if somebody buys something through, you can have them go into a workflow, and then It's have a bunch of emails sent and there is an e-commerce part of Flodesk. If you did wanna sell eBooks or something like that, you could do that with Flodesk too. That's a like a another tier on top of just the standard email tier.[00:06:00]
Okay. Let's talk photography specifically. You could use flow desks to showcase your work to your clients, to your leads in a beautiful portfolio. You can have an email, an email that just shows your Instagram, and if you do an automation, you can have it. So it's. automatically sending your latest Instagram on a set period of time.
That's pretty cool. You can promote special offers again using, their built in templates. If you want to mini sessions, holiday sessions, a special wedding package, whatever it is, there's templates already designed for you that you could utilize and blocks within those templates that you could utilize.
Anytime in any email accessible to you. Now you can personalize emails with merge tags. you can share behind the scenes content all very easily. Client testimonials. There's blocks for testimonials that look [00:07:00] absolutely gorgeous. Take your testimonials from from a Google business listing and add it to your email.
Very little effort. Very little effort. now Flow desks doesn't have a built in booking system, but you can connect it to a Calendly or a z cal or whatever through their Zapier integration. And now you can have a bunch of emails sent based on who books with you. That's pretty cool. you could also integrate with, let's say.
A HoneyBook or or a Sprout studio or whatever you want through Zapier. And again, if somebody books have stuff happen, right, you can have emails sent depending on what happens through Zapier integration, they also have Pley integration. They also have Sure Triggers integration. There's so many, that are built in.
There's also a really nice one that I like that is quizzes. and I have a link on my blog that I can, that I, that I will include in the show notes for this, that talks more about that, that you can actually create quizzes [00:08:00] for your clients, let's say like, are you the ideal wedding photographer for their weddings, and then it asks them about what they're looking for for their weddings, and then based on if the answer is yes, they go into a new drip sequence, right?
So there's lots of things you can do with that. Okay, so just to recap with the key features. Beautiful email templates with a huge library. So there's a vast library of professionally designed templates easily customizable with your brand and fonts. There's a drag and drop editor so you would add a block then you can move it up and down and expand the spacing all this visual without needing to code.
You can segment based on different tags you want to apply to people. If they've engaged with your emails and different things like that there's automated, sequences you can make in the in the in there, what they call workflows, whether it's drip campaigns or or lee nurturing or whatever it might be.
You could have [00:09:00] multiple! You can have multiple like segments of your list. Not only can you tag people, but you can also segment, right? So you can, you can have it. So if somebody clicks a link, they get automatically tagged with a custom field, or you could have them if they click a link, for example, goes into a new segment.
And then if they go into a segment, a workflow starts. So many cool things that can happen. In a variety of ways. Right? and then of course there's analytics tracking, open rates and click rates. What links are people clicking who un subscribes and, you know, digging into the data of, of the different emails.
So Flodesk offers a really compelling solution for small businesses. Especially photographers, right? People who want to build strong relationships with their audience through email marketing. It's user friendly interface, it's beautiful templates, it's affordable pricing, it makes it a strong contender in the email marketing space.
So if you were looking for a way to elevate your email marketing game, I recommend checking out [00:10:00] Flodesk, okay? Again, click on the link in the description, the show notes for this episode, right? Click on that link, get over to Flodesk, just sign up for a trial. That's all you need to do to give it a try without paying a dime.
Again, just as a disclosure, if you do sign up, right, if you do sign up and subscribe, I will make a, a small commission, but, I strongly recommend it. I wouldn't be talking about it unless I recommended it. Thanks for listening. More at PhotoBreakdown.com