Important Affiliate Disclaimer: I am a Flodesk affiliate, and if you join using my link, I’ll receive a commission on the sale – at no extra cost to you! This Flodesk review reflects my own honest opinion based on my experience as an online course designer and strategist. 

Email marketing services are a must for small business owners and online course creators so they can stay in touch with existing clients and potential leads. If you’ve been curious about Flodesk and are wondering if it might be the right choice for your business, then you’ve come to the right place! Today, I’m sharing my honest Flodesk review. I’ll talk about what I love, what I think could be better, and who I think it would be an excellent fit for.

My Honest Flodesk Review

As part of helping my clients promote their new courses, I’ve set up campaigns in practically every email marketing service on the market. Even though some of the more popular options out there have a lot of extras, they might be confusing, clunky, or just plain overwhelming for beginners. Because it’s insanely simple to use, I think Flodesk is a great option to get started with email marketing. The catch is that as your business grows, you might need a more powerful service in the future. So, how do you know if it’s right for YOUR business? Let’s weigh the pros and cons in this full-length Flodesk Review!

Flodesk Review: Pros

Overall, Flodesk has many features that make it a winner for newer businesses and DIY email marketers. It’s ultra beginner-friendly, the templates are gorgeous, and the pricing is really good! 

Easy for beginners to use

If you’ve ever used an email marketing program, you know that getting set up and finding your way around can be a HUGE learning curve. Flodesk stands out from the other options because it’s effortless to use, even if you’re brand new to email marketing. Seriously, it’s possible to figure things out and set up an entire campaign in one day! The dashboard to set up campaigns is clever, minimalistic, and intuitive. All the analytics are crystal clear, so you don’t get lost in the weeds on numbers before you understand the data you’re looking at. 

Beautiful Templates

Another thing that differentiates Flodesk is their beautifully designed email templates. They emphasize making stylish template options for users, and you can tell; even if you’re not a very creative person, your emails can have a super-polished feel. Their templates are especially helpful for content-based businesses, like food bloggers.

Designing emails is simple

The Flodesk email builder is highly user-friendly, and it’s an effortless process to design a campaign. Once you’ve set up your preferences and uploaded a logo & brand colors, you just choose a template to get started. You can drag and drop template elements around to fully customize the appearance – and if you don’t find a template you like, you can design your own totally from scratch.

Flodesk Pricing

One of the major reasons people consider Flodesk is its transparent pricing structure. Basically, you pay one flat price for unlimited access to all of their features, no matter how many subscribers you have. That’s a big deal because most of the other email marketing software out there charge you based on the number of subscribers (and sometimes they’ll even penalize you for having duplicate subscribers)! Flodesk could save you a fair amount of money, and knowing the exact price you’ll need to budget for each month’s emails is very important for some people.

Flodesk Review: Cons

Even though it’s a strong option for beginners, as your business grows, you might need more design features, more powerful workflows & automation, and better analytics data.

Limited template designs

While Flodesk has lovely templates that are easy to figure out and tweak to your liking, there aren’t a ton of designs to choose from. They only offer 24 base templates, making it harder to find something you like. You’re also pretty restricted on where and how to use text and photos in Flodesk templates, which is potentially frustrating. Of course, you can always build your own template, but that isn’t as simple or beginner-friendly as being able to choose one and go (and there are still limitations to designing your own template). For a while, this might not be that big of a problem, but you’ll probably want to branch out into other designs at some point.

Restrictive automation & workflows

Flodesk’s workflow tools let you create certain conditions that will trigger specific content to be sent out, depending on actions taken by a visitor. So, for example, you can pre-write a series of emails to be delivered to new subscribers over time. However, that’s only the beginning of what you might need to get out of marketing automation, and Flodesk doesn’t do a fantastic job at handling more complicated welcome sequences or multiple types of flows to promote a launch. In particular, course creators will need something more robust, like ConvertKit, Active Campaign, Kartra, or Kajabi.

Minimal analytics content

While a more straightforward analytics layout can be helpful when you’re a beginner and don’t want your brain buzzing with data, in the future you’ll need access to more complex data to step up marketing efforts. Flodesk lets you segment your audience in fundamental ways to view things like open rates, percentage clicked, and which devices people used to view your email – and all of those things are valuable information! However, it’s also missing some key insights that help you see exactly what people are doing when they open your emails, which links they’re clicking on, and overall trends like account growth.

Flodesk Pricing

Pricing is one of the things that makes Flodesk so appealing and it’s important to discuss in any Flodesk review, so let’s talk a little more about the details! They pride themselves on offering a flat rate for unlimited access to all of a plan’s benefits. That means they never charge users based on the number of subscribers and don’t limit feature access between price tiers. That’s a big difference compared to other popular email marketing software providers, who charge different rates depending on which features you want access to and how many emails you send per month.

Flodesk offers three basic plans:

The Email plan costs $38 per month or $420 annually – but through my link you can get a free trial and 50% off your first year, bringing the cost down to $210, or $17.50 per month! You’ll get unlimited:

• Emails
• Subscribers
• Forms
• Landing page forms
• Workflows
• Segments

The Checkout plan is priced the same as the Email plan ($38 per month/$420 annually) and includes unlimited:

• Sales pages
• Checkout pages
• Upsells
• Payments
• Transactions
• Instant deliveries

There’s also an Everything plan available for $64 per month (or $708 annually) that includes all of the benefits from the Email and Checkout plans in one seamless email marketing and e-commerce solution, which can be perfect for course creators who want all those things in one place.

Real talk: Wondering if I use Flodesk in my own business? Since I sell multiple digital products and love having access to fuller-featured advanced automations, it’s not the best fit for me. But if I didn’t have digital products or just wanted to get started sending newsletters, Flodesk would be a great pick and would probably win because of how affordable it is. 

So, what’s the bottom line? I personally think Flodesk is great for email marketing beginners, content creators or people who are just starting out in business. The templates look amazing and are incredibly user-friendly, so it’s a terrific way to dip your toes in email marketing without a hefty price tag. You might want extra features as your business grows, but when you’ve just launched your brand or first course, you don’t necessarily need all the bells and whistles of other service providers!

Ready to give Flodesk a shot? Try it for free for 30 days and get 50% off your first year when you use my link!