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Why I moved from Mailchimp to Flodesk

Flodesk

See why I moved from Mailchimp to Flodesk in this video, Mailchimp vs Flodesk. What if I told you that creating email newsletters could be as easy as posting to social media? Don’t believe me. Prepare to be mind blown. Ready to stop fighting the Instagram algorithm and start building your email list? I thought so. Meet my marketing secret weapon: Flodesk. Yes, I said goodbye to Mailchimp and hello to Flodesk. Want to know why? Watch my video, Mailchimp vs Flodesk to learn more.

Affiliate disclosure: I get $19 if you sign up and you save 50% on the annual cost.

What makes Flodesk so good?

  • Unlike Mailchimp, Flodesk doesn’t penalize you for growing your list. Whether you’re looking to start a small newsletter or build an email marketing empire, you pay the same monthly price.
  • Forget about all the stress that comes from tagging. No more duplicate tags or thinking about it too late. Flodesk does all of the tagging for you! You can see which of your subscribers are most engaged, what they signed up for, what they clicked on, there’s tons of data automatically captured for you. And you have full segmentation capabilities!

Transcription was done by Descript‘s automated transcription services which means it’s an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar, and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video.

This is going to be very business E MailChimp, the big elephant in the room, the big elephant in a lot of rooms. So here’s the thing

For More than 10 years, I have been using MailChimp for email marketing. I have used it for the companies I’ve worked for. I’ve used it for myself and I recommended it to other companies and people to also utilize and well, I’m no longer using MailChimp for myself. So why did I use MailChimp? Well, MailChimp has always been the best email marketing platform by far the easiest to use very easy to organize your contacts, your lists, very easy to create emails, send emails, tracking, emails, and integrate with everything. Yes, there is Google analytics integration. There is WordPress integration. There’s integration with pretty much anything that could integrate with an email marketing platform. There’s integration with MailChimp. But over the years, I would say probably the past three years, MailChimp has been slowly moving beyond just email marketing into websites and surveys and a full CRM system while that’s good for some people, the prices that MailChimp had been raising and raising and raising have actually gotten a little outrageous as a solo entrepreneur, a solo photographer and photo educator.

It’s a good thing when my list starts getting bigger, of course, cause it means I could potentially sell more product and teach more people by sending one email out to my list. But the thing is that sometimes things don’t go as planned and you may not sell what you want. And sometimes a pandemic happens and people are not buying as much as you, they normally would. But MailChimp is charging for the list that I have, which you can subscribe to at Scott wine.com/newsletter. They were charging me close to $100 a month. Now there are a lot of platforms out there for email marketing. There are even WordPress plugin to which I have actually tried and some are okay and some are not very good. There’s also alternatives to MailChimp like constant contact and convert kit and, and companies like that. But then there’s photographer specific tools and services like sticky emails and sprout studio.

Now, if you’re using a tool like sprout studio, of course, that is the ultimate way to do it because it’s already your CRM designed for photographers. It’s already your nurturing system for any leads that come in, it’s already how you track projects or your sessions from start to finish. It’s potentially already your proofing solution for all of your client work. Sprout studio is this all in one solution and they offer email marketing built in. So if you’re ready to using sprout studio, you don’t need any other tool because you got it right. Built in sticky emails with kind of headed in that direction with their sticky platform as well. But then it came across a service that is technically in beta. So it’s still pretty new and it has been designed for anybody, anybody, and it has one purpose. This service is called flow desk.

And at first I was very intrigued and I w I dug in, I started a trial and I, I loved it. I loved every part of it. I love that they were doing some things that MailChimp was not doing at the time, which MailChimp is now doing. I love that their design, their user experience was very minimal and very clear from start to finish for generating and sending your in tracking your emails. But there were some things that are lacking, like really, really good Google analytics integration, and e-commerce integration. Besides some Shopify, they have integration with Shopify. There’s no integration with anything other than Shopify and Zapier. So I walked away and I stayed with MailChimp. I tried other things. And then my prices at MailChip went up more than I had enough. So I went back to flow desk and I said, you know what I’ll make do I’ll use Zapier as much as I despise having to use Zapier, I used Zapier and I set up everything I needed to do.

Instead of me rebuilding everything with the integrations, I basically went to XYZ service and connected to Zapier instead of direct to MailChimp. So Zapier’s might go between from any service, anything to flow desk, but of course, flow desk also has popups and they have inline opt-ins and all of these things, but I didn’t want to have to rebuild everything on my website. I didn’t want to have to do that. So quick change from MailChimp to Zapier solve that problem. So MailChimp can do landing pages. I don’t care because I can do landing pages on my own website. MailChimp can do surveys. I don’t care because I can do surveys on my own website flow desk. Doesn’t have that stuff at least right now, not right now. What flow desk does have is a really good user experience. Beautiful ways to design your emails, which MailChimp also has beautiful ways to design your emails.

They don’t have some of the AI tools like what MailChimp has, but MailChimp has been doing this for years, years. Flo desk is still a startup. What flow does does offer for anybody who needs an affordable email marketing service that already does not have one built into their photography, CRM, what flow desk offers is good email marketing tools at a very affordable price. Remember I told you that MailChimp was charging me close to a hundred dollars a month for my list. Flow desk comes in at $418 a year, but even better. And that’s, by the way, at the time I’m recording this even better is if you use the coupon code, Scott Wyden, you can save 50% off that price. So for just over $200 a year, you get everything that flow desk offers with unlimited subscribers and unlimited email sends. That’s a price that’s hard to beat for email marketing.

So I switched. I went through the process. It took me probably four or five hours because I’ve had a MailChimp list for many, many years. It took me a long time to reorganize my, my segments, my groups into segments inside a flow desk, but it was done. And now flow desks tools will automatically tag based on what people are doing. And I can send emails and do workflows in automation based on what people are doing with my emails. And now when people sign up for my newsletter@scottwine.com slash newsletter, they go right to my new flow desk list. If you have a brand new list, somewhere else, converting to flow desk, won’t take you much time. If you have a list that you’ve been doing for a very long time, and you’ve got integrations to, to MailChimp or wherever that you’ve been using for a very long time, that will make things a little more complicated.

There is a private Facebook group for flow desk insiders. That’s what they call it, where you can talk with the flow desk community and share tips and tricks and things like that. And you actually can see what is coming in flow desk. If you’re going to be a part of the flow desk community, I definitely recommend joining that Facebook group. So yeah, I switched to flow desk. I’m saving myself well over $500 a year because of this. I’m saving myself a lot of money every year by switching to flow desk, I’m getting the same results at a flow desk. When I was getting out of MailChimp, the only difference is the integrations. If I was using everything MailChimp offer with the surveys and all that stuff. Sure. That would change what I decided to do. Maybe I wouldn’t have switched to flow desk, but I’m not, I’m not using all that stuff. I signed up for MailChimp for email marketing. I didn’t sign up for MailChimp for everything else. Check out flow desk, make sure you use the coupon code, Scott widen so that you save 50% off that annual fee. Be sure to do that. Don’t pay full price. Don’t buy.

By Scott

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