Building your personal brand online is all about the pathways you design for audience connection. You need to have various vehicles in your business that allow for your audience to not only discover you and your brand, but learn, build trust and connect with that brand as a whole.

Email marketing is hands down one of the best ways to build your small business and engage your audience authentically and strategically. Email marketing gets you this direct invitation into your audience’s world. It’s a little more intimate than social media and popping up in their scroll. You’ve landed in their inbox because they asked you to be there. They gave you their email address, essentially saying, “hi, my interest has peaked…tell me more!” in exchange for something you gave them, most likely a discount code, free resource, ebook, checklist, etc. And now you get to regularly show up and show them what you got!

And with all that being said… email marketing intimidates the crap out of a lot of small business owners. As a personal branding and visibility coach, I help my clients stand out to their audience, shining a light on what makes them the go-to authority in their space making them and their offers completely irresistible. Email marketing is a necessary step to building that authority. Whether it’s the lack of something to say, the time to write the email, the unknown tech behind it, there is always some excuse I’m battling when getting my clients on board with sending the dang emails.

Until Flodesk.

Ahhhhhh, Flodesk, you little minx, you. Hands down the best, easiest to use, and most aesthetically pleasing email software you can find. Oh… and she’s a bargain, ya’ll. Smart, pretty, AND affordable?! Time to put a ring on it, babe!

Speaking of affordable, click this link and get 50% off your first year of Flodesk when you sign up! And trust me, you’ll be signing up after I bust each of the above excuses for you and show you how easy and effective growing and nurturing an email list can be!

Let’s break down Flodesk’s epic features, and then I’m going to spill the tea on how YOU can use Flodesk to build your personal brand, and I’ll even end this post with some juicy email topics you can send this week that both provide value to your audience and lead them to the sale.

The Smartest Email Platform

Flodesk is my go-to email platform because of how much time it saves me when going to send an email or create a funnel, or workflow in Flodesk terms. And saving time is the smartest hack you can take advantage of as a business owner.

Everything you need to grow your email list, whether you’re starting at 0 or you already have 5,000 subscribers, can be found in Flodesk.

Your job: decide on your email opt-in freebie or lead magnet. This is a free something you give a subscriber for signing up to be part of your email list. The options are endless for these- checklists, e-books, free challenge, masterclass, discount count, the list goes on and on.

Easy to Create Opt-In Forms

You can give your free gift away in 3 different ways with Flodesk: a pop-up form, an inline form, and a landing page. I use all 3 of these for different purposes, but landing page is usually my go to because your girl loves to share a link. I’m on my Instagram stories teaching or in my DMs chatting away, a relevant tie into my free resource comes up and boom- I can paste a direct link to download. Those posts you see on Instagram that are like “comment WORD below and…” boom- a robot sends the link to that landing page to whoever comments DMs. Magic!

Easy to click, easy to add my info, easy to deliver the freebie. TIME SAVED.

Workflows to Automate Emails

THEN, once you get them on your list, you can set up a workflow to take care of them! This is so much easier than it sounds, promise. A workflow is an automation that sends emails to a group of people on autopilot once they sign up or something or click a link in an email. And this is where that “money in your sleep” magic comes from.

Let me give you an example for my personal branding free resource, my Secret Sauce Workbook.

I have a landing page set up on my own website with the Secret Sauce form embedded.

They sign up through the form, and automatically get dumped into a segment (a specific group label you assign based on your form). That segment add triggers the automation for the workflow to begin, sending the below emails out every few days.

My Secret Sauce Workflow:

Email 1: Deliver the free workbook + welcome them to my email home

Email 2: Sharing my unique spin on personal branding and why it’s an underutilized asset in their business

Email 3: Introducing myself- highlighting my authority, credibility and relatability

Email 4: Give another free gift- my 30 Days of Engagement Boosting IG Story Ideas

Email 5: 3 excuses you’re letting hold you back from humanizing your brand 

Email 6: Invite them to book a Personal Branding Strategy Sesh with me, a 90 minute call to uncover their expert buckets and brand builders, create a roadmap plan of attack for implementation in their content, and a content plan personalized to them for the next 2 weeks.

Best part of this? I sat down, put on my phone’s do not disturb, and busted out all this work at once. Work once, get paid often. This email workflow consistently brings new leads into my business on a weekly basis, many of them booking that Strategy Sesh call, which leads into extended 1:1 coaching work or personalized content planning from me.

I told ya, our girl Flodesk, was the smartest way to go! 

Smartie Pants Fave Features Recap:

• Easy forms to create in seconds for different purposes and uses
• Segments for audience to send the most relevant info to the hottest leads
• Workflows you create once that allows your audience to get to know you and often leads to passive sales 

The Prettiest Email Platform

I won’t lie and say Flodesk’s  looks weren’t what drew me in originally years ago. I had been using another email provider that was just meh, and all of a sudden this hot new bombshell entered the villa and gave me that record scratch moment. I am too FUN of a business to be sending BORING emails.

The Personalized Brand Board

I’m strongly committed to having a cohesive brand throughout all my content- both visually and personally. My brand is recognizable both in how it looks AND how it sounds. Flodesk allows you to upload your brand fonts, colors and logos, making that visual cohesiveness possible from social presence, to website, to email inbox.

The Customizable Email Templates

In addition to letting you showcase your brand, Flodesk’s templates are so good. The design is unique, they’re strategically designed by experts to convert, and they are completely customizable to you and your content.

Whether you want to announce a sale, do a fave product round up, break down the steps of learning something new, or just share a story with your audience, Flodesk has a template ready to go for you, or makes it crazy easy for you to create your own with their drag and drop, intuitive design builder. AND if you create a template you love and use all the time (like one of my end of month Fri-yay monthly round-ups), you can save that template and share it with your audience to customize and use themselves! Which is a fun way to provide value or grow your leads list as well.

We know that looks aren’t everything, but consistency is. When you are building a business online, consistency in your aesthetic, your values, your voice, and your content matters. Why? Because consistency brings safety and safety brings trust. Trust is the number one reason for sales. 

Pretty Face Fave Features Recap

• Built in brand board for fonts, colors and logos
• Already designed for you templates for any content you’d like to send
• Easy to use design builder to drag and drop and create your own email templates and formats 

The Most Affordable Email Platform

As creative entrepreneurs and business owners, we know there are expenses associated with running a business. Website fees, employees, softwares, ads, and yes, email marketing platforms. BUT, you will not find a more affordable email platform than Flodesk. Outside of a free version of some other platform that will quickly end once you hit a certain number of subscribers and then you have to start all over again anyway. Not the vibe.

One Monthly Price, Unlimited Subscribers

Email marketing is responsible for over 75% of my overall sales. I really don’t mind investing in something that holds that much importance for my business. However, with Flodesk being so dang affordable, it doesn’t even feel like an investment. AND they don’t punish you by price gouging you as you build your list like most other email marketing platforms do. You pay one monthly price for unlimited subscribers- which is a HUGE perk.

Other honorable mentions for Flodesk features aligned with money: their link in bio AND their e-commerce platform. Yeah, you can literally MAKE money through Flodesk Checkout. Not wanting to commit to a website with a full blown payment processing software? Flodesk to the rescue! You can literally start your business and sell something TODAY, with no website of your own, all just by creating a Flodesk checkout page. Flodesk Checkout helps you monetize with e-commerce blocks, sales pages, upsells, instant deliveries, and unlimited transactions—all seamlessly connected from the start. HUGE time saver and excuse buster for those that aren’t ready with a full blown website, or insecure about the tech knowledge (or investment to outsource) needed holding them back.

It is my very strong opinion that the businesses not prioritizing their personal brands will not survive the next few years. Markets continue to get more and more saturated, content is blurring together, messaging is repetitive, and it’s getting harder and harder to trust brands and what they’re promising us.

YOU and your personal brand is what will make you stand out. And being able to regularly be in contact with your audience via their email inbox is a huge leg up in standing out. Your ability to pop in with a story, ask for feedback, engage in a conversation, teach something, take something off their plate, and heck, even sell is a huge way to build a relationship with your audience. Let them in, let them get to know you! Write your emails like you’re writing to a friend. Reread your emails out loud and see if they actually SOUND like you do when you talk.

Hot tip: using contractions is an easy hack for sounding more conversational. I am so glad you are here, Allison! vs. I’m so glad you’re here, Allison! Ones a little more robotic when read out loud, one’s more conversational, easy breeze, yeah?

K, now that I’ve got you on board with email marketing and using Flodesk to be your trusted provider as the smartest, prettiest and most affordable choice, let’s give you some email topics to send to your list this month!

A Month of Emails to Connect and Engage Your Audience 

These emails are designed to both serve AND sell your email list audience. They should connect with them on a human level through adding a bit of storytelling and personality. Your emails should be FUN and valuable to read, ensuring they keep opening them! Take these ideas and run with them this month- I did the thinking, now you go open Flodesk and do the writing and scheduling!

1. Telling the backstory behind your OG or best selling offer/product- where it was as an idea, and how it has evolved to what it is today!
2. Share a tool, software, product, hack that is currently saving you (time, energy OR money) that you don’t feel right gatekeeping anymore – just like me and Flodesk with this blog post!
3. 3 features of your best-selling or current focus product/offer that you can’t afford to miss out on
4. End of month recap of your world email: just something fun, connection based, personal brand forward to get them relating to you on a girlfriend level:

• Fave book/show/podcast of the month
• Currently eating: 
• Fave outfit or sweatshirt you can’t stop wearing
• Fave women owned product find
• Fave snack
• Fave song
• Fave skincare item
• Fave accessory
• Fave thing your kid said
• Fave girls night look of the month
• What I’m looking forward to next month…

Ready to get your email marketing routine rocking and rolling with Flodesk? Yeah you are! Be the action taker I know you are, and click this link to get 50% off your first YEAR of Flodesk!