Flodesk Made: Design & Launch your Email Marketing System

1. Introduction: You've heard it time and time again email marketing matters, especially for small business owners. But when you actually sit down to do it, where do you even begin? You might spend hours trying to figure out what to share, how to design it, all the tech involved. But then you come to realize you don't even have anyone to send emails to in the first place. If this sounds like you, don't worry. I'm here to help. Hello, hello. I am Sheryl Chen. I run a brand and website design studio, a YouTube channel called Made on Sundays, and I'm a top teacher here on Skillshare. I've been in the digital entrepreneurship space for over six years now, and I still find that email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to connect with my audience. In a world of ever changing algorithms and saturated social platforms, email marketing really allows you to own your audience, helping you to show up consistently, build trust, and eventually even showcase your offerings. We are going to start from the very beginning. We're going to head into your class workbook and map out your strategy together, and then we're going to head into Flow Desk, and we're going to set up your four part email flow. Part number one will be your opt in forms. This is how people are going to find you and enter your list. Second part is your lead magnet delivery. This is how you're going to deliver value and grow your list. The third part is your welcome sequence. This is how you're going to nurture your audience through an automated email sequence. And last but not least is part four your newsletter. This is how you're going to continuously connect with your audience through branded consistent content. By the end of this class, you will have a beautiful and working email marketing system launched and running with no tech overwhelm. If you're an artist, a maker, a freelancer, or any kind of creative entrepreneur, and you're ready to design an intentional, beautiful, and effective email marketing system for your business, let's get started. 2. Class Project: This lesson, let's talk about your class project. Throughout the class, we're going to be learning how to build your foundational email marketing system. An important part of this system is your email newsletter. We'll be designing a template that you can reuse again and again to save you time and ensure consistency. I would love for you to share your template design with me and the community in the project section. Here's how you do it. Once you've designed your template on Flow desk, let's say this is your template right here, you can click on the three dots at the very top right and you can get preview Link, and you can just copy this link and share it in the project section. Otherwise, you can also just take a screenshot of your email and share it as an image as well. By the way, I've actually created a free flow Ds email newsletter template for you to use as you wish. This is the template right here. This is very similar to what I use for my business. You can actually download this free template in the class projects workbook. It's under the newsletter section. So it's waiting there for you. Once you click on the link, it will prompt you to create a flots account. And if once you have your flots account, it will open this newsletter template right into your flots account and you can use it as a starting point for your newsletter, or you can just use it as inspiration as well. I cannot wait to see your email designs. In the next lesson, let's design your purpose led email system. 3. Map Our Your Email Marketing System: In this lesson, we are going to be mapping out your email marketing system. We're not just going to be sending out random emails out to your customers and your audience. We are actually going to build a meaningful flow to guide your audience from that first hello to a long term connection with you. So, first off, head to the resources section and download that class workbook. We are going to be filling that out together right now. All right, so, first off, we have your define your purpose section. What role does email marketing play in your business? You really want to think about, you know, why you want to start sending emails in the first place. What outcomes do you want to create? By sending these emails, do you want to build a connection with your audience? You want to increase sales and bookings, et cetera? Then we have the NIC section, which is define your target audience. Who are you speaking to? Describe your ideal subscriber. What stage of the journey are they in? What do they need most from you? If you already have a target audience, your business, then that's probably a really good starting point. You want to start listing that out here, but also then go into more detail about exactly what part of their journey they're in when they are subscribing to you. Next up, we have your newsletter, name, and themes. Now, by choosing a consistent email topic or theme and giving your newsletter you know, a name. I can really help anchor your message and build familiarity with your audience. A theme format really gives readers and yourself something to look forward to and helps you really stay focused with what you're sharing week after week. Now, think about what kind of content you typically share in your business already and how that can really translate into a weekly rhythm. Would you share tips or updates in your business, inspiration, reflections, behind the scenes content, or curated recommendations? Do you usually post YouTube videos or blog posts? How can you kind of formulate that into a short email newsletter. Having a clear theme or recognizable name, like, for example, Sunday studio Thoughts or Monday morning Muse, it really gives your emails an identity and makes your audience more likely to open and connect with them. So use the space here to start listing out content themes that you feel like can align to your brand, and then brainstorm newsletter names that can go with those according themes. Alright, so now that we've established your purpose, your audience, and your theme and newsletter name, let me introduce you to the four part email flow for a purpose led email system. We have four parts here. The first part here is your Optin. This is how people will find you and be able to sign up for your newsletter. Next, we have your lead magnet delivery. This is where you're going to provide immediate value and be able to build trust with your audience. Then the third part is your welcome sequence. This is your first few emails that you're going to send out to your audience automated, and this is going to help nurture your relationship. Then part four is your newsletter. This is going to be your ongoing connection with them after your welcome sequence ends. Alright, so let's go through each of these steps and start planning it out for your specific business. So first part of the flow is your opt in forms. You want to think about all the different places that you want to invite people to subscribe to your email list. For example, are people going to come in from your general website? They going to come in through certain freebies that you're offering? Are they going to subscribe through your Instagram or Pintris? Think about all those different places, and we're actually going to segment them out. For example, maybe we have the first part here is website subscriber. And then think about what kind of opt in type you're going to use. So there's four main opt in options. There is the Landing page, which is basically just a link that opens up a landing page with a form to sign up for your email. There is an inline in website. So this is a script that you put onto your website, and it's going to be within a section of your website. We have website pop up, very self explanatory, a pop up on your website or Lincoln Bio. And this is usually used for Instagram subscribers. You probably have seen that before. Choose which segment works for that kind of subscriber type. For this example, because it's coming from my website, I'm actually going to just do a landing page, and then we're going to give it a segment name. Some people call this tagging. Basically, it helps you organize your subscribers based on how they signed up or what they're interested in hearing from you. Think of them like labels for different groups of subscribers, like a freebie downloader or a client or a workshop attendee. If they sign up and get tagged with this specific segment name, and you can make sure that the next time you're sending out emails to specific groups of people, you can just select that segment, and it'll only send to that segment of people. So for this example, we're just going to be calling this website, probably subscriber. Next, we have your lead magnet delivery. Now, this is the second part. We want to start brainstorming your freebie or your lead magnet. So you don't know what a lead magnet is. It is just a freebie. It can be a free PDF. It could be a notion template. It could be a flow desk template. It can be a Canva template, a checklist of some sort, a workbook. It's basically a free offering that's of high value that you can put together really quickly to offer to your subscribers. It's an incentive to subscribe to your email list. The most important thing to think about when creating your lead magnet is to make sure that it is very specific to your niche target audience. So look back at the target audience that we wrote earlier and think about a lead magnet that will really speak to that specific target audience. All right, next up is your welcome sequence. Now, what will happen is once they sign up for your newsletter, they might you know, get that freebie delivery, and then they'll start this welcome email sequence. So this is a very important automated sequence because it's going to be the first few interactions they have with your email list. A few ideas for a sequence is to create a storytelling series. I really like that. I usually do that for my newsletter. It really tells your story, your background, what you offer, that kind of thing. And then another option is a mini workshop series, for example, an email based course. So if you're an educator, then this might be a great first email series for you. Okay, so as an example, let's pretend that we're doing a storytelling series. So you want to use a space and write out each email. So, for example, email one is probably going to be your freebie delivery, and then you want to then write out how many days or time between each emails. For example, this one might be two days goes by. And then on the third day, they will get email two. So email two, for example, if you're doing a storytelling series can be where you share a story, maybe your background, how you started your business. I like to talk about why, why I started my business, a little bit about your brand values, maybe. And then another maybe two days go by and then we're going to send out Email three. And then Email three can be maybe some sort of turning point in your business. Maybe you started off in corporate, and that's what you talk about in email two, maybe you learned a lesson from it. In Email three, maybe you talk about a turning point in your business. This is to create some tension and build excitement and curiosity, and then you can maybe offer some sort of thing to build trust. So maybe a tip or something to offer, like a quick value add to your audience. Email four is going to be the last email in this series, and maybe this last email can be a soft pitch of some sort. Maybe you just talk about your offerings, your YouTube video or channel, your services that you provide. All right, so we are now in the last part of your email four part flow, and we are now planning out your email newsletter. This is going to be the ongoing connection that you have with your subscriber. We're going to draw out an example, newsletter here. And typically, what I like to do is I will have a header at the top, so maybe some sort of logo, and then the next section usually is some sort of personal introduction section. So this is usually a little write up, like a paragraph, I'll. Maybe what I did on the weekend, something that inspired me, maybe something that I learned that week or that month, a little personal update. It's going to be like a paragraph section, so it'll look something like that. And then the next section might be your main feature section. This can be maybe a tip of the week, client Spotlight, maybe a new blog post that you're sharing. I think you can draw it out. Maybe you have an image here, and then you have a title. And then a little, like, written section there. And then the next section might be resources as an example. This can be maybe a recommendation section, one thing you're loving in the moment or a product that you're loving in the moment, a recent favorite read, whatever it is, maybe, like, a 33 images here, and then we have a little text. And then we maybe do a little call to action in this last section, and then we have our footer. Usually in your footer, we'll have your like, social icons, and then maybe an unsubscribe link here. Now, as you can see here in this last section here, we have my bonus flots Newsletter template. So you can go ahead, just click on Download Free template, and it's going to lead you to my free newsletter template. So feel free to use this as a base or starting point for your newsletter, or you can use it just as inspiration, whatever you like. Alright, so before I close out this lesson, I just really wanted to quickly talk about email compliance. It is super, super important once you start your email newsletter to read up and be familiar with email compliancy it is different around the world, so it really depends on where your subscribers are coming from. So if you have email subscribers coming from Europe, then you want to read up on GDPR in the EU. If you have email subscribers coming from the US, then you want to read up on CNSPAM. It is really easy to find this information. Just do a quick, like, search on the Internet, and I'm sure you can lay it out or even ask HachiBT and I'm sure HHIBT can probably list it all out for you in a more understandable way. Alright, so now that we've mapped everything out and the next lesson, we are going to be finally setting up your flow Ds account. 4. Sign up for Flodesk: This lesson, let's sign up for flowdes. Now, do note we will be primarily using flowds as our email marketing platform of choice in this class. But the overall concepts and how our email marketing system works can definitely be executed on most email marketing platforms that you choose. Feel free to stick with any platform that works for you. All right. But with that being said, Flo Des is what I've been using for many, many years now and it's one of the tools that I can't run my business without. In my opinion, it really is the best in class for simplicity, design and user experience. And that's why I've chosen to do this class with Flodes. Now to sign up for FloDes you can follow the links in the description or in your workbook or just go to flodes.com. Once you sign up, you are most likely going to get a 14 day free trial. I definitely recommend using your free trial to go through the class. Now, the memberships on each email platform do vary. In the case of FloDes, currently they are offering a set price per month and you get unlimited emails and subscribers with them. I'm offering a code in the workbook, which you can use to sign up and enjoy discounts. More details are available in the workbook. This is currently their plans right now. I think these prices do vary depending on which country you're signing up from, but these are the prices if you sign up for monthly or if you're committing to an annual plan, this is how much it would cost per month on an annual basis. All right, so get your account and let's get started with a class. 5. Basic Flodesk Setup: Alright. In this lesson, we are going to be setting up your FloDS account. Hop into your FloDS account, login and you're going to see something like this. If you've been using FloDS for a while, then you'll have all of the emails that you've sent out in the past in this homepage area. But if you are just setting it up for the first time, then you're probably not going to see much here. Uptop are your navigation. So you can check out your emails, the forms that you've created in the past, the flows that you've created. Check out if you're subscribe to FloDS Checkout. You can see your audience, who subscribe to you, and then also your Analytics panel. Right on the right side here is where we are going to set up your accounts. We're going to head to overview, and on the overview, on the left hand side is where all your navigation for your settings are. The first four sections here is actually just very general setups. I'm not going to go through these four sections just as they're pretty straightforward, go through them and fill out what it tells you to fill out. We're going to head straight to branding here, and this is where you can customize the general branding of your emails. So at the very top here is your logo. Here you can just upload your logo in here. What I actually like to do is I created on Canva a little image that represents my brand and my company, and then I put my newsletter name at the middle here and my logo at the very bottom right. What you put here will show up at the top of every single email that you write. Just keep that in mind. I find it nicer that there is a nice banner at the very top of my emails. That's what I personally prefer. So if you prefer that, you might also want to create that for your newsletter as well. Just so you know the dimensions is 600 pixels for your emails horizontally, it can be as high as you want. I wouldn't recommend super high, but horizontally, it is 600 pixels. Alright. Then the next section is your brand colors. You have actually a lot more choices now. Previously, there were only five colors that you can upload, but now you can upload ten colors. So I haven't even used up all of these brand color options. So go ahead and click into this section and you can actually type in and copy and paste your hex codes into here. And then these are the colors that you can easily just click on it when you are designing your emails so that they are on then the next section here is your brand fonts. Again, you can go into manage and you can add a new font here, and then this is where you can upload your font files here and you'll be able to use your brand fonts in your emails. The NIC section is just your general business information. We can go ahead and fill those out as well. The NIC section we have here is your optins. Double Optin here just means that if someone subscribes to your email list, if you enable Double Optin, you will automatically send them an email confirmation, and if they click Accept confirm my subscription, then they will be able to start receiving emails from you before they except, which is the double confirmation, they won't be able to receive any emails from you. This is actually really important and highly recommended as a best practices to opt in for double Optin. If you are in Europe, it is actually a legal requirement in a lot of countries. So just as a best practice, I do recommend doing double opt ins. It also makes your list a lot more clean, takes out all the bots who just subscribe and don't double opt in. So yeah, I definitely recommend setting this up. And for me, I just put a little language here, cute little Jiff, and I said, just to remind them that it is the law because I'm from the Netherlands to double opt in and click Join the list because if they don't click on this, they won't be receiving any emails from me. It's important to put that reminder wherever you can on your website where they're subscribing or even in this double Opt in email. It's a good reminder for them to make sure that they know that they have to double opt in before they receive emails because I have in the past, when I don't put these reminders, people email me back that they're not getting emails from me, and it is better to remind them so that they will receive the first email. This is your thank you page. Once they have subscribed, if you have a double opt in, once they have double opted in, they will get this thank you page. It is super important for you to customize this thank you page. I just put a little language here to thank them for joining my list. This is also a great place to add a little discount code or you can upload your best freebie in here or whatever value you can give them upfront. You can also put it into this thank you email. Then we have your preferences page. Again, you can just customize this with your logo and you're all good there. Last but not least is integration. One very important thing that you do want to connect to is Canva. You want to scroll all the way down to connect with Canva here. We are going to if you have a Canva account, hopefully you do because later on in this course, we are going to show you how to use Canva designs right in your flow Desk email. You definitely want to turn on this integration and log into your Canva account. In the next lesson, we are going to be creating your opt in forms. 6. Design your Opt-in form: All right. In this lesson, we are going to be setting up your opt in forms. We are going to first, before you set up your form, we have to set up all of your segments. Now, go on to your workbook that you filled out. Look at the whole segment name list, and we're going to get all of those segments set up. So we're going into audience here, click on segments, and we're going to click on New segment here and go through your segment names and add them one by one. So just as an example, I'm just going to call this flow des made example so that I know what the segment is. I'm going to assign it this blue color, and I'm going to click on Save. So go through all of your segment names and go and create those segments now. Just as a reminder, if you don't know what a segment is, a segment is a group of subscribers who share common characteristics. These can be interest or your purchase history or engagement with previous emails of yours. It's just groups of people who have subscribed to you so that you can personalize your emails moving forward and send it to the appropriate groups of people. Just as an example, I have segment here called All Skillshare students. So when people are subscribing to my email list through Skillshare, I'll know that I tag them with this segment called All Skillshare students so that I know that this person that is subscribed to my email is indeed a Skillshare student. So in the future, if I wanted to send out an email just for my Skillshare students, I can choose this segment, and it'll only go to that group of people. So again, set up all of your segments, and once you have that all done, we're going to head to form. So click on Forms here, and we are going to create a new form. So we're going to click on New Form here and there are lots of different templates that you can choose from and also the different types of opt in ways. If you look in your workbook again, you have your Opt in types that we talked about. We have the Link in Bio, we have the website pop up. We have the website in line, within a section of your website. We have the full page and then other types of full page opt in forms. One with a video in it, one with a spinner. These are fun little different types of opt ins, as well as one with a countdown timer. Just to keep it simple for this class, we are going to be creating a full page one. So basically, if they click on this link, it'll open this page so that they can fill out the opt in form on this page. So there are a couple of different templates here. So the one that is actually my favorite is one of the ones with the checkboxes, and I'll explain that in a second. So maybe we'll just choose I think I like this one right here. We'll customize this one, and here is where you're going to choose your segment. So we made the floats made example segment, so I'm going to click on that. What that means is anyone who signs up for this Optin will get assigned that segment. All right, so a couple of things you can fill out here. So, first off, you can upload an image. This is where you upload a mockup, let's say, of your freebie and write your little title here. So a headline in your headline, you might want to highlight some key benefits or solutions for your audience. For example, get my free PDF or example here, get my top three secrets to organic gardening. You really want to come out right away and tell them exactly the benefit that they're going to get by signing up for this email. Then in this description section, you can explain about the freebie or the newsletter, what they're going to get, what they can expect, what they're going to achieve by signing up? Are they going to get inspired? Are they going to learn something? Are they going to be able to join a community? What exactly are they signing up for? Then in the section, you can add whatever field that they need to fill out. So email address, first name, or other fields, custom fields as well. Then right here is your selection for them to opt into specific things. The reason why I like to choose these templates that have these checkboxes is because it is GDPR compliant. Again, GDPR compliance is a European email compliance standard. Um, if you by any chance, have a subscriber that is from Europe, it doesn't matter if you yourself are from Europe or not. If you have a subscriber from Europe, you need to be GDPR compliant. And in order to do that, you need to make sure that your subscriber knows exactly what they are signing up for. So as an example, if this opt in is for your freebie, then like all of this copy right here, get my freebie da da da, and then description. This is what the freebie is about. Fill out your email address to get this freebie. Then the only thing that they are signing up for is your freebie, not your newsletter, not your three P course, not anything else, just your freebie. So if you want them to sign up for all of these other things, you need to make sure that they have opt into it separately. So for example, this section might say your freebie. So, oops, you have to type it here. So let's say this is for the freebie. Let's say this is specifically signing up for your newsletter. Maybe I'll just say very specifically weekly newsletter. And then this might be, I don't know, something else. Maybe you only have two of them, right? You have your freebie opten and then you have your weekly newsletter. If you want to remove them, you can go here and delete it. So by doing this, they get to choose exactly what they're signing up for, and that makes sure that you are GDP compliant. This right here, you name it, you also have to tie it to a segment. So for example, this was tied to that freebie, right? So the flotsmd example. This one, however, you might need to create a separate segment that's called weekly newsletters. Whoever gets tagged with the weekly newsletter segment will get your weekly newsletter. You want to make sure to create all the different segments that you need tied to the information that you're sending out. If you click into settings right here, you can also do all of the settings for your opt in form. I would recommend doing a double opt in. This is optional. If you have a lot of subscribers, you might want to toggle this off so that you don't get lots and lots of emails. Make sure you have the right segment picked here. The link, you can actually change the link name. So if you want to share this link to people directly and you want it to look nice, you can change the name of it. Then the link preview, you definitely want to edit this change up the photo and all of the description and stuff, especially if you're going to be sharing it on social platforms like Facebook or something. This is going to be that generate photo and, you know, information. But after that, you're going to click on Share, and it's going to show you this link. So basically, you can create a button on your website and make sure this link is tied to that button, or if you have an image or whatever you want to share this directly to your audience through your social platforms or like I said, on Facebook, you can also copy this link and share it there. Alright. That is your opt in form. In the next lesson, we are going to be delivering your freebie, as well as setting up your welcome sequence. 7. Deliver your Lead Magnet + Welcome Email Sequence: This lesson, we are going to be setting up your workflows to deliver your lead magnet or freebies, as well as your welcome sequence. We are going to head to your workflows here and we're going to choose your desired sequence. They have a lot of different templates for you. You can just click on New workflow here. Again, there are so many different types of sequence templates for you. Definitely go ahead and scroll through and see if there's one that works best for your needs. If you are just sending out or automating a lead magnet, then you can choose lead magnet delivery. But for this class, we are going to be using the welcome sequence because we are going to not only deliver your freebie, but we're also going to deliver a couple of first emails, which is going to become your welcome sequence. So I'm going to choose welcome sequence here. Can take a look at it and then click on Customize. All right. First off, you definitely want to go back to your workbook and make sure that you have filled out the late magnet, as well as the welcome sequence section so that you can now go into Flo Desk to recreate those sequences and those emails. The first thing you're going to do is we are going to add your trigger. So again, this is the segment that you want to choose. So this is probably fine. A subscriber who is added to this specific segment will then start this sequence. And the sequence that we created for this class as an example is your flow as made sequence. So in this sense, whoever signs up for that opt in form that you created that's tagged with this segment. They are then going to start this sequence. Right now, if you scroll through, you can see the different emails that will happen. Once they get this trigger, they're going to receive this email right away. If you don't want them to receive the email right away, then you can add a time delay. There's a couple of things you can app. The most important thing that you can do here is a time delay. So maybe you wait a certain hours, minutes or days if you click on one day after 24 hours or one day, they are going to receive the next thing in this sequence. For now, I'm going to delete this. First they're going to receive this email, this email will most likely be your lead magnet or your freebie delivery, and then we are going to have a time delay. You can change this to whatever. I wouldn't recommend 30 days. That's a pretty long time, maybe two to three days. And then they're going to receive their first email within the Welcome sequence, and then there'll be, again, a time delay, and then they're going to get the next email and then so on and so forth. So you can make the sequence as long as you like. But for now, let's just focus on the content and the sequence itself. Go back to your workbook and look at the sequence that you drafted out, and we're going to now create this on Flow Desk. The first one right here, let me just head into it. So you can change the subject line. This is the subject line of the email that goes out, so maybe it'll be something like your freebie is here, and then you can write the preview text. This is that little preview text that you see in your inbox of kind of like a little blurP of what's inside the email. So it might be like, we're excited or I'm excited to share with you your freebie, d dot or whatever it might be. And then we're going to edit the email. You can look at the editor here, and this is where you can literally just go in and change up the text. So you can be like your freebie is here or is waiting for you, and then you can change up the content here. In the style editor, which is where we are right now, you can add in different sections. So the most important one is probably your layouts. Flotas has a ton of incredible like premade layouts for you. Definitely scroll through them and see which one might fit your style better or the section better. You can also just do very plain texts as well, but a lot of these will help you have an image and some text laid over. For example, this one right here, you can upload an image for the background, and then you can write the text here. Within the layouts, sometimes you can adjust the block. This right here is the block. You can change maybe the background color of the block here. You can change the font style. You can even change the padding. Let's say the top here, you might want to have some more padding or less padding. Definitely play around with it. There's so much flexibility with these layouts that it's just really incredible and making emails so much faster. So right here, you can maybe even just upload an image of your freebie. Again, in a later chapter, I'm going to show you how to create, let's say, a mock up on Canada, and then you can integrate it with your Cava account and put it into this section right here. So that is your different layouts. You can add different things like images, logo, video. When you're done writing out all of the content and you're ready to upload your freebie. Let's just say this is the button for them to actually upload the freebie. You can put all the images here and the text here, and then you can say download freebie here. And then you can click into it and make it a link, and you can either upload your file. So if it's a PDF, you can upload the file of the PDF here. If it's, let's say, a notion template or a Canva template, you can put the link of that here, and that's it. So that's how they would receive it. All I have to do is click on this button and they will get their freebie. Once you're finished with your email, you can go on and click Finish, and this will be saved onto your sequence. So go on and fill out this whole sequence out, look back on your workbook and make sure that you have built out all of your sequences that you want to create. Now I do want to give you a couple of tips when creating this welcome sequence. The first thing is you really do want to focus on quick wins and building trust and confidence in your brand. This email sequence tends to be short. It's also the first time that people are introduced to your brand, possibly. So you want to really make sure that they are seeing the value in being part of your email list right away, quick wins can be simply getting a freebie or seeing your YouTube content or reading really valuable blog posts or really getting to know more about you. Those quick wins can really help you build trust in these early stages of your relationship. Now, another tip is, at the beginning of your email, you could sometimes mention something that they will get at the end of the email, and at the end of the email, you can actually kind of tease the next email that they'll get. For example, in the beginning of the email, you can be like, Oh, remember to read to the end to get your free. And then at the end of the email, you can tease and be like, I'll be back in two days with XYZ, kind of tease the next email. My third tip for you is to make sure that the emails feel really easy and fun to read. You can style it with some images, break it up with some graphics, or you can even make the paragraphs shorter, maybe bold certain words or italicize certain words to kind of guide people into reading. I mean, you know, we all have really short attention spans these days, and having more stylized short emails really helps people to digest your information quickly. Next tip that I have is to use personalized recipient name. What I mean is if you're adding some text here, let's just say this email. You're saying hi there. This is Cheryl. You can actually, instead of saying there, you can add right here, add personalization, and then you can add their first name. So it will I first name is available, it will say the first name here. Otherwise, it will display, you can write whatever else. So there is now a personalized text right there. So every time someone gets an email, it'll say hi, Cheryl, hi, Susan or whoever is getting the email. And if they didn't provide you with the first name, they will get hi there. This adds just a little bit more of a personal touch to it. It sounds like you're talking directly to them. My next tip is to encourage micro actions in these emails. Now, micro actions could be hit reply or watch this, read this. These are just tiny little things that you can encourage them to engage with your email. I love using hit Reply in these first emails in the email sequence or the welcome sequence because it encourages them to email you back and start a more personal conversation. For example, in my welcome sequence, I encourage them to reply to what their why is. Why did they start their business in the first place? And this really starts, again, a more personable conversation so that I can reply back. And this back and forth, really adds a lot of value to your email list. And the next lesson, we are going to be creating your newsletter template. 8. Create Your Newsletter Template: This lesson, we are going to be designing your newsletter template. Go into your workbook and hopefully you have filled out your draft design for your newsletter. So definitely bring that back out. If you create a new email, you'll also see all of those design templates again. So you can definitely choose one of these. But I'm actually going to be providing you with one of my own templates as well so that you can start from that template as well. So this is the template that I will share with you. We're going to edit it. I'll just provide the link of this in your workbook as well, so you can start either from scratch or from one of the flots layouts, or you can start from this layout right here. Go ahead and look at your workbook and start creating the different sections of your newsletter. Now, I do have a couple of tips for you for creating your newsletter. You want to try to be as personal as possible. Don't be afraid to be personal in these newsletters. This is your way to have a consistent connection with your subscribers. I always love to start off my newsletters with a little personal story. Maybe you can talk about what you did on the weekend, a little story about your baby or your family or something a conversation that you had with a friend or just something you learned this week. That really helps sets the mood of the email and also obviously have that personal connection. So hopefully, it ties on the main purpose of the email, that would be even better. After you have created that personal connection in this first section, you really want to lead with value. Can you offer in this section, we have our monthly intentions, but can you offer something that they can take away really quickly and get some value out of your email. For example, in this section, we might have the latest blog post, so they can click on to read the story or read the blog post, or watch the YouTube video or whatever it might be. Maybe it'll give them inspiration. You really want to lead with value in these newsletters. One thing that's really important about these weekly or monthly connections is in general, you want to pitch less so that when you do actually have to pitch, let's say you have a launch coming up or a product that you're about to list, you want to feel comfortable about making those pitches once in a while. If you offer a lot of free value in your weekly newsletters or monthly newsletters, you actually feel a lot better about pitches because I know, especially for me, sometimes I feel really uncomfortable with my email pitches because, you know, I feel like I'm always selling. So by having really value added free value added emails consistently, you feel a lot more comfortable with those pitches when you have to do them. Now I was talking about weekly or monthly. The most important thing about email newsletters is not necessarily how often you send them, but how consistent can you be. So if you can only stick to once a week or once every two weeks or once every month, that's totally fine as long as you stay consistent, choose something that you can commit to and then try to stay consistent with it and give your subscribers an expectation of how often they're going to be hearing from you. Now, often people struggle with figuring out what to share. First off, having a template really helps because every month, you can be sharing your intentions. You just need to figure out what is your intention of the month and then write that out. Or every month, you have a new blog post, then or a new YouTube video. Then you can have those sections already built out for you. All you have to do every time you send a newsletter, you're just updating this template, and that really gives you a quick way to remember, oh, yeah, this is the type of information that I usually share. Um, not only is it easy for you, but it's also more consumable for your audience because they kind of already have an expectation of what is part of these newsletters. Once you do have this template all built out, what you're going to do is you're going to click on Save to Favorites, and this you can name it your weekly newsletter template, and you can click on Save and that design like this design will automatically be ready for you when you are creating your NIC email. What you do is the next time you want to send out your newsletter with that template, you go to new email and you can click on MFavorites right here and it will show that template that you just created and all you have to do is click into it and you can start your email by customizing it right here. That's how you create your weekly, biweekly monthly newsletter. I hope this template is going to help you create your template really quickly. Yeah, be sure to download this. You can click on the link on the workbook and it will directly open up this template into your flots account and you can start editing it as you go. Hopefully, you're going to replace all of the branding the colors, the fonts, the logo with your own business, and then you can just create your different sections here. In the next lesson, we are going to be finally designing your email. Now that you have them all written out and workflows created, I'm going to show you how to add in your brand fonts, add in your brand colors, how to use the Kanda integration to make these even more personalized to your brand. 9. Branding Your Emails + Canva Integration: This lesson, let's go over how to design your emails to match your brand, as well as go over the amazing Canva integration to help with your designs. We are going to head into the weekly newsletter template that we built. We can use this as our base while we learn how to design your emails. This has already been pre designed with my brand. I'm just going to show you a little how I did it all. I like to create a the settings area when you're uploading your logo. I like to actually create a graphic that is the full span, like a whole banner instead of just having your logo. I think it looks nicer, more put together, almost like a little frame for your email, all of your emails. So just so you know, anything you design, let's say you're designing on Canva, the dimensions of emails are usually 600 pixels across. Whenever you're creating a new graphic, just make the horizontal dimension, 600 pixels and then guestimate how high you would need it to and just adjust as you need. So this dimension here is probably around 600 pixels across and then probably around 250, I'm guessing here, 250 or yeah, probably 200 to 250 vertically. And then what I did was I just created an image with one of my brand photos on the back, and then you can just put your logo right in the middle and then upload it onto Flo Ds. Now, I also like to create a little background color. Now, if you just click on the side areas here, you can choose your background color here. If you've already set up your brand colors on Slots and makes it super easy, your brand colors actually show up here at the very bottom, just click on whichever one you want to use. In my case, I like to have the green sides, or you can just literally copy and paste your hex codes into this area and um yeah, it's super easy. You can also change your canvas color, which is this background right here. For me, I like it a little bit like a beige color, main font color, as well as your link color. If you have a link within your text, this would be the default color that it will make it. You can also change the borders to create a little border. You see how it created a little border here. Personally, I like to have no border and just have it clean, but you can add that if you like, as well as padding. So those are the main colors for the base of your email. Within each section, you can also change the color. For example, if you want to add a background color to this layout right here, you can choose a background for that. Typically, I like to keep my backgrounds for the emails as close to white as possible. Even for this one, I would probably typically choose a lighter white color. I just think it's easier to read. But for this specific example, I did a beige color, which is also fine. Um, yeah, that's how you change brand colors. You can also change the colors of your text as well per section. So as you can see here, you can change the font color here to whatever color you like. Again, I typically like to have a darker font and then a lighter background. You can also change colors of fonts for specific sections, so you can just um put your cursor over it and then change the font color of just that specific section. Just one note about the fonts, um, you two notes, actually. So if you've already uploaded your brand fonts in your brand setting section, then you'll be able to find all of your brand fonts here up at the top. You'll see the section for brand, and then they also have a lot of beautiful in house fonts that they already have on the system, so you can also use those. I typically do use my own brand fonts, do note that some layouts, you aren't able to use your brand fonts. For example, if you add a text layout right here, these cannot use your own brand fonts. So if you go into fonts here, you'll see that it'll say this block uses only websafe fonts, no brand fonts are allowed. I typically would like to choose an in house font that looks similar to my own brand fonts as a second option in case I use a layout where I cannot use my brand fonts. The other thing is you can save font style. For example, you really like how you style this font right here. You can go ahead and save this font style. Let's just say I save this one and then I want to change this one to that font style. Then you can click on this and it will mimic the font style that you save. That really saves you a lot of time. Um, I really love that feature, and then you can also save button style. So let's say you really like how you style this button right here, you can go ahead and save this button style and then I'll save it into this list here, which is so great because styling buttons does take some time. There's a lot of things you can do. You can change the shape of it, change the fill color and the border color and the font style. So it does take some work. So now that they have this feature, you can just click with one button and restyle it to how you typically like your buttons to look. The next thing I really wanted to talk about, which is super exciting with styling your emails now is the Canva integration. Sometimes you might want to bring in an image or a graphic or I don't know, you want to bring in a mockup and you want to do your own custom buttons or maybe sections, and you want to style that on Canva because it's just easier to create it on Canva. You can't do all the design things within Flow Desk. You can now use the Canva integration to do that. Let's just as an example, we want to create our own button. These buttons are just not how we want our buttons to look like. You can go ahead and add an image here. And then when you click on the image, you can click on Add Image from, and then you're going to choose Canva, and I'm going to add my design. If you're designing your buttons for the first time, you can go ahead and create a new Canvas and just as a reminder again, it's going to be a graphic that is 600 pixels horizontally, and then you can choose the height of your graphic. Make it as tight as possible. So probably for a button like 100 height is probably good enough. I did preme some buttons here just as an example. Let's import this as an image. We're going to click on this one that I pre made recently. Here you go. I basically made a design with a background that's the same color as the rest of my email backgrounds and then an image here with whatever text I want. To make this an actual interactive button, you can go ahead and click on it and add a link. If they click on this block right here, it will automatically send them to the link. Here is the actual Canva graphic that I made, just so you can see here, I basically just had a background where I changed the color to my email backgrounds, and then this graphic here is actually a frame. I'm going to choose a frame here like any shape that you want. I usually just go with a rectangle one because that's easy, and then you can put any image in here. If you have some brand textures that you want to pop in here, you can do that. What I did for this one is I actually just looked up a gene print, I just chose one of them. I think it's probably this one here and I just pop this image into the frame and then I added text on top. I just go wild with the creativity here. It's so much fun to create your own custom buttons, I find. Another idea is to create section dividers on Canva. Let's just say you want it instead of just a plain line here, you wanted to create a whole different section, title, and divider. I'm going to add another image here. Again, I created something in advance so you can take a look at. I'm going to go on Canva and as an example, we can bring in this image right here. Again, 600 pixel dimensions horizontally and then you choose how high you need it to be. But this is an example of a graphic that I made that I can continue to use for all of my newsletters. Maybe it's just a really cute section divider, something that you can't really create on flots itself, but definitely you can create it on Canva and then just bring it over into your sections on flots. The only tip is remember to make the background color the same color as the rest of your email so that it matches. Another thing you can create are images. Let's just say, instead of this right here, you want to create your own mockup. Let's go into Cava and let's create that from scratch. Because this image won't go from left to right, it will be a vertical image. We're going to change the dimensions a little bit. So just any vertical dimension is probably fine. It's going to be a default, um I think squares. So you can edit the size of this canvas and just go to resize and custom size. I mean, this is just going to fit into that graphic dimension. So size itself doesn't really matter too much. You just need to make sure it's vertical. Okay, resize this design. Okay, so let's just look up a background. So let's maybe put office desk. I do have Canva Pro, which makes things a lot easier when you want to use their graphics. So I do recommend it. But you can do probably similar things with the free version. And then we're going to look up a mockup. There is actually an app here for mockups. Mockups. All right. Let's look for a phone mockup. Smartphones. Let's just choose this one right here and then oh, that was weird. We're going to choose the image. I actually took this image, but we're going to drag in another image. So let's just drag in let's just say this image right here. You can also take a screenshot of your phone, and then we're going to make this the background as well. We're going to put this to the back, position it to back, perfect. Then we have your phone, obviously you're probably going to use a screenshot of your website or whatever it is. Then once this is done, let's say this looks perfect, you can add some text here, a bubble or whatever, and then you can return to flow Des this will immediately import it into flots. There you go. Immediately import it into flots which is so convenient and that looks really great. Yeah, I really, really love this Canva integration. You can do so many fun things with it and it makes designing your email much faster and much easier, especially if you already are a Canva user. One tip that I do have with designing your different sections for Flo Ds is I would always name those Canva documents, something that's easy to search for because when you are adding the image through Canva, let's say you add design, um if it was an old design, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find those images. If you just name it something like flow Desk, then you'll see all of those images pop up so that it's easier to access. Name all of your canvases that are for flow Desk with the name flowdsk on it or another word where it's easy to search for. In the next lesson, we are going to be wrapping things up and look at the analytics on flow Desk. 10. Email Analytics: All right, so at this point, it is also really important to start understanding the analytics on Flo DS. So as you start sending more and more emails, you're going to be able to look into the analytics overall, but also per email. So let's hop into Flo DS and look at what the options are for analytics. So for each email, let's just say this email right here. I can actually click into this button right here to look at the analytics details for this specific email. Right here, you can check out the open rate or how many people opened it and how many people clicked on it. For this particular email, I have an open rate of 36%. For most creative entrepreneurs, I would probably expect about a 30 to 40% average open rate. Then for click rates, you can I have 1.8% for this email, but you can probably on average expect about 1.5% to 3%. If you're below that range, you might want to look into that email and see what is not working. Maybe your list isn't engaged or that particular email wasn't very engaging and see how you can change that for the next time. You can even click into here to see more details. For example, the link clicks. That one actually is pretty helpful. You can see all of the different links that are within that email and see which links people are actually clicking into and how many times. For example, for this particular one, most people were clicking into this link right here, which is the main call to action on that email, which is perfect. But if you're testing something, for example, for this email, I listed out three or four different blog posts that people can check out. You can see which blog posts people are more interested in reading and clicking into, and then next time you send an email, you have data to be like, Okay, these are the types of things that people are really looking into reading, and that's the type of information I can share for next time. At the very bottom, you can also see the unsubscribe, how many people unsubscribe due to this email. As you get more and more subscribers, this email went out to almost 5,000 people. So of 5,000 people, 81 people unsubscribe, that rate is actually not bad. I mean, I prefer people not to unsubscribe, but as you get more subscribers, you're going to see this unsubscription number go up. And my only tip here is to just embrace unsubscribers and realize that it's perfectly fine that people decide that this is not the information that they want to receive. We constantly want to attract those that really resonate with our message, and we want to then let go of those who don't anymore and that's totally fine. This actually helps us create a much healthier list so that it ensures the right people are actually getting your emails. A lot of email providers actually do price based on the size of your subscription list as well. So we want to try our best to keep those who want to listen and then embrace those who want to leave so that you can keep your subscription list small, efficient and the right people who actually want to listen to your message. The next thing that you can look at is actually the details of your workflow analytics. If you click into workflows, you can go into, let's just say this workflow right here. You can actually click onto the Analytics button as well and view the details of your workflow. If you click into details right here, you can actually see the breakdown by email or part of the flow. So you can compare, okay, this click rate and open rate on this particular email in the sequence actually was working better than let's say this email. You can see where people are dropping off, where people are not interested anymore, not clicking through anymore, and maybe those are the places where you can make those emails a little bit more engaging and fix them so that they have a better rate. The next section where you can see your analytics is in the analytics section right here. It breaks it down by subscribers, emails forms, workflows, and checkouts, if you have checkouts. You can definitely scroll through them to see what kind of analytics you want to check out. But the two sections that are actually my favorite are within emails. Click into Analytics, and if you click on emails here, you're going to see, all of those totals, how many emails you sent out, deliverability and subscriber, click rate, that kind of thing. My favorite section is actually right here, Best days to send email. So if you look at AT, which is best for me because I've been on maternity leave and I haven't been sending emails during my maternity leave. But in this section, you're going to get to see which days are the best days to send your emails. The darker the color, the better rate it is. For example, these are the total volumes of how many emails I sent on those days and it looks like the best days to actually send those emails with higher open rates and click rates is Thursday and Saturdays. Um, so maybe moving forward, the best days for me to actually email out is Thursdays and Saturdays. What I would do is if you're in the beginning part of your journey of sending emails out, I would for the next 90 days, you can try out sending emails on different days and different times. And test out after 90 days, come back and see which days are actually working best for you to have the highest open rates and click rates. You can also do it by time of the day, test out sending out those emails on different days and different times, whether it's the morning, afternoon, evening or night for me in particular, this makes sense that evenings work best for me because I'm in Eastern Time and a lot of my subscribers are actually in North America. So when I send out the emails at evening time, people are usually reading it in the morning. So this is probably the best time for me, but definitely test it out yourself and after 90 days experiment and see which days and times you actually get a bigger or better lick rate and open rate. The Nick favorite section of mine is the form section. Here you can see which forms OptinFms are working best. You can scroll down here and they will actually list out which forms are doing best, the first ones doing the best. For me, people are definitely really into my free Notion dashboard template. The next time I'm creating a freebie opt in, then I might create something notion related. To really put all of my eggs on what's working for my business. All right. So those are my two favorite sections and analytics. Definitely go through all of the sections and see what kind of information you're looking for. All right. And that is flow desk Analytics for you. 11. Final thoughts: Congratulations on completing this class with me. By now, you have created a foundational Em marketing system for your business. This method will help invite people into your ecosystem, helping you to continuously nurture and build trust with them, giving you a super niche community that's excited to learn and hear about your offerings. Remember to share your newsletter, design template with me and the Skillshare community in the project section. Cannot wait to see your designs. And if you enjoyed this class, I would be so appreciative for you to leave a review. There is so much to learn in the world of email marketing, and this is just the beginning. So if you have any questions or follow up or comments, let's continue that conversation in the discussions. You can also connect with me directly on Instagram at Made on Sunday Studio. And if you're interested in watching some of my free content for creative entrepreneurs, you can find me on YouTube at Mt on Sundays. Again, thank you so much for spending time with me here today, and I will see you in the next class. Bye.