Let’s set the scene: you finally decided to start your email list. You opened up an email marketing platform, took one look at the dashboard, and closed the tab because you couldn’t figure out how to send an email.

The good news is that’s totally normal.

Most email platforms were built by engineers, for engineers, and come with a learning curve similar to a doctorate. Which is exactly why so many creative entrepreneurs land on Flodesk—it’s the rare email tool that’s actually pretty to look at and doesn’t require a computer science degree to operate.

And in this blog, I’ll walk you through how to use Flodesk—from your very first login to advanced segmenting strategies that’ll make your email marketing feel like it’s running itself. We’ll cover forms, landing pages, segments (beginner and advanced), workflows, checkout, and their amazing customer service.

This post is for the email marketing beginner who just signed up for Flodesk and is staring at a blank dashboard, wondering where to even click first. But if you’ve been using Flodesk for a while and want to level up your segmenting game? Stick around—I saved the advanced strategies for the back half of the blog.

What you’ll learn in this guide:

• What Flodesk actually is and how it compares to other email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and Kit (ConvertKit)
• The key Flodesk terms you need to know before you do anything in your account to help you be less overwhelmed
• How to build forms, landing pages, segments, and workflows from scratch in Flodesk
• Advanced segmenting strategies most business owners never touch, but should
• How Flodesk’s Checkout feature works if you want to use your email list to sell products and services
• Why Flodesk’s customer service is genuinely one of the best parts of using this platform

What is Flodesk?

Let’s start with the basics, because if you’re brand new here, the rest of this guide won’t mean much without them

Flodesk is an email marketing platform built specifically for creatives and small businesses—the kind of business owner who wants beautiful aesthetic emails without confusing tech. It lets you design emails, build opt-in forms, create landing pages, automate sequences, and (depending on your plan) sell digital products directly through the platform.

Here’s why creative entrepreneurs specifically gravitate toward it:

• The design is simple and good-looking. No coding or fighting with a clunky drag-and-drop builder that breaks every time you move a text box.
• It’s intuitive to use. You don’t need a tutorial for every single click.
• It has all the features you need for the basics and to grow. Forms, landing pages, workflows, segments, and checkout all live under one roof.

Flodesk vs. Mailchimp vs. Kit (ConvertKit)

I’m not going to pretend Flodesk is the only email platform on the internet—but as of writing this blog, it’s the one I use for my business after moving from Kit, and it’s what I recommend for most of my clients.

But here’s the TL;DR on the other email marketing platforms:

• Kit (ConvertKit)—my 2nd favorite after Flodesk. It’s fairly easy to use and is great for sending emails, but usually it’s more expensive than Flodesk. However, it does have more advanced integrations than Flodesk, so if you have a very robust tech stack, it may be a better fit.
• MailerLite—I personally don’t like MailerLite and find it hard to use. But a lot of creatives like that they have a free plan.
• Mailchimp—expensive and EXTREMELY hard to use. Avoid at all costs.
• Any other ESP not listed—some of the other email marketing platforms will have weird rules in their services that affect deliverability—aka wherever your email lands in inboxes or not—so I wouldn’t recommend them.

Bottom line: for most small business owners, Flodesk is the best platform for creatives who want their emails to look as good as their Instagram grid, without needing a coding specialist on retainer. If you need wildly complex integrations, you might eventually outgrow it. But for most service providers, photographers, coaches, authors, artists, bookkeepers, and small business owners? It’s exactly what you need

Key Flodesk Terms You Need to Know

Forms—how someone signs up for your email list by giving you their email address, whether it pops up on your website, sits inline in a blog post, or stands alone as a full landing page.

Landing Page—A “full page” form type that lives on its own URL, hosted by Flodesk without needing a website. This is your go-to if you don’t have a website yet (or just want to throw up a quick landing page).

Segments—groups of your subscribers you’ve marked and labeled with a “segment” because of a specific action they’ve taken. Think of your email list as a pie, and “All Subscribers” is the whole pie. Segments are the individual slices—people who signed up for a specific freebie, clicked a specific link, bought a specific product, answered a poll question, etc.

Workflows—Flodesk’s term for automations. A workflow is a sequence of emails (plus delays, conditions, and triggers) that fires automatically based on something a subscriber does—like joining a segment or completing a form.

Checkout—Flodesk’s built-in ecommerce solution so you can sell digital products, courses, subscriptions, etc. with Stripe handling the actual payment processing behind the scenes.

Getting Started: Setting Up Your Flodesk Account

Step 1: Sign up for your free trial. Flodesk offers a 30-day free trial with full access to paid features—no credit card required. (And if you use my link, you’ll get 25% off your first year.)

Step 2: Set up your brand kit. Before you touch a single email or form, head into your brand settings and upload your logo, choose your brand fonts, and pick your color palette. When you’re sending an email or creating a form, your brand colors and assets will be available to use every time without having to search for logo files and hex codes.

Step 3: Pick a plan that fits your season of business. As of late 2025, Flodesk moved away from its founding member “unlimited everything” model to a tiered, subscriber-based structure:

• Free—$0/month. Forms, landing pages, and link-in-bio pages, but no email sending.
• Lite—$25/month (or $19/month billed annually) for up to 1,000 subscribers. Unlimited email sends, but capped at one workflow, and you can’t remove Flodesk’s branding.
• Pro—Starting at $28/month for 1,000 subscribers (or $25/month annually). Unlimited workflows, can remove Flodesk branding, and one Checkout for selling a single digital product (and an upsell).
• Everything—Starting at $54/month for 1,000 subscribers (or $49/month annually). Unlimited checkouts plus all the e-commerce tools—payment plans, subscriptions, abandoned cart automations, and discount codes.

If you joined Flodesk before December 2025, you may still be grandfathered into the old unlimited flat-rate plan. If, for some reason, you decide to cancel Flodesk but want to rejoin later, you’ll have to choose from one of their current plans.

How to Use Flodesk Forms

Flodesk gives you four form types:

• Popup—appears over your website, can be triggered by time, how far someone has scrolled on your website, etc.
• Inline—embedded to a page directly on your website or in a blog post
• Full Page—a standalone landing page (hosted on your Flodesk URL)
• Link in Bio—a mobile-friendly list of links, perfect for Instagram

Here’s how to create one:

1. Go to Forms in your top navigation, then click + New Form.
2. Choose your form type.
3. Select or create a segment for this form (use a different segment for each freebie to keep track of who signed up for what). Every single subscriber who opts in here gets dropped into that segment automatically.
4. Customize the design—swap in your images, adjust your copy, and make it match your brand kit.
5. Set your “success” message or redirect URL (so subscribers know their freebie is on the way).
6. Publish.

How to Build a Flodesk Landing Page

If you don’t have a website yet—or just want a clean, dedicated page for one freebie—a Flodesk landing page (technically a “Full Page” form) is your best friend.

Here’s the step-by-step:

1. Go to Forms → + New Form, and select Full Page.
2. Choose or create your segment (use a new segment for every form and/or freebie you create).
3. Click into the page to start customizing: swap headlines, images, button text, and colors.
4. Customize your URL slug. You can’t change the “flodesk.com” part without connecting a custom domain, but you can customize the slug.
5. Decide your post-signup experience: either show a success message or redirect to a thank-you page (you can use the thank-you page for upsells and tripwires).
6. Publish, then grab the link and put it everywhere—your Instagram bio, your email signature, your podcast show notes, your “link in bio” page, all of it.

How to Use Flodesk Segments (Beginner to Advanced)

The Beginner Basics

A segment is just a labeled group of subscribers. “All Subscribers” is your default segment (it’s automatically generated, and you can’t delete it). From there, you build out smaller, more specific groups to target your emails to with more customized content depending on their actions.

To create a segment manually:

1. Go to Audience → Segments, then click + New Segment.
2. Name it clearly—”FREEBIE: Newsletter Template” is infinitely more useful six months from now than “Segment 3.”
3. Choose a color so it’s visually easy to spot in your Audience tab (choosing the same color for segments that go together will help you down the road for easy finding).
4. Save.

You can also build segments automatically—someone joins a segment the moment they fill out a specific form, click a specific link, complete a poll, or make a Checkout purchase.

The Advanced Strategy

Segment by behavior, not just opt-in source. Basic segments like “downloaded freebie” are a good starting point, but advanced segmenting like tagging people who clicked a specific link inside that freebie email—because clicking tells you what they’re actually interested in, not just that they wanted a free thing—can give you more specific data to sell to.

Example: Say your welcome email links to three blog posts on three different topics. Whoever clicks the link about “email deliverability” gets added to a segment called “INTEREST: Deliverability.” Now you know exactly what to email them next, without guessing.

Segment by purchase behavior. If you’re using Checkout, you can automatically segment subscribers based on what they bought. This means your past customers never get a general “are you interested in X” email for something they already own.

Segment by engagement level. Build a segment for subscribers who haven’t opened anything in 90 days. These are the cold subscribers you can clean off so you can keep your list healthy and avoid the spam folders better.

Use segments to build VIP lists. Got existing clients you want to treat differently from cold leads? Segment into a dedicated “Clients” segment and send specific offers to them you whole list doesn’t get.

How to Use Flodesk Workflows

If segments are your labels, workflows are the conveyor belt. A workflow is an automated sequence of emails that fires based on a trigger you set.

To build your first workflow:

1. Click Workflows in your top navigation, then + New Workflow.
2. Choose a template (Flodesk has several pre-built, including lead magnet delivery, welcome sequence, etc.) or start from scratch.
3. Add your trigger—the event that kicks everything off. Common options: a subscriber is added to a segment, a subscriber completes a specific form, or a purchase happens through Checkout.
4. Click the + icon to add your first step: usually an email delivering whatever you promised (the freebie, the welcome message, the discount code).
5. Add a time delay, then your next email. And the next. Build out your full sequence.
6. Hit Publish.

A few things you can layer in as you get comfortable:

• Time delays between emails (24 hours, 3 days, a week—your call, based on your goals)
• Conditional branches based on whether someone opened or clicked a previous email
• Adding subscribers to a new segment partway through the workflow, so you can trigger yet another automation later

How to Use Flodesk Checkout

If you sell digital products, courses, templates, or even newsletter subscriptions, Flodesk’s Checkout allows you to sell products to your email list directly in Flodesk.

Here’s what it includes:

• Sales pages built right inside Flodesk
• Stripe-powered payment processing (Flodesk doesn’t add any transaction fee on top of Stripe’s standard rate)
• Payment plans and subscription billing
• Abandoned cart automations
• Discount codes

Checkout availability depends on your plan: Pro gets you one checkout (great if you’re selling a single template or guide), and Everything unlocks unlimited checkouts for anyone running multiple products, a membership, or paid newsletter subscriptions.

When someone purchases through Checkout, you can automatically drop them into a segment—which means your post-purchase emails, upsells, and “you might also like” sequences can all run on autopilot without you lifting a finger after the sale.

Flodesk’s Customer Service is Top-Tier

They respond fast. Support runs through email (no live chat or phone line), but most of the time they respond within a day or two. They also have a very active Facebook group for more real-time support.

They have a real, public feature request board. Got an idea that would make your life easier inside Flodesk? You can submit it and upvote other people’s requests on the public roadmap. And it’s not just a suggestion box that never gets looked at; the new features come from it. Like the options to sell subscriptions that I personally requested.

They actually add features based on what people ask for. Recent rollouts—like deeper integrations, abandoned cart automations, and even AI tool connections—have come directly out of user feedback. Their active Facebook community (search “Flodesk Insiders”) is full of people who’ve watched their own suggestions turn into real features.

Get 25% Off Your First Year of Flodesk

If you’ve read this whole guide and you’re ready to build your email list inside a platform that’s beautiful and functional, you need to try Flodesk.

Start your free trial and get 25% off your first year with my affiliate link!

And if you want help turning your brand-new Flodesk account into newsletters that actually sell (not just look pretty), grab my Newsletter Starter Pack. You get three Mad Lib-style templates you can fill in and send to your list in minutes.