I used Mailchimp for my newsletters for over 8 years.  The benefits and functionality was really great. I don’t have much to complain about as far as the ability to edit and send and even maintain the lists / segments I had. They really thought of everything and while I loved the application and what it did for my business, my business was growing, my contact list was growing and I was continuously trying to trim my contact list to help reduce the cost of Mailchimp.  It’s great as a free tool – but once your business grows and your contact list approaches 5000 contacts, you start having to pay a great deal a month. I was paying upwards of $80 a month to be able to send a newsletter out twice a month to my customers.  I was telling myself that there’s got to be a better way to handle this without the high out of pocket price.

A friend of mine told me about Flodesk. They were (and still are somewhat) in a beta version and still building as they go. I’ve been using Flodesk for about 5 months now.  I pay $19 a month, unlimited contacts.  I’m locked in to this $19 a month and don’t have to worry about deleting my contacts from my lists to keep costs down.  Are there drawbacks, eh’ a few.  As I’m writing this, there are a few things that I know they’re working on and will release soon, but are a little frustrating to have to work through on my end. I’ve noted the gaps below.

• In Mailchimp – there’s a member rating concept where a contact will rate between 1 star and 4 stars.  1 -2 stars are not opening your emails. So you can clean up your list based on this metric. Flodesk does not have this concept and therefore cleaning up isn’t as easy.
• In Mailchimp – You can look at a contact record and see what campaigns they opened. In Flodesk, they are currently building this out, but as of right now, they show you a contact dashboard of how many opened vs sent, but not WHICH campaigns were opened. (screenshot below)
• When looking at the campaign results, you can see a list of those that opened / clicked your campaign, however, there’s no search or sort from that result list, so if you have over 20k contacts, like I do, and you want to know if a specific person opened that campaign, you would have to scroll through the list to find that contact.

Those are my biggest pain points, all in regards to maintenance & reporting.  Other than those three listed above, Flodesk has been a lifesaver in the fact that I’m not spending $80 for only half of my contact list, but I can have my full list at an affordable cost.  The templates, omigosh, are great, just beautiful.  You can also use Canva to create your own images and use them in Flodesk as well.

If you’d like to get in on the $19 rate – I can offer you a coupon code to get in on this rate:   Get Flodesk for Only $19

Template examples:  Here’s a few ..