Email marketing is a large part of running a successful practice. Whether you use a platform strictly to communicate to a different subset of people or to deliver your free resources, the platform you choose is very important to the success of your list. In this blogpost, we’re chatting about the best email marketing platforms for scalable growth while comparing them in their features and preferences.
This post contains affiliate links.
Before we dive into the comparison of Flodesk and ConvertKit, we are here to say: we love both of these platforms for different reasons! The purpose of this blogpost is to be informative so that you can make the best decision for which platform will best serve your audience.
Both of these platforms are great for businesses but they do have a completely different interface. We’ve also seen different types of clinicians invest in one platform over the other – and it really works for those who choose to dive into one platform.
Personally, we use Flodesk at Chloe Creative. Many of the features discussed in this blogpost are the reason why we invested in this platform as our primary source for email marketing.
When reviewing the best email marketing platforms, you’ll want to compare different features and prices to see what works best for you!
Features to look for in a good email marketing platform
The best email marketing platforms will include features that make your life easier. Embeddable forms, automations, segmenting, template customizations are all examples.
When you are searching for the right email platform, I would make a list of these items in order of highest importance on your list. Here are some things to look for:
- Embeddable forms. Can this platform allow for their forms to be embedded on your website? This makes conversion rates higher!
- Audience segmentation. Once individuals join your list, are you able to segment them according to how they joined? What about segmentation after they are on your list?
- Visual ease. Is editing the forms easy? How will they look?
- Metrics & data monitoring. Are you able to extract data from your list and use it to improve your systems?
Why we love Flodesk
When researching the best email marketing platforms, Flodesk was our ultimate selection because of the aesthetic templates they had along with the ease of use.
As a newer business owner, I didn’t have the time to allot to learning another platform while trying to build my business. I needed something easy to learn and that had the features to get the job done. Here’s a few reasons why we loved Flodesk:
- Click and drag email builder with templates
- Easily-interpreted analytical data
- Ability to segment audiences based on form signup / embeddable forms
We’ll chat more about each of these features below – but if you are sold like we were, you can grab 50% off your plan now!
Why we love ConvertKit
We’ve found out about ConvertKit during our research phase on what email marketing platform would be best for our studio. If you’ve done any sorts of Google searching, ConvertKit will likely be up there!
Many of our clinician clients utilize ConvertKit for their businesses because it’s also a great tool to use. We loved ConvertKit because of:
- Advanced analytics
- Automations, tagging and segmenting
- Ability to grow with you
Ultimately we decided against this platform because we felt it would take longer to understand and we wanted to prioritize the visuals of our email list (being a design studio).
Keep reading for more of a deep dive on the features of ConvertKit!
Flodesk: best email marketing platforms for small businesses
With Flodesk being our ultimate choice of platform, we wanted to spend some time reviewing the features in-depth so you can really understand if this platform is best for you.
Click and drag email builder with templates
We do think that Flodesk is best for small businesses because it is especially designed to convert users with their gorgeous template library. When you are first starting out, you don’t want to learn another platform alongside the growth of your company.
Flodesk meets you where you are and provides you with an overly generous amount of templates that you can select and automatically input into your email.
They start by asking you what your email goal is – which I think is great because it’s straight to the point. Once you make your selection, you’ll be greeted with all the templates available for that goal. For example, if your goal is to “make money” they’ll have templates that focus on selling a product or service with a countdown offer to encourage action.
Easily-interpreted analytical data
I am a big data gal, but I’m the first to admit that I need it parred down for me to understand well. With this, my main goal was to get data and easily interpret it to make changes as needed. Flodesk has an “Analytics” tab where you can see many different categories of analytics. My favorite is the “performance by segment” area.
I use this data often to create new free offers around what people like and interact with the most on my existing email list. Here – this data tells me that a free offer around SEO performs very well with our audience.
Ability to segment audiences based on form signup / embeddable forms
Segmentation is key when working with an email list. Flodesk has the ability to segment your audience based on embeddable forms via your website. For example, we have an entire freebies page that houses most of our free resources. If you sign up for a particular form (or even multiple) you will be segmented accordingly.
Flodesk makes this easy to see visually, by it’s color coding. My type A self loves this feature!
ConvertKit: best email marketing platforms for intricate workflows and tagging
Although we don’t use ConvertKit within our business, we have a lot of experience utilizing ConvertKit with our clients. As a website design agency, we often have to embed forms and craft automations with respect to the website. We’ve found that ConvertKit works great for those looking for more in-depth audience tagging, workflows and automations with bigger lists.
Advanced analytics
I label this as “advanced” because most of our clients who utilize ConvertKit have email lists of 10,000 individuals +. When you are dealing with this many subscribers, understanding their behaviors are one of the highest priorities.
With ConvertKit, they have tracking pixels to follow a subscribers journey once they join your list. Within their analytics area, they have dashboards broken up into:
- Acquisition
- Engagement
- Sales
- Velocity
ConvertKit knows that most of their users are higher-impact brands, so they really showcase these metrics in a high level overview which I think is great. For us, this simply isn’t needed at this point.
Automations, tagging and segmenting
Similar to Flodesk, ConvertKit also has automations, tagging and segmentation. Most email marketing platforms do.
ConvertKit has the ability to tag individuals along with segmenting them and automating them into a journey. For example, for our client Bariatric Meal Prep, we built a very robust membership for her. In this membership, users are tagged based on what membership they signed up for.
Along the way, say they cancel their membership, ConvertKit is smart enough to remove a tag and resegment them elsewhere to keep them on the email list but still showcase different email content to them. Genius!
Ability to grow with you
I don’t say this because Flodesk doesn’t have the ability to grow with you – in fact, Flodesk charges you a flat rate regardless of how big your email list is! This is a huge pro in our eyes.
However, with ConvertKit, as you grow your list, you will be expected to pay more. In some eyes, this is a big benefit of the platform simply because they are able to have very large email lists and sustain the technologies to keep it easily manageable.
If you are OK with paying a larger price as you grow, this can be super helpful to know in the long term!
Conclusion for the best email marketing platforms for a clinician
All in all, the best email marketing platforms have the following features:
- Ability to segment
- Embeddable forms
- Analytics/metrics to review
Most platforms will have all of these features, but may charge you a hefty price to access them. Ultimately, we chose Flodesk because of how easy it was to learn and the simplified approach to their features which is all we currently need in an email marketing tool.
Either way, it’s important you evaluate the features of all platforms and determine which is best for you and what features are of high priority.
We are big fans of Flodesk and want to give you 50% off your plan if you decide to try. Let us know how you like it!
