How to Create and Set Up an Email Opt-In with Flodesk
Flodesk is one of the most simple and user-friendly email marketing services we’ve ever used, and we’ve been with multiple services over the years. We made the switch in the middle of 2020, and we haven’t looked back since! One thing that makes Flodesk stand out from other platforms is the fact that it’s just so beautiful (but that $38/month price isn’t too bad either, but read until the end to find out how you can get Flodesk for just $19). From the emails to the forms, they make it easy to show off your style and brand in everything you create.
Creating and setting up forms is an easy-peasy task. It takes no longer than 15 minutes total, if that. Today, we’ll be showing you a complete walk through of how to create and set up an email opt-in with Flodesk!
Create Your Freebie
Of course you can’t set up your forms without having an actual freebie! The most important tip we could ever give you in regards to putting together a freebie is to focus on the problems that your audience is dealing with right now. Then, think of what you could provide them that would help them solve that problem quickly.
For more detailed help with creating a freebie, check out this blog post.
Create Your Form in Flodesk
You have three form options: inline, full page, and popup. Even further, you can choose to have an image or not with all three except for the ribbon banner inline style. The style you decide to go with will just depend on your purpose. Ribbon banner inline forms are primarily used for the footer of your site to collect newsletter signups. To display an opt-in, we’d recommend going with either the full page or popup form.
With a popup form, you can choose to have it pop up immediately when someone visits your site, after 10 seconds, after 30 seconds, or when they scroll 30%. Full page forms act as a basic landing page for your opt-in. Before you create your form, though, you’ll want to create the segment that you’ll be adding these subscribers to because Flodesk will ask for it before you can begin customization.
CUSTOMIZING YOUR FLODESK FORM
There are really only 6 things you need to customize when it comes to the design, which is:
The heading and subheading text
The name and email fields
The sign up button
The tiny privacy text at the bottom of the form
The image
The background color
Flodesk has tons of beautiful fonts you can choose from. In case they don’t happen to have one of your brand fonts, you’ll definitely be able to find ones that are similar. When customizing your form, the heading can simply be the name of your opt-in. You can give a brief description in the subheading or just simply tell them to enter their name and email address to receive it. (This is what we usually do, but either option is fine!)
You can customize the name and email fields to adjust the border style and color, font, and height and width, same as the button. As for the bottom privacy text, Flodesk has its default text that you can either just change the font and color of, or you can write something else there if you prefer. All that’s left is to change the background color if you want and add an image! If you have some sort of mockup of your freebie, this would be an awesome place to put it, just make sure it’s either a transparent file or the background matches the color of the form.
If you want your form to display a success message instead of redirecting to another URL, you’re able to choose from Flodesk’s standard messages or create your own.
Here’s what our freebie form for The Creative Template Shop looks like:
Publish Your Form
Now that you’ve finished customizing your form, it’s time to publish it. There are different publishing options for each form. With full page forms, Flodesk creates a URL that you can then share wherever you please. Personally, we like to make them what we call “pretty links” by adding a 302 redirect with our domain. For instance, if you visit bossproject.com/signup, it will redirect you to the Flodesk form to join our Boss Project email list. Popup and inline forms will need to be embedded on your website.
Create a Delivery Workflow
If your form is just to simply collect newsletter signups without an incentive to offer on your behalf, you can skip the step. However, if you do have a freebie involved, you’ll probably need a method of delivery. Your two main options are:
Deliver the freebie in the redirect URL upon someone completing your form. You can see an example of this with our free Trello board.
Deliver it in an email that sends immediately. Your trigger will be when a subscriber is added to the segment you created initially for your form, and an email will be sent right after entering their email.
With either of these options, we recommend having a welcome sequence/nurture sequence set up afterwards to nurture your new subscribers and to build know/like/trust with them. For this reason, we’ve created Flodesk email templates that are fully designed, built, and customizable emails that you can add to your workflows.
Each email includes copy prompts and Canva graphic templates for you to deliver your opt-in and nurture new subscribers in a welcome sequence. You can purchase it one-off for $57, or you can save $10 and instead become a member of The Shop and get instant download access to these templates and every other template for just $47/month.
Put It Out There
Talk about your opt-in everywhere! Share it on social, link it in buttons, any place you can possibly think of. You’ve created a beautiful new form thanks to Flodesk, so be proud of it! If you’re new to Flodesk and want to try it out, click here to save 50% on your monthly plan.
We also shared how we migrated our own 100k email list on our podcast episode #448, check out here!
