Why I Came Back to Active Campaign After 3 Happy Years With Flodesk
I know how overwhelming and stressful it can be to choose the right email service provider for your business when you’re busy serving clients and developing your craft.
I wrote this article to share my humble experience and, hopefully, help you navigate the business chaos with more peace of mind.
After I conducted my mid-year business audit this summer, I decided to move my course platform from Podia to Thrivecart, and my email service provider from Flodesk to Active Campaign.
I'm not an email marketing expert, just an entrepreneur using different email service providers to communicate with my community since 2010. This is not a tech article but a testimony of my experiences from a coach and course creator point of view.
IN THIS POST, YOU’LL LEARN:
4 reasons why I decided to leave Flodesk
3 insights to help you pick the right email service provider for your business
Why I left Flodesk for Active Campaign
1) Active Campaign aligns with my goal of sharing simple emails with no design, distraction-free
As I'm writing this blog post, I re-read my article on "Convertkit vs. Flodesk: Why I Changed Email Marketing," where I speak about why I moved away from MailChimp, Active Campaign, and Convertkit, and I smiled because the reasons why I left Active Campaign became one of the reasons I came back to it:
At the beginning of my coaching business, I needed the momentum to write and felt intimidated by Active Campaign and Convertkit because their interface was rather cold and techy. I needed something very intuitive that helped me create beautiful newsletters with a magazine feel; elegant and designed - almost effortlessly. Flodesk was the natural answer and delivered.
However, my writing journey is at a different point today. My content used to be very business-oriented, and I'd include graphics and visuals. Over time, I evolved towards a more personal letter-like minimal look, my emails rarely have any visuals or even a logo, and my content gravitates towards a personal outlook on business and life.
You can write on blank templates in both Flodesk and Active Campaign, but doing it in Active Campaign is more straightforward, and you don't get sidetracked by the myriad of gorgeous template options. Active Campaign now has templates for emails and forms, but I would say that Flodesk is the next level if the design is your priority.
2) Active Campaign integrates with course platforms and helps me keep my business lean
In the above, I'm speaking about that specific type of entrepreneur. That's who I'm becoming; more nerdy and adventurous.
As I'm creating more digital assets and my business is moving towards curriculum-based coaching, I aspire to take segmentation a step higher to tailor the experience to my contact's behavior. That is the strength of Active Campaign.
I love Flodesk, but if you want to have several email funnels connected to a course or membership platform, this adds complexity to your business systems.
For example, when a client purchases a product or signs up for my free email course, I want to warmly welcome them with an email - this is an important piece of the customer experience.
When you end up having several courses and freebies, you have to set up a connection with a third-party tool called Zappier, and this is what it ends up looking like 🤯:
Honestly, it's such as hassle, I rarely get it right the first time, and it has its limits, and I ended up reaching out to Zapier for help to achieve this, and eventually outsourced this to a contractor.
All of these layers slow down the creative process of sharing our work; another tool to manage and pay for, another person to run this, the time spent to reach out to support - all of this adds up!
Active Campaign integrates with course platforms directly - when you create a course, you can connect it to an email workflow directly from the course platform. That's so cool!
I set up a masterclass in Thrivecart and connected it directly to an email workflow inside Active Campaign so the students could receive their invitations and details for the event in their inboxes. This is where the magic happens inside Thrivecart; I can find my Active Campaign lists and tags:
3) Price comparison Flodesk vs. Active Campaign
Finally, price-wise, Active Campaign charges you different pricing depending on your number of contacts. Right now, I have under 500 contacts and pay 108$ / per year for a basic plan, which is still cheaper than Flodesk which I pay 209$ with a 50% discount.
When I have more than 1000 contacts, I'll end up paying more (348$/year), but I'm not there yet, and- even if I pay triple, the revenue generated from more course sales can absorb this cost.
4) Active Campaign helps you become more data-driven
As a personal preference, I have always leaned on email marketing more than social media, and I've been focusing on becoming a better writer for the past 2-3 years; I wrote blogs, emails, podcasts, and a book.
I can see myself writing better emails from the engagement I receive from my emails, but I want to pair this with more informed and data-driven decisions about titles, type of content, etc.. so it's not all random and based on my feelings.
And to do that, I need to test things out to see what kind of titles get the most open rates, what kind of content gets clicked, etc. This is where Active Campaign shines, with the possibility of doing a split test. That is a feature Flodesk doesn't offer - and honestly, I never missed it before, but now, I'm interested in these metrics and want to learn more.
Last newsletter, I tested my email with three types of titles; If you signed up for my newsletter, Sweet Words, you received one of the following emails;
The quote subject line: The shoemaker wears the worst shoes (51.89% unique opens)
The question subject line: Can you pursue your ambitions without compromising your health? (42.45% unique opens)
The mysterious subject line: I'll never forget the 15th of every month (36.45% unique opens)
Here’s the kind of data I can get inside Active Campaign - so interesting!
Three insights to help you pick the right email service provider for your business
If you're thinking about sending newsletters and feel almost in the myriad of options, here are a few insights and questions that may help you.
“Disclaimer: I’m not an expert that can tell you what you need; you are the expert in your business.”
1) Pick the email service provider that will help you get to the next stage of your business in a few months, not a few years.
I started too early with Active Campaign and left it for Flodesk. Three years later, I'm finally ready for it - my mindset, experience sending newsletters, and technical skills are there.
What stage are you in currently on your newsletter journey? How do you see this develop in the next six months?
2) You may not need all the bells and whistles to start. Most email service providers have free trial periods.
Just try them out. Which one do you enjoy most for what you want to do?
3) If you're thinking of migrating from one tool to another now or in the future- it's not as complicated as it looks.
Moving a contact list took me 10 minutes. What took time was to move 10 email workflows with a total of 30 emails - but even that just took me three focused work sittings. So it's possible and manageable.
Conclusion
I don’t give ADVICE, but if you ask me, here is my 2 cents:
If you're just starting your business or running an established business but simply want to keep things minimal, I would recommend Flodesk wholeheartedly. I've used Flodesk for three years, loved using it, and I feel nostalgic about it. Support was stellar; I wrote a lot of emails and got compliments for my emails being elegant and soothing.
If you're a bit techy, want to get into automation, segmentation, and personalized emails to your contacts behaviors to give a high-standard experience, if you want more data, sell digital products and courses (that you have and are more than a wish), I'd recommend Active Campaign.
Active Campaign has a bigger learning curve, so I only put 3.5/5, but it also means more features and possibilities. If you just want to send simple emails, I would put 4/5!
I'm just beginning a new chapter in my email marketing journey, and I'm still learning the ropes and making silly mistakes; like this month, I forgot to edit an email that was scheduled to be automatically sent out right after a workshop with the replay, so the email didn’t make sense at all, it was a placeholder for myself- and people were like, “what??”. C’est la vie!
I hope this article gave you some insights, and I look forward to exploring more on this topic together. I saw that Active Campaign also has a CRM feature; I will look into this in 2023!
If you want to try out Flodesk or Active Campaign, I’ll be happy and make a happy dance if you use my affiliate link (it won’t cost you more).
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About Maika
Maika mentors heart-centered, impact-driven entrepreneurs to build the foundations of their business with her signature Intentional Business Building™ method. Her approach is holistic and integrates the entrepreneur mindset, marketing strategies, and systems to help create sustainable changes and long-lasting results. A lifelong passion for the human psyche, healing arts, and personal growth brought her to mentorship and coaching. She’s French-born in Japan and currently lives in Istanbul with her family. She’s an Epicurean and enjoys cooking Asian, dining out with curiosity, and sophisticated cocktails.
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