As a web designer, I often have clients ask me whether they should include email marketing on their new website.

An email marketing system allows you to collect email addresses and send emails for marketing purposes. You can create an opt-in form (or forms!) in your email marketing system that you can then embed on your website. When visitors fill out this form, they will be added to your email list. This is also how you are able to do things like send opt-in freebies (also called lead magnets). If you are planning on sending a newsletter or promotional emails for your business, an email marketing system is a must!

My favorite tool that I and most of my past clients use for email marketing is Flodesk. I love Flodesk because it’s very design-forward and easy to use. My link will get you 50% off your first year: Get 50% off Flodesk here!

Another popular email marketing tool many small businesses choose is Mailchimp. I actually started out using Mailchimp back when I started my business (before Flodesk launched)!

In this post, I’ll break down some of the key differences between Mailchimp and Flodesk and why you might consider each one when adding an email marketing strategy to your business and website!

Price

Let’s start out with pricing since that can be a deciding factor for many businesses, especially when you are just getting started with email marketing!

Flodesk’s pricing is a flat monthly rate. Unlike many other email service providers, Flodesk does not charge more as you grow your list. They also have a free plan which would be a great way to start playing around with the platform, creating forms and adding subscribers to your list, but in order to send emails, you will need a paid subscription! Flodesk also offers an email & checkout tier if you would like to use Flodesk for e-commerce (more on that in a bit)!

Mailchimp’s pricing is based primarily on the number of subscribers to your list. They have standard and premium plans, with premium offering more automations and access to analytics. Beyond that, pricing is variable, growing along with the size of your list. The standard plan is free up to your first 500 subscribers!

Both platforms offer a free trial so you can sign up to explore the platform and see how it works for you!

Forms

Forms are an area where Flodesk really shines. As a web designer, I appreciate how easy Flodesk makes it to create aesthetically pleasing forms that integrate beautifully with your website. Flodesk offers a variety of form options, including link in bio forms, video forms, spinner forms, and countdown forms. These types of pop ups are really engaging and great for conversion! They also all look really sleek and beautiful, as well as being customizable to your brand colors, fonts, and more. If you want to learn more about how to embed a Flodesk form on your site, check out this post!

Personally, on my own site I use Flodesk’s inline forms so that I can design the rest of the canvas in Showit, and it ends up looking really seamless! Either way you can’t go wrong.

In Mailchimp, you can use the form builder to build forms to embed on your website. The form builder is straightforward and easy to use, allowing you to select which fields to include as well as styling the fonts and colors. Embedding the form on your website is simple with the code provided. I’ve found getting the styling right to be a bit tricky with Mailchimp forms, sometimes requiring CSS coding to get it the way you would like it to look. I recommend this template available in the Showit marketplace to help you customize the look and feel of your Mailchimp form! I have used it before and found it made the process much easier!

Automations

As you grow your list and get more strategic with your email marketing, automations are an important factor to consider when choosing your email service provider! You’ll want to choose a tool that allows you to automate the aspects of your marketing and segmenting your list that are important to you.

Flodesk manages automations through their “workflows” tab. This allows you to create automations for when someone opts in to a freebie, for example, sending them a specific welcome sequence and adding them to specific segments of your list. Flodesk also recently added a “link actions” feature that makes automating even easier. This feature would be useful for example if you would like subscribers to add or remove themselves from specific segments (like certain promotions/sales) or to update a custom field based on a link click to personalize future communications.

Mailchimp offers sophisticated automation tools. Mailchimp has a library of fully customizable pre-built customer journeys. You can create specific journeys for instances such as a user abandoning their cart, not opening a certain email, or celebrating their birthday. I find these types of automations are most helpful for e-commerce businesses!

E-Commerce

Flodesk checkout makes selling digital and physical products simple. You can use their pre-made sales page templates to sell anything from a digital product to services and take advantage of tools like upsells and discount codes. If you are familiar with Thrivecart, I would compare it as quite similar, but more aesthetically pleasing. Handling both your email marketing and checkout within Flodesk makes things simple and straightforward!

Mialchimp integrates seamlessly with top ecommerce providers such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Squarespace Commerce. This allows you to really take advantage of your store’s data to craft targeted emails and campaigns tailored to the individual user. Mailchimp’s analytics and automations in this area are very sophisticated and would be a great choice for a large e-commerce shop, though are probably not needed for smaller businesses with just a few products.

My take on Flodesk vs Mailchimp for email marketing for wedding pros

For most wedding pros, my recommended email marketing platform is Flodesk. The ease of use simply can’t be beat—as a Showit designer, I would compare Flodesk to Showit as being similarly focused on creative freedom, aesthetics, and user-friendliness. If you love Showit, then I think you will love Flodesk, too! I have used it since they launched and it just keeps getting better with new features being added!

While Mailchimp is an amazing tool, I find it can be overly complicated for small, service-based businesses. The capabilities are more broad than Flodesk’s, but most wedding pros don’t need such complex tools to run their email marketing campaigns successfully!

If you are taking your first steps into using email marketing in your wedding business, my suggestion would be to set up a free trial with Flodesk (and don’t forget to use this link to get 50% off your first year) to see for yourself how simple and easy to use this platform is!