Switching from Flodesk to Substack & how we got here

Why I'm switching my email newsletter provider and a SweetPhi newsletter history.

I’ve tried them all.

By “them”, I mean email-newsletter providers: Mailchimp, ConvertKit, SendFox, Constant Contact, (these are the ones I can remember) and most recently Flodesk.

There’s definitely pros and cons of each. Most notable was that as your subscriber count went up, so did the prices.

Ever since starting my blog SweetPhi.com in 2011 I’ve had a newsletter of some kind. It wasn’t until I started sending weekly newsletters that the email provider became important to me.

But as my subscriber count went up (slowly, yay) so did the costs. To the tune of thousands of dollars. And I wasn’t even using all the features. I didn’t have courses or sales “funnels” I needed to keep track of or any of that jazz.

Every Friday I’d send an email with “title…here’s to the weekend”

I’d get the nicest responses and really built up a newsletter community.

I just have to tell you that I look forward to Fridays even more, because I am eagerly awaiting your newsletter each Friday morning when I wake up.  Though, I can’t read it until later in the morning, it definitely sets the tone for the weekend.  

Simultaneously the blog world started changing. Long story short: SEO (search engine optimization) + algorithms + change in priorities.

This SEO + algorithms ugly beast reared it’s head in the last few years. You may have heard more about it in the news with words like ‘algorithms’. Basically this is how search engines deliver content to those searching. So for recipes for example, if you google ‘xyx recipe’ the order in which that recipe comes up is part of the algorithm which weighs a bunch of different factors, and you try to optimize it so your results show up 1st page, or top 10. This is constantly changing, it’s like a game with no rules, or changing rules. And if you ‘write for seo’ too much you get penalized, but if your stuff isn’t optimized, you don’t show up in search results.

This is where you’ll find a lot of content creators differ in opinions.

I’ve personally seen beautiful writer friends change the way they write blog posts and have lost their beautiful writing, because it’s not ‘SEO’ friendly.

Ever wondered why there are ‘so many words’ in front of a recipe? Part of it is that it is someone’s site and they want to give you good information about the recipe and connect with their audience, but another BIG PART of it is SEO. If they wouldn’t include certain things, like repeating the recipe title in the first paragraph or having a minimum number of words, or or or, chances are, you won’t even see their recipe when searching.

Another change that happened is that the ‘algorithm’ would penalize you if your content wasn’t all on the same topic. So if you’re a food blog talking about lifestyle things (*raises hand*) your content wouldn’t rank as high.

One way to earn revenue as a blogger is ad revenue. But that really depends on traffic and advertising spending which has been way down in recent years (read the pandemic and uncertain market conditions).

So with ad revenue down and sending the newsletter cost up, something had to change.

Around this time I also went back to work full time and made the decision to take a step back from the constant blog-posting hamster wheel schedule I had self inflicted (we were posting new content every.single.day and there was/is a backlog of wonderful unposted content that we’re now slowly, reasonably, gently, posting) to focus on working and my family (4 kids 5 and under…need I say more lol).

I found Flodesk. It’s an email marketing service. It’s super affordable no matter what size your list is, and it’s beautifully designed. Think drop an image in, write one or two words and bam, that image-block is done.

But…if your emails are too long, it “clips” the message in readers’ inboxes (meaning it doesn’t show them the full message) and then it doesn’t count towards opens, so the open rate looks low, and I feel like the emails maybe started looking a little too designed?

Then I found out about Substack.

Substack is another email marketing platform, but what I loooove is that there are no algorithms to decide who your content reaches and there’s an archive which can be viewed (yay no more emails getting lost in inboxes) and, there’s a nice paid subscription option!

Here’s my pros and cons list of switching my newsletter to Substack from Flodesk:

Pros

• Love that one can see archive of posts and that it has a ‘home’ - feels like what I was trying to do with CUWTK initially, it’s not like an email that gets lost in an inbox

• Connection with audience, feels more community focused

• Love that it can be free or someone can pay

• Possible new source of revenue

• Free to use - unless someone subscribes, then 10% of subscriber revenue

• Could make it look like we want - maybe a simpler version of what we used to do in ConvertKit - people loved those emails, maybe that’s more of our audience and this would appeal to them.

• Love that one can include a link to the newsletter and share on socials - more ways to get subscribers!

• People always used to call my weekly newsletter my weekly ‘blog’ - this would be that!

• Won’t clip the message, would help open rates.

Cons

• New platform, will have to set up and learn

• Doesn’t have a pop up form

• Can’t resend to unopens

• Doesn’t have segmenting or sequences

• Not as easy as Flodesk with templates

• Not as pretty as Flodesk - but am starting to feel like Flodesk is too designed and not personal.

I’m so excited and hopeful for this new platform and home for my newsletter. Thank you for bearing with me as I figure out all the nuances.

The weekly newsletter will continue to be free, and there will be a paid subscription offer that I’m working on. If you feel so inclined, I’d truly appreciate the support, it will allow me to keep providing amazing content. If you’d like to sign up for the paid subscription but can’t swing it, please message me and we’ll add you, no questions asked.

Thank you for reading, here’s to the weekend

Phi