Intro

About the Episode:
Martha Bitar is the co-founder and CEO of Flodesk, an email marketing platform that makes it easy for creators and entrepreneurs to make beautiful emails designed for conversion. Flodesk has quickly grown to a $30 million ARR business while remaining completely bootstrapped.

In this episode of "Uploading...," Martha shares strategies for creating engaging email content, growing a subscriber list, and using email to build authentic audience relationships. She covers key topics like email design, subject line optimization, and future trends like AI-powered email marketing. Martha also provides actionable insights on deliverability, segmentation, automation, and more.

Today, we'll cover:
- Why email marketing is still one of the most effective channels for creators and businesses
- Martha's favorite tactics for rapidly growing your email list and keeping subscribers engaged
- The ideal email content and design elements that drive opens, clicks and conversions
- How segmentation and personalization can supercharge your email performance
- The future of email marketing and how AI will enable solopreneurs to compete with big businesses

What You'll Learn
1. Power and Benefits of Email Marketing for Creators
2. Strategies for Growing an Email Newsletter
3. Importance of Building an Email List
4. Segmentation and Its Importance in Email Marketing
5. Automations and Workflows in Email Marketing
6. Best Practices in Email Design and Content
7. Factors Affecting Email Deliverability
8. Relationship Between Open Rates, Deliverability, and Spam
9. Future Trends and AI in Email Marketing

Timestamps
00:00 Martha's background and starting Flodesk
00:42 Why existing email solutions weren't working
03:30 What makes Flodesk different 
04:55 Flodesk's fast growth and bootstrapped success 
05:47 How to build and grow an engaged email list 
09:36 Strategies for email segmentation 
15:50 Overview of the email marketing tool landscape
19:52 Best practices for subject lines and preview lines
25:49 Two ways to improve email deliverability
28:58 Ideal email content and design
35:15 Optimal email sending frequency
38:02 When and how to clean your email list
42:56 How AI will positively impact email marketing
46:49 Q&A: Referral programs to grow email lists
48:41 Q&A: Reliability of open rates with machine opens
49:46 Q&A: Ideal number of emails in a welcome series 
52:16 Q&A: Best image-to-text ratio for click rates 
54:26 Q&A: Email list quality vs quantity
57:02 Where to find Martha and Flodesk online

Why Design-Driven Emails Convert Better: “Like there's a lot of noise, attention spans are super short. So every single email, it can't just hit the inbox, it has to stand out, it has to engage from the beginning. It has to be hyper optimized for conversion. And text based without any of your brand just doesn't cut it anymore, right? And not just for solopreneurs. We actually we looked at a case study with Stripe. Stripe is a massive company, right? I think it's the largest private company in the world and they A/B tested a text-based email and one that was actually optimize for conversion using their own brand. And the on brand design-based email increased conversion by 21%. So whether you're a very small business or a large business, like design is not a luxury anymore.” — Martha Bitar, 00:03:32 → 00:04:14.160

Why Owning Your Audience Matters: “The risk is not using it [email] because you saw what happened with TikTok, right? It can really disappear overnight and you're really on rented space. You don't own your audience. So over all of the effort that you put into building that followership and engagement can really go away. Where if you're building that on social media, but you're also saying, ‘Hey, by the way, join my newsletter.’ That's the list that you own. You're not platform-dependent. Even if we at some point make a mistake and become like a dinosaur as well, and you want to jump ship and go to another platform, you can just download and export your entire subscriber list and go use another platform.” — Martha Bitar, 00:18:48 → 00:19:25

Show notes powered by Castmagic

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Blaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Castmagic
Ramon Berrios - Co-Founder of Castmagic
Martha Bitar - Co-Founder and CEO of Flodesk