The Creative Bodega | Content Marketing and Instagram Growth for Solopreneurs

43: The 30-Minute Email Newsletter System Every Solopreneur Needs to Grow (Without Funnels or Fancy Tech)

• Emily Connors

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What if Instagram vanished tomorrow—would you still be able to sell? Real talk: social media is rented land, and your reach is controlled by an algorithm that shows your posts to maybe 3-6% of your followers on a good day. Your email list? That's the one channel you actually own, and honestly, it's the simplest path to sales when you keep it bite-sized. In this urgent episode, I'm breaking down why email matters RIGHT NOW—and sharing a deadline you absolutely cannot miss. Flodesk (my beloved email platform) is phasing out its unlimited pricing plan on November 28th at midnight, which means if you lock it in before then, you're grandfathered into unlimited emails and subscribers for life at just $19/month with my code. 

Plus, I'm doing something I've never done: taking $200 off my Start and Grow Your Email List program for five days only. If you've been waiting to start your list or switch platforms, this is your sign.

Check out the full show notes for this episode HERE.

Things I cover inside this episode:

  • Why email gives you the most control and lowest overhead compared to social media (and the math that proves it—spoiler: 53% open rates vs. 3-6% Instagram reach)
  • My exact journey from hiding in my bathroom writing newsletters to sending 1,020 emails over four years with a 16,000-person list
  • The simple 3-2-1 newsletter format that keeps me consistent every single Tuesday without the overwhelm (3 ideas, 2 things I'm loving, 1 content tip)
  • Two big myths busted: "I'm not a writer" and "I don't have time" (plus the 30-minute workflow that makes it actually doable)
  • How to lock in Flodesk's unlimited pricing before November 28th and why this deal is literally too good to be true (but it IS true)

Resources & Links mentioned in the episode:

Connect with me:
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🫶🏼 Join my 321 Create Newsletter for weekly content tips
🫶🏼 Check out The Content Coven Membership

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Emily Connors:

Hello friends, and welcome back to the Creative Bodega Podcast. Happy Thanksgiving week. Today I'm sharing a quick urgency style episode that bless my editor. Scott agreed to get back to me within 48 hours, and it is about the one channel that gives you the most control, the lowest overhead, and honestly the simplest path to sales when you keep it. Bite sized, and that is your email list. And yes, I'm coming in hot because there's a deadline that I do not want you to miss. I do not want you to be in my dms saying, oh m is it still going on? I missed it. Like, don't be that person. Don't be that person. Float desk. My beloved email service provider, the platform I am in every day and that I love so much is phasing out their unlimited pricing plan. What does that mean right now when you sign up with Flow Desk? You get unlimited emails subscribers. You get unlimited workflows. You get unlimited forms. You get unlimited. Did I say email subscribers? I dunno. My brain's not working too well. But you get unlimited everything, to be honest, except for checkout. So they have two levels of pricing, email only, and then if you wanna upgrade to checkout, meaning people can actually pay through. Flow desk, that's not included in the base plan, but you can also do checkout and that's also unlimited. Then if you purchase that, so if you sign up. Before this Friday, November 28th at midnight, you'll be grandfathered in to unlimited pricing for life. Trust me, the CEOs behind flow desks are phenomenal. They are all about transparency. This is a female led brand that I have come to know and love. I have been on a call with the CEO and she was amazing. I believe them. They will never change this pricing on us. If you get in before this Friday. Again, it means you do not pay per subscriber, which is the model that they are moving to. So right now, unlimited,$38 per month. Is a phenomenal rate, but guess what? It gets better. I have a code to get you 50% off your first year, which means it's$19 a month. I just told my best friend Courtney, I said, listen, she's a photographer and I've been begging her to do like send out like a monthly newsletter about her shoots and what's going on and how to book with her and samples of her work. Like she's so talented, but she doesn't have an email list. I said, listen, court, even if you're not ready to start. Just get in. Just lock it in. Lock in the pricing. It is too good to be true, but it is true.$19 a month with my code after the first year, that 50% off goes away and it's 38 a month. You guys, that's like still stupid low, and I can tell you that the pricing model that they're moving to, it'll never be this low again for you, even if you have 10 subscribers. So please, please the link and the code are in my show notes. And a quick heads up, it is an affiliate link. Uh, so I do earn a commission, but it's, uh, to no cost to you. And in fact, it gets you 50% off. So there might be a Black Friday extension from Flow Desk. So I want you to stay tuned to their marketing. But I am scripting this with the November 28th deadline, and that is what they have publicly announced over and over. that's gonna be the line in the sand for me, so nobody misses it. I'm also doing something that I've never done my start and grow your email list from scratch. Self-paced program, I'm giving you$200 off. Okay? So it is now only$297 you guys. It's for five days only. This is my instant access, self-paced. It's the exact path that I took to go from completely overwhelmed with starting an email list and a newsletter to, I have a freebie. I have an opt-in, I have a workflow. I've got a weekly newsletter that I can actually keep up with, like no problem. In fact, it's one of the my most favorite things that I do in my business. Now, this program, this course is four modules. With 10 to 12 bite-sized lessons in each that you can pause, you know, rewind, rewatch, go and do it yourself. Come back like. The clock is ticking on this deal too. All the details are in the show notes. This is a five day only deal, and I want you to get in on this. I'm not, I'm not gonna lie. Like if you divide, wait, I'm getting my phone. If you divide, let's take$19 for 12 months, that's what flow desks is, 2 28. And you add that to my. Course price, which is 2 97, and you get a total of$525, and if you divide that over 12 months, you guys, you're paying like$43 a month. I'm telling you, if you follow my program to start and grow your email list and start a newsletter and do everything I tell you to do to grow your list consistently, there is no doubt in my mind that you're gonna make more than$43 a month by selling your offers. Okay? Let's talk about why email matters right now and how to keep this just incredibly simple. What if Instagram vanished tomorrow? Right? Would you be able to sell still real talk like social media's rented land, my friend, and it can be amazing for discovery and community, and obviously I'm not abandoning it any time soon, but visibility is not the same as control. You don't control your reach. You don't control who sees your posts. You don't control whether a launch you poured your heart into actually surfaces in more than what, like three to 6% of your followers feeds on a good day. So quick math. If you have a thousand followers, that means that, I don't know, 30 people might see your sales post. And in the meantime, an open rate is much higher than three to 6%. Okay? Open rates are typically 20 to 50%. Mine on average is 53%. That means if you have a thousand email subscribers, that's 200 people at a minimum, but probably more likely like 500 people actually seeing your message. That's not theory. That's my week to week reality. You build your list once and you own it forever. You can move platforms, you can change offers, you can pivot your business, but you still have a direct line to your people. And I know the question bubbling up. Okay. M like, I get it. But starting an email list feels like a lot. And listen. Same. Let me take you back to my story for a minute. In the fall of 2020, your girl was mentoring clients via Zoom calls, juggling two toddlers and literally hiding in my bathroom between my mentoring calls, frantically trying to piece together. My first ever newsletter, I am on the phone with my mom saying, can you just preread this for me? Like I just need another set of eyes. I feel like, you know, I'm going a little brain dead. Just tell me if it all makes sense if I have any grammatical errors.'cause she always like checked my papers in college and high school and all that because I did not see myself as a. I actually was incredibly intimidated by this concept. I'm not a writer. I can create beautiful things in Canva all day long, but I'm not a writer. And the email platform that I was on before Flow Desks, which is called Active Campaign, it literally felt like rocket science every single time I had to write a newsletter. It felt like a scavenger hunt. I needed my husband to help me find where the compose area was. It just, it wasn't sustainable to me. I used it because he used it and I wanted to have somebody in my back pocket to help me with the tech. But as I got going, I hated the platform more and more and more. So I decided, you know what? My husband doesn't know flow desks, but I am hearing these gurus that I really respect and love tell me to use flow desks and I get their emails and they're so beautiful and mine aren't, and design matters to me. So I decided to move to flow desks. So fewer tabs, beautiful templates. The interface is so simple to understand. It was a place I wanted to hang out, whereas ActiveCampaign for me was, which was a place where I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. Their forms were beautiful. Their email templates, their workflows were easy to understand and their analytics, I could actually read. There were just fewer places to get lost. Okay. And it turns out I didn't need my husband because the setup of flow desks is so beautiful and simple that I could do it myself. I also ditched the pressure to write like a story essay every week. So all the emails I was getting from the people I loved were like little mini blogs, right? Just storytelling and. You know, when we're circling back to like a bigger lesson at the end and I'm like, oh my God, this is like rocket science. I'm not a writer. How am I gonna build this big email every week? So I decided to build a format that I could rinse and repeat. That is my jam, right? In everything I do, I have a format. And I have something I can rinse and repeat. So I developed this 3, 2, 1, create newsletter format, short intro, three ideas to grow your business. Two things I'm loving right now, which gave me the freedom to share all the things I love, like Amazon links and clothing and stuff like that. And one content tip pulled directly from my highest performing post that week on Instagram. Once I had the tool, the platform flow desk, that didn't make me wanna cry, and a format that legit felt like fill in the blank, the overwhelm dialed down dramatically for me and fast forward to now, I haven't missed a Tuesday newsletter in years. Like we're going on years, like four years, the receipts, because numbers calm my nervous system. My email list is at 16,000 subscribers. If you look on flow desks, I've actually gathered 23,000 email addresses over time. But you know, we've got spammers, we've got people that I've kicked off'cause they're not opening my emails and that hurts my open rate. So I'm at 16,000 subscribers. My average open rate. Hovers around 53%, which I am insanely proud of. That number is phenomenal. That means people are opening my emails, they want them. My click rate lands around 2.7 to 2.9%, also insanely high. I believe the average is around one to 2% maybe, and the average open rate hovers around 20 to 50%. They say and my unsubscribes tiny 0.4 to 0.5%. And I have sent. Wait, let me just check this. I forgot to check this. Please hold. Let's see. Analytics. This is so easy to figure out. I've sent 1020 email over my four-ish years of having email. So I've had a$95,000 launch at one point and the email was the backbone. Not viral reels not a magic funnel'cause I don't have funnels. Not paid ads'cause I've never had a paid ad. And when Instagram totally went down during a launch of mine in 2023, I kept selling. I don't even rely on Instagram during launches anymore. I'm actually barely posting on my feed. I'm in my stories. Yes.'cause those are my people, but I'm sending emails. Okay? And it's not just me. Some of my students who have taken start and grow your email list from scratch. Here's some things they had to say. Ashley told me. Short videos step by step. This is the first course I've actually bought that has moved the needle for me. Janet said I half started for years with my email list, EM'S format inside this course helped me finally take action. All I have to say is do it. Angela now sends a newsletter every Tuesday just like me, and made her money back from this program in a week. And Denise had wanted to create a freebie for years, but was so paralyzed with. Overwhelm and in just a few days after starting the course, she finished one that she was extremely proud of and couldn't wait to get out into the world. I share those to show you what's possible when we keep things simple and consistent. Not fancy. You know, I'm not a fancy, complicated girl. I keep things. Incredibly simple. So I wanna bust two big myths that so many people come to me with. I'm not a writer. Well, great news. You don't have to be right. You use a format. I give my students a menu of frameworks for their newsletters, but maybe you just steal mine. Use that 3, 2, 1 format, right? Keep the intro under a hundred words. Add in three ideas. That can be literally put into bullet points. Add a couple things you're loving or a couple of anything that makes sense for your brand. Okay. And then one tip, right? And this can be from your highest performing post that week, or a quote that you love. Again, just keep it simple. Repackage it with a sentence or two for context. Done. Okay? And again, I give a number of different framework options for your newsletter inside Start and grow your email list. Myth number two, I don't have time to start a regular newsletter. Oh my God. Trust me, I feel this to my core. I did not have time. I didn't have time, but I also knew that I wasn't gonna grow my business without one. So you don't have time to fight the algorithm either, right? So use a 30 minute workflow, 10 minutes, draft the 3, 2, 1 section, 15 minutes to fill it in. Right? Half of this is repurposed for me. Five minutes to link it and schedule it. And bonuses. You don't even need a website to start with. Flow desks. Flow desks, forms where you gather people's information. They're standalone, so they provide the links for you so you can have a freebie landing page live today that collects names and email addresses and delivers the thing and introduces you to the new subscriber. No website development required. Okay. So why I point beginners and even seasoned creators to Flow Desk. I have used other platforms. I've used MailChimp. Don't even get me started on how painful that was. I started also with active Campaign, so complex. I needed like a Sherpa to guide me up the mountain. I wanted to write an email. I wanted to build a form. I wanted to deliver a freebie. I wanted to set a simple email sequence, and I wanted to see if people opened it easily. Flow desks does those core things so simply and beautifully. It keeps it incredibly obvious. So emails you write and design them in a few minutes using templates forms. These are standalone embeddable. You can grab a link. They are beautiful. Out of the box workflows, you know, if this, then that to deliver your freebie and send your intro, welcome emails. So simple, and then analytics opens clicks. Growth at a glance. And trust me, I walk you through all of this inside of the program. Again, the sign up is before November 28th to get the 50% off flow desk. For unlimited pricing for your first year, 50% off. It's about$19 a month. Okay. After that, it's 38. The link is in the show notes. Or you can use MyCode, the Creative bodega, all capitals when you are signing up. So a tiny pep talk for my recovering perfectionist. Hi, I'm one. I'm actually still one, to be honest, but you've heard me say this, content creation doesn't have to be a full-time job, okay? Your visuals should speak before your captions do, and a consistent look builds trust. And trust sells, right? So email lets all of that work harder for you. You keep the design on brand. The flow desks, templates help a ton. You keep the copy human, you wanna sound like yourself, not a robot. Send it, even if it's 90% done. I'm telling you, your future self is going to thank you. And that fear of judgment, I mean, I had it. I had it so hardcore. My hands were literally shaking the first email I sent, and now I'm 1020 emails in. Okay. I used to think that good email meant some like really cinematic story with a plot twist and a moral, and then we're twisting it back to something we offer, and I was so overwhelmed. But no good email is the one that arrives is easy to skim. That helps your reader solve a micro, problem, and invites them to take that next step with you. Okay, so the countdown is on flow desk to lock in the legacy unlimited pricing for life. So you never pay per subscriber. Sign up before November 28th at midnight. Use the link in the show notes or use the code, the creative bodega, all one word for 50% off your first year. Start and go Your email list from scratch. My program is$200 off. I've never priced it like this before. That means it's 2 97 for five days only. It's instant access. Go at your own pace. Four modules, bite-size lessons, and we go from freebie. To flow desk, set up to your weekly newsletter to simple promotional plans to help consistently build your list. It's built specifically for overwhelmed solopreneurs who want a clear handheld path. The link is in the show notes. If you want both links, just shoot me a dm. I can send them over to you and let me leave you with this. You can keep trying to outsmart the algorithm. Nightmare. Please don't do it. Or you can build the asset that pays you. Email again is the lowest overhead, highest control sales channel that you can have, and it can be stupid simple when you do it the way we just mapped out. Okay? So, go lock and flow desk. Grab your spot and start and grow your email list and send your first newsletter next week. I'm telling you, you can do it. You've got this. If this episode, little, little fire under your, you know what, share it with a friend who also needs an email list and a nudge. All the links, the codes, the step-by-step are waiting for you in the show notes, and I will see you next week.