TL;DR: Black Friday means big opportunities for small business owners, and having the right tools in place can make all the difference. Get ahead of the holiday rush and start gearing up for busy season with three essential Flodesk features designed to help you streamline tasks, boost sales and grow faster.

With Black Friday right around the corner, now is the time to set up your small business for success. This crucial period is your chance to ensure you make the most of this peak season—while giving your list a boost ahead of the holiday rush. Flodesk has all the tools you need to rev up your marketing efforts (with minimal effort required). Our intuitive, easy-to-navigate features will help you streamline workflows, save time, drive sales and connect with customers when it matters most.

Here are three key features you should be using right now to gear up for Black Friday.

1. New, interactive forms

Wildly engaging forms aren’t just fun for your audience (and fun to build). They’ve also been proven to be highly effective, significantly increasing engagement compared to standard forms. That’s why we’ve introduced video, spinner and countdown timer forms to support your marketing success during this holiday sales period, and all year round. Each is unique, but the goal is the same: grow your list faster.

Video forms

We love a great tagline, but video can build an emotional tie between your brand and your audience in a way that words simply can’t match.

With video forms, you can seamlessly embed a YouTube or Vimeo video into the most visually exciting popup and landing page forms your subscribers have ever seen. Offering a deeper, immersive experience that showcases your brand’s personality and voice helps capture attention and keep visitors engaged longer, increasing conversion rates by up to 80%. Try using video forms to share your excitement about a Black Friday deal, highlight the products you’re offering, include teaser content for an upcoming event or encourage signups with a personal message. 

Now more than ever, audiences value a personal connection with founders. It’s an area where small businesses like yours can have an edge over the big guys, and video forms are an excellent way to build that connection.

Spinner forms

Everyone loves to be a winner. Spinner forms leverage that truth to engage audiences and drive opt-ins through an interactive, gamified experience—converting up to 30% more subscribers than standard popup forms. Encourage your audience to opt-in to your email list in order to spin the wheel and claim their prize!

The winning offer is up to you, whether that’s a discount, a free download, a webinar ticket or something else. Either way, you’re treating visitors to something fun and memorable while offering value right off the bat.

Customize your spinner’s layout, style, fonts and colors, and choose the winning offer that it will land on every time. Once your audience successfully opts in, the wheel will spin to reveal their reward. You can choose to display their discount code directly in the form, or display a message that you’ll deliver their prize via email.

Countdown timer forms

Imagine getting a 25% off coupon to your favorite store. You might shop around without making a final decision, bookmark the offer for later or simply forget about it. Now imagine that coupon came with a 48 hour time limit. Chances are, you’ll make it a priority to claim that deal before it expires. You might even make a purchase right away to guarantee you don’t miss out.

That’s the power of creating urgency. 

It’s also the purpose of countdown timers, which are now available as a popup, inline or full page form.

Countdown timer forms help create that valuable sense of urgency and scarcity, inspiring immediate action to opt-in to your email list or make a purchase. This can increase conversion rates by up to 200%, driving more sign-ups and sales.

Customize your countdown timer to create a stunning, on-brand design, and select the date you’d like your countdown to end. When the countdown timer expires, you have the option to display a custom message and add late subscribers to a different waitlist segment, furthering anticipation.

Busy sales periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the perfect opportunity to take advantage of countdown timer forms by highlighting the urgency of limited-time offers!

2. Poll Blocks

What if you didn’t have to guess what your audience wants? With poll blocks, you don’t!

You can now add polls to emails to collect valuable insights about your subscribers, then use these insights to make more informed, strategic decisions—supercharging your marketing efforts. Bonus: The fun, interactive nature keeps your brand top-of-mind for subscribers.

How it works:

  • Add a poll directly to an email using the drag-and-drop poll block
  • Customize the poll’s colors, fonts and style to fit your branding
  • Include up to 12 response options
  • When a subscriber clicks an answer, the current poll results will appear in a new window
  • Poll results are available to view and export as a CSV file via Flodesk Analytics
  • Automatically segment your audience based on their responses

This automatic segmentation is key, because it enables more precise segments—a huge win in a successful email marketing strategy. In just a few simple clicks, you can connect poll responses to a segment or custom field. When a subscriber selects an answer on the poll, they will be automatically added to that selection, allowing you to send highly targeted emails. These perform a whopping 33% better than unsegmented emails!

Launching a new product around Black Friday? Give your subscribers a sneak peek and ask for their opinion! Finalizing your email plan for the holidays? Ask your subscribers how often they want to hear from you. Or, surprise and delight your audience by letting them vote on your Black Friday sale itself. Not only does this make them feel valued and connected, but it creates a lasting impression and emotional investment that helps your Black Friday offering stand out from the sea of others.


There are endless ways to use polls to engage subscribers and refine segments, and we can’t wait to see what you create.

3. Templates

If you’ve tried using templates in those other email marketing platforms, you know how rigid and inflexible they can be. At Flodesk, we’re proud to offer a wide selection of truly customizable, actually intuitive templates that help your business stand out. We give you full creative freedom to make beautifully on-brand emails, forms and checkout pages this holiday season. The process is so easy, you can dive right in—no design training required.

Here are three types of Flodesk Templates you can utilize to scale growth this holiday season.

Email templates make it quick and easy to create visually stunning, strategic emails that look like they were built by a professional designer (whether you are or not). The easy-to-use editor allows for full customization, so each email feels consistent and on-brand.

Form templates make it just as easy to create fully customizable, high-converting forms that capture audiences and grow your list. You can allow audiences to choose what they’re most interested in and how often they want to hear about it, then segment subscribers based on those responses, helping you deliver more personalized, targeted marketing.

Checkout templates simplify the online selling process while maintaining your brand’s look and feel. Plus, with the recent introduction of countdown timers, you can create urgency that drives visitors to act faster and increases conversions.

With that, we’re thrilled to introduce six new templates, just in time to gear up for Black Friday! Explore them all.

Through all of these features and more, we’re on a mission to help make this Black Friday and Cyber Monday season your best one yet. Everything’s waiting for you in your Flodesk account

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