Promise from GoLive: How templates 5x revenue and revolutionized the brand

TL;DR: We’re thrilled to partner with Promise at GoLive to celebrate the release of Flodesk template sharing and bring you three high-converting email templates to elevate your brand. Discover her path from freelancer to award-winning business owner, and how templates revolutionized GoLive.

Does your online presence have a distinct brand identity—and is it memorable? Like people, brands are full of personality, emotion, and purpose. And without clear branding, your audience won’t be able to easily grasp who your brand is (or tell their friends about it). 

No one knows that better than Promise Tangeman-Wurzell. Before she became known as a leading female designer and branding expert, she was hustling to build her own business as a creative. Initially, she tried to do it all—offering photography, graphic design, fine art, and even dinosaur necklaces.

But after a conversation with her mentor, she realized that her business was so all-encompassing that people couldn’t recall what she did. That’s when she decided to niche into what felt like her purpose: supporting female entrepreneurs and small businesses with their web design and brand identity.

Get to know Promise’s journey from freelance creative to starting GoLive—a Forbes-featured, award-winning web design agency and one of the top-producing Squarespace template shops on the market.

Promise first fell in love with personal branding and web design while crafting her Myspace page. She loved how everything on her page connected in a way that highlighted who she was—and friends loved hers so much they had her design their Myspace pages, too. 

Seeing her personality online and helping others see theirs was electrifying. It showed her what was possible with personal branding and web design and inspired her to help people carve out their own unique corner of the web. So, she started a design business to help people launch what they love and bring their biggest dreams to life. 

“I always loved art and design and went to school double majoring in graphic design and fine art. I saw digital art as the art of the future in a way, and specializing in brand identity and web design is such a sought-after need for small businesses. When I started my business, one of my mentors told me ‘When you make your business about helping other people, you will always have plenty of work.’ I became passionate about helping others blaze a new path and succeed with their dreams,” she says. 

Now, Promise is the CEO and Founder of GoLive—a Forbes-featured, award-winning web design agency that launches websites faster than you can say procrastination. Think five days flat. Why GoLive? Because she believes in ‘going live’ with your website.

GoLive’s stunning templates and custom websites are perfect for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and anyone with a personality so big that the internet needs a website just to contain it. They’ve grown to be one of the top-producing Squarespace website template shops on the market, with designs so beautiful and easy to use—you might actually enjoy customizing them (unlike that time you tried to put together your Ikea desk).

With over 12 years of design and strategy experience under her belt, Promise and her team have brought websites to life for thousands of brands, including Girlboss, Sadie Robertson, TLC’s resident fashion guru Randy Fenoli, and many contestants from The Bachelor. She has been featured in Forbes, Buzzfeed, and Martha Stewart, but her most impressive feat is maintaining #hairgoals while owning an Airbnb in Newport Beach, California, and wrangling her toddlers—all from her home base in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, Brian.

If you’re ready to launch your website ASAP, snag one of their pre-designed website templates or follow Promise for daily doses of design inspo and hilarious attempts at adulting.

We asked Promise to share more about her experience with templates, email marketing, and growing her business. Here’s what she had to say.

We’re BIG template girls—half of our design agency is based around Squarespace website templates! Templates completely streamline our semi-custom design process, which allows us to take on more projects. Our customers love our templates because they get a professionally designed website template without the designer’s price tag.

When it comes to email marketing, templates make it easy to create and send newsletters every single week (without reinventing the wheel for our email design every time).

Selling templates completely revolutionized our business. People ask me all the time what percentage of the revenue is template sales. When I first launched our template shop in 2011, the template sales 5x our total revenue, taking the business to a whole new level. 

Templates are a powerful way to save time, earn recurring revenue, and reach an audience that may not be ready to hire you for your premium service.

Email marketing has played a critical role in staying in front of potential customers and clients. Social media is how we spread awareness about who we are and what we do, and our email list has been an important step in moving our audience through our marketing funnel to become paying customers eventually.

Our email list helps us connect with our audience, build that know-like-and-trust-factor, be a valuable resource, and increase our revenue—which we do by switching between helpful educational emails and promotional emails.

Funnels, consistency, and storytelling!

It’s so easy to bump email marketing to the bottom of your to-do list. But the truth is that emails have a major potential for ROI in comparison to other marketing efforts. And in a world full of 6-second Reels, it’s nice to have a place to create long-form content that showcases your brand’s personality.

Really get to know your audience before you start writing or designing! We say this to our website design clients and customers all the time—if you don’t know who you’re speaking to, you’re going to lose potential clients to competitors who do. Your clients and customers don’t care about what you offer—they want their problems solved. So, know who you are talking to and exactly how you can help them.

For super strategic email copywriting tips, we’d recommend signing up for a workshop or webinar to hone your skills. There are a lot of great resources out there! We love learning from our clients, Karsen Murray and Between The Lines.

Three cutting-edge email designs with powerful layouts and content prompts for maximum conversions designed exclusively for you by Promise. Grab your free templates, save them to your Flodesk account, and discover all you can do with them. Claim yours now.