Hey coach! If you’ve been struggling to stay consistent with your email marketing, this post is for you. We’re breaking down a brand-new tool from Flodesk called Flodesk Studio, what it is, how we used it to design the actual email you received announcing this blog post, and whether it’s worth your time.
We’ve been using Flodesk at Lovely Impact for 3–4 years now. It’s the platform we use for our own email list, and it’s the one we recommend to all our clients. We trust them so much that we’re a Flodesk Partner, and proud of it. So when Flodesk quietly started building something new, we paid attention.
Flodesk Studio is a free AI-powered email design app from Flodesk. You describe the email you want, it generates a branded design for you to edit, and you send it from Flodesk or export it to any email platform.
Here’s what we think about it.
Table of Contents
- What Is Flodesk Studio?
- How I’ve Used Flodesk Studio So Far (Two Real Examples)
- Flodesk Studio Features: What’s Actually Useful
- Who Should Use Flodesk Studio
- Flodesk Studio Pricing
- Is Flodesk Studio Worth It? My Honest Take
What Is Flodesk Studio?
If email consistency is a struggle for you, you’re not alone. The coaches we work with tell us the same thing over and over. They don’t know what to write. The tech feels overwhelming. And even when they do know what to say, they can’t figure out how to make the email look good without a designer on their team.
Flodesk Studio was built to solve that.
It’s a brand-new email design app from Flodesk, separate from the main Flodesk platform but designed to work best with it. You describe what you want your email to be and contain, it builds an on-brand email using a design system created and trained by actual brand and graphic designers, and then you refine it. You can tweak it in the AI chat, or go in and make manual changes yourself. When you’re done, you either send it straight to your Flodesk account or export the HTML to use with any other email platform, Kit, Mailchimp, MailerLite, you name it.
The key thing to understand about Studio is that it gives you a place to create and a foundation to build from. Most AI tools generate content for you and hand you something finished. Studio hands you something to work with.
You can check it out at studio.flodesk.com.
How I’ve Used Flodesk Studio So Far (Two Real Examples)
I ran two tests. Here’s what happened in both.
Test 1: The newsletter I sent last week
For this one, I went in without a lot of strategy. I just wanted to see what Studio could do on its own. I clicked on the newsletter email type, which comes with its own set of suggested prompts to get you started, and used one of the ones they provided: create a newsletter sharing one big lesson I learned recently, a helpful resource, and a CTA to book a call with me.
Studio came back and asked me two questions: what’s the big lesson, and what’s the helpful resource? I dumped in my content. For the resource, I shared a description of our Success Assessment for Coaches and mentioned that I wanted to frame it as a mid-year check-in. For the lesson, I wrote: you’re never going to feel ready to launch your business. Waiting until things are perfect is really just fear wearing a productive outfit. The coaches who succeed aren’t the most prepared ones, they’re the ones who launched before they felt ready and figured it out as they went.
That’s it. I hit enter, and it generated three design directions to choose from.
I picked one, then made some manual edits: swapped out the background color (it leaned too hard into an accent color I rarely use), changed the headline font from my script font to my serif, replaced the placeholder images with actual images I wanted, adjusted a sticker shape and color, and tweaked a few text elements. Worth noting: I hadn’t set up my font mapping in the brand settings yet, which is probably why it defaulted to the script font. Once you configure that section correctly, it should make better choices automatically.
The AI also wrote all the copy for the email, and honestly? It did a pretty decent job given how little I gave it. But it sounds like AI wrote it, because AI did write it. I made a few minor edits and sent it as-is since this was a test run, but moving forward I’ll be writing my own copy and dropping it into Studio for the design, not having it do both.
A few other things I had to clean up: every template automatically includes Instagram feed blocks by the footer, which I deleted. The email signature defaulted to “Lovely Impact” in a generic signature font instead of my name and brand script, so I had to fix that. There was also a weird spacing gap near a CTA button I couldn’t fully resolve. And when the email arrived in my inbox, a square mockup image got zoomed in and cropped oddly. All small things, and expected for a beta tool, but worth knowing going in.
On performance: open rates were in line with other recent emails. Click-through rate came in about half of what I’d normally see, and I think that’s because the call to action wasn’t very strong. That’s on the strategy side, not the tool.
Test 2: The email you just received
For this one, I came in with a clear plan and my copy already written. My prompt was: I want to create an affiliate email announcing the launch of my blog post about Flodesk Studio. I’ve already written the copy, which I’ve included below. I want this email to have two sections: a letter section with a CTA linking to the blog post, and a product spotlight with a mockup image, short description, and button linking to the product page. Then I pasted in all the copy.
Studio gave me three design directions and reminded me in the chat that I’d need to manually add the links to the buttons. That heads-up was genuinely helpful.
I went with option 2 as my base. Here’s what I edited from there: deleted the Instagram feed blocks again, moved the email signature to sit under the letter instead of under the product section, changed the background color of the shop section from a too-dark accent to a lighter tan, updated the product title and body copy font weights, changed the button colors to stay on-brand, and swapped in my actual product mockup image with a transparent background.
One thing I noticed that’s worth flagging: when I pasted in the copy I’d already written, Studio edited it. It added em dashes, removed some parentheses, restructured sentences, and bolded things I hadn’t bolded. I write how I talk, and that’s intentional. It’s how our audience connects with us. So having to go back and restore my original copy after explicitly saying here is the copy I want you to use was a friction point. Just be aware that may happen, and plan to review your copy carefully before sending.
I also discovered that when you design in Flodesk Studio and import to Flodesk, you lose the ability to add first-name personalization tokens to the greeting. The “Hey, {{first_name}}” that most of us use in Flodesk doesn’t carry over, and you can’t add it manually on the Flodesk side after import either. For me, that’s a real thing I hope they address, because personalization matters in email marketing.
That said: the final email looks great. You can see it above. The header section Studio added (which I didn’t include in my original copy) ended up working really well. And the overall layout is cleaner and more polished than something I’d have put together in the time it took.
Flodesk Studio Features: What’s Actually Useful
Prompt-to-email generation.
You describe what you want, and Studio gives you three design directions to start from. The options tend to follow similar structural patterns (one image-heavy, one more editorial, one simpler and letter-style), so you’ll likely end up using the same general starting point each time. What varies is how many sections you need based on your content.
One important note here: there’s currently no way to save or reuse a template you’ve already perfected. Every email starts fresh. So don’t get too attached to a specific layout, because you’ll be starting from scratch each time. That’s a limitation worth knowing before you spend an hour perfecting one design.
Brand storage.
When you set up your account, you input your brand details: logo, colors, fonts, button style, social links, business address, and even a brand voice description. Studio uses all of that to design emails that start on-brand. Make sure you spend time in the brand settings before you start designing, including the font mapping section. Getting that set up correctly will save you from having to manually fix font choices in every email.
Manual editing.
It’s not exactly drag-and-drop in the traditional sense, but the click-by-click editing is intuitive. You can add blocks from a built-in library, swap colors within your palette, change font weights, adjust image zoom and positioning, and delete sections you don’t want. Layout blocks render as images, which means they won’t reflow for mobile the way text blocks do, so keep that in mind if mobile responsiveness is important to you.
The block library.
This is one of the cooler features. Beyond the basics (text, image, button, divider, logo), there’s a whole library of pre-designed layout blocks you can add: headers, testimonials, countdowns, quotes, personal bios, banners, recipes, polls, invitations, numbered lists, and signatures. These make it easy to add visual variety and design structure without needing any design skills.
Export to any platform.
If you’re not on Flodesk, you can export your finished email as HTML and import it into whatever platform you’re using, as long as it supports HTML emails. If you are on Flodesk, the integration is seamless: you import the email to your account, and if you go back to make a change in Studio later, it auto-updates in Flodesk without you having to re-export anything. For non-Flodesk users, you’d need to re-export and re-upload each time you make a change.
And if you’re not on Flodesk yet and want to give it a try, you can sign up here using our affiliate link.
Who Should Use Flodesk Studio
Flodesk Studio is for the solo business owner who’s doing this all themselves. If you’re the one writing, designing, and sending your own emails, and the design part is the piece that slows you down or stops you entirely, this tool is worth trying.
You’ll get the most out of it if you come in with your copy already written. Studio shines at taking what you want to say and making it look good. It’s not as strong when you’re relying on it to also figure out what you want to say.
Right now it’s email-only, but forms, pages, and other features are on the roadmap. It works best when paired with Flodesk, but the HTML export makes it usable with other platforms too.
Flodesk Studio Pricing
Free while it’s in beta. No credit card required. Flodesk hasn’t announced what it’ll cost once it’s out of beta, and that’s because they’re still figuring it out based on feedback. That’s just how Flodesk operates as a company: they build it, they make it accessible, they get it right, and then they introduce pricing. You can try it now at studio.flodesk.com.
Is Flodesk Studio Worth It? My Honest Take
I have 11 years of experience in branding, web design, and marketing. I’ve sent thousands of emails and built newsletters for myself and my clients. And honestly? Studio is something I’d recommend coaches try, especially if consistency is the thing standing between you and actually showing up in your subscribers’ inboxes.
Even Lovely Impact has gone through stretches of inconsistency. Life happens. Projects pile up. Energy runs low. A tool that removes the design barrier so you can just show up and send something? That has real value.
My biggest takeaway from these two tests is this: come to Studio with a clear direction, your copy already written, and the expectation that you’ll spend some time on manual edits. Let the tool do the layout heavy lifting, but stay in the driver’s seat on the content side. Studio is a place to create, not a replacement for your voice.
It’s free. It’s worth a look. Go try it at studio.flodesk.com.
