You are already paying for a world-class email marketing platform inside GHL. Here is how to use it and cancel the tool you no longer need.
A 2-minute walkthrough... press play when you are ready.
GHL has a complete, built-in email marketing platform that does everything FloDesk, Mailchimp, or ConvertKit does... and it is already included in what you are paying every month. There is no reason to maintain a separate subscription for email marketing when everything you need is already right inside your GHL account.
There are two ways to send emails to your list inside GHL, and one game-changing feature that most photographers do not even know exists.
Every one of these tools does something that GHL already does natively. If you are paying for any of them alongside your GHL subscription, you are paying twice for the same thing.
That is potentially $35 to $350 per month going back into your pocket the moment you make the switch. GHL's email marketing is not a stripped-down lite version. It is a full-featured platform with automation, segmentation, tagging, campaign analytics, and the resend-to-unopened feature that most dedicated email tools charge extra for.
Automated sequences that fire based on a trigger. A subscriber joins your list and immediately enters a welcome series. A lead fills out your inquiry form and gets a nurture sequence. A client signs her contract and gets an onboarding flow. You build it once and it runs forever for every person who enters the trigger.
Best for: Welcome series, nurture campaigns, post-session follow-ups, onboarding sequencesOne-time broadcast emails sent to a specific audience at a specific time. Your monthly newsletter, a session availability announcement, a seasonal promotion, or any email where you are speaking to your whole list at once. You write it, pick your audience, schedule it, and send.
Best for: Newsletters, announcements, promotions, availability drops, seasonal contentBefore you send a single email, you need to authenticate your sending domain so your emails actually land in inboxes instead of spam folders. Go to Settings → Email Services → SMTP & Mailgun and follow the DNS setup instructions. Add the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to your domain provider. This takes about 15 minutes and it is non-negotiable. Every email you send after this will be trusted by inbox providers because it is verified as coming from you.
Go to Marketing → Emails → Templates and click Create. You will find a drag-and-drop builder that lets you add text blocks, images, buttons, dividers, and custom HTML. Build your branded email template here once... your logo at the top, your brand colors, your footer with unsubscribe link and business address. Save it as a template and you will use it for every campaign going forward without rebuilding from scratch.
Go to Automation → Workflows and create a new workflow. Set the trigger to "Contact Tag Added" with the tag "subscriber" (or whatever tag you assign to new list members). Then build your automated email sequence inside the workflow using Send Email actions with Wait steps between each one. This is your FloDesk replacement for automated sequences. Every new subscriber gets the same polished experience automatically, regardless of when they join your list.
Go to Marketing → Emails → Campaigns and click Create Campaign. Give it a name, write your subject line, select your email template, and choose your audience using tags or smart lists. You can send immediately or schedule it for a specific date and time. Once it sends, you will see open rates, click rates, and delivery statistics in real time inside the campaign analytics panel.
This is the feature that changes everything. After your campaign has been sent and has had 24 to 48 hours to generate opens, go back into that campaign and look for the Resend To Unopened option. Click it, write a new subject line for the same email, and send it to everyone who did not open the first version. Most photographers see their total open rate jump by 20 to 40 percent from this one step alone. FloDesk does not have this. Mailchimp charges extra for it. It is built right into GHL for free.
The average email open rate in the photography industry is around 20 to 25 percent. That means 75 to 80 percent of your list never saw your email the first time. They were not uninterested. They were just busy, distracted, or the email got buried. Resending with a fresh subject line catches them on a different day at a different moment. It is one of the highest-ROI moves in email marketing and it costs you nothing inside GHL.
Once you have sent your first campaign inside GHL, exported your subscriber list from your old platform, and imported those contacts into GHL with the correct tags, you are done. Go to FloDesk, Mailchimp, or whatever you have been using, and cancel your subscription. The money you were spending there now stays in your studio budget every single month. You do not need the other tool. Everything it did is now living inside the platform you already pay for.
If you already have a subscriber list on FloDesk or another platform, migration is straightforward. Log into your current email platform and export your subscriber list as a CSV file. That file will include names, email addresses, and any tags or segments you have set up. Then go to Contacts → Import Contacts in GHL and upload that CSV. Map the columns to the correct GHL fields during the import process and assign a tag like "subscriber" or "email-list" to everyone in the import. From that point forward, your entire existing list lives inside GHL and your automated workflows will pick them up based on their tags.
One important note: do not import unsubscribed contacts. Before you export from your old platform, filter to only active, opted-in subscribers. Importing people who previously unsubscribed creates spam complaints and can hurt your sender reputation inside GHL.
GHL's email marketing is not a consolation prize. It is a genuinely powerful platform with automation, segmentation, beautiful templates, campaign analytics, and the resend-to-unopened feature built right in. The only thing keeping most photographers on FloDesk is that they did not know this was here. Now you know. Cancel the extra tool. Keep the money. Use what you already have.
Have a question about this page?