Email marketing is likely an important part of your health coaching or wellness practice.

Wellness newsletters, email opt-ins, health coaching program promotions—these are all standard pieces of a health coaching practice (especially an online health coaching practice!) that require strategic set-up and maintenance with an email marketing tool of your choice.

Just like choosing the right website platform for your health coaching website, your email marketing platform is an important choice because of how frequently you’ll be using it in your health coaching business operations. Because it’s your regular business buddy, you want to make sure you choose an email platform you’ll be happy with and comfortable using!

And, as with any other technology used in your health coaching business, we want to make sure it’s effective at its purpose and that it simplifies running your business, rather than complicates it.

So, what’s the best email marketing software for health coaches & wellness professionals?

I get asked pretty often by health coaches: What’s the best email platform for setting up and growing my email list?

There are many, many different email marketing tools available to choose from.

It’s hard to say that there’s one “best” one—but I’ve tried quite a few and do have a favorite, based on the email marketing needs that are most common for health coaches and other wellness professionals like fitness instructors and personal trainers, yoga teachers, massage therapists, etc.

Email marketing for health coaches and wellness professionals

In your wellness business, you’ll probably be sending a variety of emails to your audience, including things like:

wellness newsletters
Regular messages with updates, wellness tips, personal notes—anything that’s relevant, helpful and builds rapport with your existing or potential clients. (Here’s more about how to keep your email subscribers engaged with a regular wellness newsletter!)

welcome automations
An automated welcome message sending a warm hello to your new email subscribers + sharing some of your best or starter wellness content. Or, an automated welcome email to new health coaching program members, with more information on their program, a welcome packet, next steps, etc.

promotional emails
If you run a special promotion for your wellness programs or you’d like to introduce a new service offering.

sales funnels
You may also wish to include a targeted sales funnel in which a subscriber who shows interest in a certain topic is then sent a series of additional emails about that topic, including more information about your relevant health coaching or wellness service offerings.

How to choose an email marketing tool for your wellness business

Based on these common emails you’ll typically be sending as a health coach or wellness professional, here are some of the things you’ll want to consider in choosing an email marketing tool for your practice:

simplicity & ease of use: How efficient is it for you to format and send regular emails?
workflow automations: What’s the functionality for setting up automated workflows (welcome automations, sales funnels, etc.)?
email design: What are the design options available for your email templates, and do they fit with your business branding?
sign-up process & opt-in forms: How will you collect new subscribers and add them to your list?
audience segmentation: Is it easy to segment audience members into distinct groups (e.g. clients vs. not-yet-clients)?
email analytics: What data will you receive on your email and audience performance, and how helpful is it for fine-tuning your email marketing strategy?
pricing: How does the price of the software compare to other comparable options, and does it fit into your business budget?

The email marketing software I use + recommend for wellness entrepreneurs

For years, I used Mailchimp as my email marketing tool of choice, as well as recommended it to other health coaches and wellness professionals. There are a lot of reasons I personally preferred Mailchimp over other popular options—a big one being simplicity and ease of use.

While there are some more robust email marketing tools (like ConvertKit, for example) and I love the functionality of platforms like this, most health coaches I work with are simply looking for a way to grow and connect with their new audience… and jumping into heavy duty segmenting is not as easy of a starting place for most people. And, that level of segmenting is perhaps not as necessary for health coaching businesses that have essentially one service offering—1:1 health coaching—in which case there aren’t a bunch of unique “customer journeys” to separate subscribers into.

So, despite what I love about the functionality of more advanced tools like ConvertKit, I didn’t find myself recommending them to new health coaches very frequently. In the past, I’ve used and recommended Mailchimp, and you’ll find plenty of resources here alluding to that!

However, I recently switched over to Flodesk (a relatively new addition to the email marketing scene), which I now prefer for our wellness newsletters and email marketing… and I’ll explain more about why below!

Before we dive in, please note that the Flodesk links used throughout this post are affiliate links (which means I’ll earn a commission if you choose to purchase)—but more importantly, they’ll give you 50% off your Flodesk subscription! As always, I only share services I personally use & love.

The best email marketing software for health coaches

Whether you’re just starting out and looking to grow an email list for your health coaching practice, or you’re looking to streamline or improve your existing email marketing (and make more sales from it!), it’s important to choose the right tool for doing that.

A lot of email marketing success is somewhat dependent on the software you choose—not just because of its technical capacity, but also because you’ll be getting real close and friendly with it. So, I find that health coaches who understand and feel comfortable with their email marketing set-up are more likely to invest in the process of doing it well (rather than avoiding it because it’s complicated and confusing).

Mailchimp and Flodesk tend to be my top recommendations for health coaches and wellness professionals—based on the types of emails we need to send, and the set-up and formatting we need for that, and how easy/intuitive they are to use. But, if you really pulled my arm and made me choose one to recommend, it’d be Flodesk.

After using Mailchimp for many years, I now use & prefer Flodesk—and here’s more about why I made that switch!

Flodesk helps streamline your health coaching business with efficient email marketing

Simplicity and ease of use is one of the most important things I look for in choosing an email marketing tool. (Efficiency is a must in running a successful health coaching business in general, and especially important for something you do as often as sending emails!)

To put it in more practical terms: if you feel overwhelmed trying to format and send regular newsletters, or set up your various welcome automations, you’re less likely to do that, and less likely to have an effective email marketing presence.

Though I initially preferred Mailchimp for its simplicity compared to to more robust email marketing software (for example, ConvertKit is great, but a bit more involved to set up and use), Mailchimp is going through some rebranding/repositioning and has started to add more marketing features (and has also raised their pricing because of that!).

In my opinion, the Mailchimp dashboard got cluttered with a bunch of things that aren’t actually necessary for many users, especially those of us just looking for simple, straightforward email marketing, without all the new bells and whistles attached to it.

I found myself having to click around quite a bit to access specific email campaigns and make simple updates in Mailchimp. It no longer felt like the most efficient set-up for the simple email marketing I used to appreciate it for.

This is one of the biggest reasons we switched our email marketing over to Flodesk: it’s the most minimalist and streamlined email marketing tool I’ve yet to find!

It has everything it needs to have—and nothing more. Which makes it super clean and simple to navigate around and use for regular emails. (And remember: regular, helpful emails are an important part of serving your audience and keeping them engaged!)

Flodesk’s pricing is affordable as your health coaching business grows

One of the things I like about Mailchimp for new health coaches is that they offer a pretty sufficient free plan up to 2,000 subscribers. It’s all you need to get started with email marketing and begin growing an email list from your website.

But, of course, Mailchimp’s free plan doesn’t allow access to more advanced features (like multi-step email automations), and once you switch to the paid plans, they increase in price pretty rapidly, as they’re billed per subscriber.

(And, you need to be careful how you set up your Mailchimp lists, so you’re not paying for duplicate subscribers—in Mailchimp, the same subscriber will count multiple times if they’re on different lists.)

Flodesk, in contrast, offers only one plan, which includes unlimited subscribers and unlimited email sends. So, Flodesk’s pricing stays the same, no matter how many subscribers you have, and how many emails you send to them. (Yay!)

A subscription to Flodesk is $38/month, which is comparatively good pricing for what they have to offer (for reference, Mailchimp’s entry pricing is about $52/month). And, right now, you can lock in a discounted monthly subscription of 50% off ($19/month) forever! (Not just your first month or year, forever!)

Get 50% off Flodesk →

Flodesk also comes with a 30-day free trial so you can try it first, while still grabbing your discounted pricing!

Flodesk’s gorgeous email templates are great for wellness businesses

I don’t have too many complaints about Mailchimp’s design options—I still think they’re some of the best out there!

But one of the reasons Flodesk is becoming so popular is how easy it is to create super snazzy, beautifully designed emails.

Their templates are somewhat akin to Squarespace templates (sleek, modern design), so they also tend to flow really nicely with Squarespace websites (my favorite for wellness businesses!) and provide a bit more cohesive branding.

In other words, Flodesk definitely provides more eye-catching “pop” than other email marketing options, including Mailchimp.

And, the Flodesk design editor is super clean and streamlined, which makes it a bit easier to work with too.

Most health coaches I know don’t want to spend your days designing emails—you want that process to be quick and simple so you can get back to the actual health coaching part of your business. 😊

Flodesk makes it easy to set up email automations for your wellness business

One of the features I personally used quite a bit in Mailchimp (and regularly helped other health coaches with) is automated email sequences—things like a welcome automation for new subscribers, sales funnels based on user behavior, etc.

Mailchimp works just fine for a few basic automations, but it can start to get a little clunky to manage all your automations when you have many.

I think their new “Customer Journeys” feature may solve some of that (you can combine workflows that previously needed separate automations)… but personally, there were enough other reasons I preferred Flodesk it didn’t seem worth it to rebuild all of our automations in Mailchimp as Customer Journeys—which is how Flodesk is set up by default.

Flodesk is structured around “Workflows,” or automated sequences of triggers, emails and other actions.

Flodesk, the best email marketing software for sending branded emails as a health coach or wellness professional

It’s incredibly easy to set up new workflows, as well as make updates to existing ones. (This is important, as you’ll often need to pop in to make quick updates to links or copywriting, or perhaps add a new email to a sequence.)

I didn’t previously have an issue with Mailchimp in this regard, but updating existing workflow emails in Flodesk is definitely an improvement over Mailchimp’s process, which now feels somewhat cumbersome in comparison.

For visual peeps (like me 🙋‍♀️), the Flodesk dashboard uses a really intuitive layout to outline workflow automations and who gets sent what, when.

You can also combine and link different conditions and triggers to further customize the automated sequences your subscribers receive.

Flodesk’s flexible opt-in forms help you collect new subscribers for your email list

I never liked Mailchimp’s opt-in forms, so rarely used them. They weren’t easily customizable to the look and feel of a website, so felt a bit clunky.

In the past, I preferred using the Squarespace newsletter block (which can be designed and styled to nicely match the rest of a website) to collect email addresses and send them into Mailchimp.

Problem: The Squarespace / Mailchimp form connection, though nice and easy to set up, is kind of finicky and will sometimes break. If you’ve ever received an email from Squarespace alerting you that “Your form submission could not be saved”… you know what I’m talking about. It can be maddening, especially if you have a lot of different opt-ins throughout your site to disconnect and reconnect (the only way to “fix” it).

The best solution is to send the Squarespace newsletter block sign-ups to Google Sheets and connect Google Sheets to Mailchimp via Zapier—which works fine in most cases, but of course is a lot of steps for a simple task, and also means paying for a Zapier subscription.

Now, another potential problem here: The Squarespace newsletter block can either collect simply an email address… or, if you’d like to collect the subscriber’s name too, the form collects both the first and last name into one “Name” field.

This may not matter if you’re not personalizing your emails with merge tags (adding the subscriber’s name into your message, like “Hey, First Name!”). But if you do need that capability, you get stuck saying “Hey, First Name Last Name!”… which is a little awkward and impersonal.

So, all of this to say that one of the reasons I now prefer Flodesk over Mailchimp is that its sign-up forms (the Flodesk-generated ones that get embedded on your website) are able to be designed much more similarly to a Squarespace website—so, when they’re embedded, you can’t really tell it’s not originally from Squarespace. It feels much more seamless.

It’s ideal to use these Flodesk sign-up forms because they collect new sign-ups directly into your appropriate Flodesk segment, so you can bypass the whole Google Sheets / Zapier connection and fee.

And, Flodesk gives you the option to choose which combination of fields you’d like to collect: email, first name, last name. So, you can collect just an email address, or the email address and full name, or the email address and first name only. Nice to have options!

Flodesk, the best email marketing tool for health coaches and wellness businesses

Should you switch to Flodesk?

It’s important to say upfront that it’s no easy task to change your email marketing over to a new platform. Especially if you have a large, segmented list and lots of automated email sequences and funnels… it takes quite a bit of time to set it all up and switch it over.

So, I didn’t switch email marketing tools because it seemed like fun (it was not!). 😉 There were enough new benefits to Flodesk that it was preferable in the long-run.

Just to recap those reasons why:

I find Flodesk to be simpler and more efficient to use—it saves time sending lots of emails. (And, I’m all about business tools that save time!)
Flodesk offers more flexible embedded opt-in forms that allow me to request first name only, which is a nice balance between improving opt-in conversions and email deliverability.
Flodesk emails are a bit “prettier”… and though there’s definitely a balance to strike with email design vs. deliverability, I think Flodesk provides more options for impactful design.
Flodesk is more affordable for a large number of subscribers and email sends. Though this may not be a huge deal for some health coaches, depending on the number of subscribers Mailchimp is charging you for, it can save hundreds of dollars monthly in email software fees.

Try Flodesk free for 30 days →

This link also gives you 50% off your Flodesk subscription if you choose to purchase!

So, as much as I’ve been enjoying Flodesk for my own wellness business, here’s what I’d recommend to other health coaches and wellness professionals:

If you’re new to email marketing:

If you’re just starting your wellness business and don’t yet have an email marketing platform you’ve committed to—easy, definitely check out Flodesk!

It’s quick and easy to learn, has everything you need, and would be both a great starting place and a great platform to grow on.

If you already have an email list elsewhere:

If you already have an email list (and templates, and automations, and sign-up forms) elsewhere, be aware that it does take some effort to switch and get everything all designed and set up again, so there’s some more to consider in determining if switching to Flodesk would be worth it for you.

In that case, here’s what might make it worth the switch:

You’re able to invest time upfront to optimize your email template design, workflow automations, and list segmenting to be easier to use and maintain in the future.
You send enough regular emails that it’s ultimately time-saving to make that process as simple and streamlined for yourself (or your team) as possible.
You’re not happy with your current email tool, or are confused/overwhelmed trying to learn how to use it (Flodesk is so clean and easy to learn).
You want more design capability that what you currently have access to (additional fonts, image formatting, etc…. I find Flodesk particularly nice for wellness businesses!).
You’re looking for the most cost-effective tool for professional email marketing as your subscriber count grows.