Instagram goes down for an hour and your phone starts buzzing. Not with sales. With messages from your own clients, certain they’ve been hacked, because the one way they talk to their audience just disappeared without warning.
That happened to me not long before I recorded this episode. It wasn’t a hack. It was Instagram, being Instagram, for however long Instagram decided that day.
If social media is the only way you can reach your community, an outage isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a blackout.
That’s exactly why you need to build an email list for your online community, one you actually own, that doesn’t go dark the next time a platform does. Here’s how I build mine, segment it, and use it to do the work Circle alone can’t.
Why Do You Need to Build an Email List for Your Online Community?
Because it’s the only channel you fully own. Social platforms and Circle notifications can go down, get deprioritized, or change their rules, and nobody can take your email list away from you.
Social media has its place. But when something like Instagram goes down for a few hours, you find out fast how many of your eggs were in that one basket. I watched it happen in real time: clients texting me, certain their accounts had been hacked, when the truth was just as inconvenient. There was nothing wrong with their account. There was nothing they could do about it either.
An email list doesn’t have that problem. It’s a direct line to your people that isn’t subject to somebody else’s outage, algorithm change, or moderation call. You don’t have to hope the right people see your post. You send the email, and it lands.
That doesn’t mean you spam your list or throw a sales pitch at it every week. Building an email list is about building a community too, one that looks forward to hearing from you, not one that unsubscribes the third time you show up only to sell. Done well, an email list can be the thing that makes or breaks your next launch.
At my own company, we use social media sparingly. The return there is low, and an email list nurtured over time has done more for the podcast and the community than any post ever has.
How Do You Segment Your Community Email List?
Start with two or three broad groups before you build anything else. Mine are coaches, podcast hosts, and course creators, and every email I send starts with which of those three I’m actually talking to.
Before I build anything in an email platform for a new client, I get a piece of paper, or open a Trello board, and write down the segments. For my own list, that’s coaches, podcast hosts, and course creators. Three groups, three sets of problems, three different reasons to open an email from me.
Segments let you talk to the right people instead of everybody at once. If I have a new freebie for podcast hosts, I email podcast hosts, not the whole list. If I want to know what’s actually keeping course creators stuck, whether it’s tech, hosting, or something else entirely, I can survey that one segment directly. Every one of those touches tells that segment I know who they are and what they need, which is worth more than another generic newsletter.
You can build more segments later, and remove them just as easily. Nothing here is permanent. The point is to start, even if you only have one or two obvious groups to begin with.
One thing that saves real time: connect your community platform to your email tool with Zapier, so a new member gets added to the right segment automatically the moment they join. If they were already on your list from downloading a freebie, that’s fine too. They just pick up a second tag, and you get a fuller picture of what that person actually wants from you.
Why Use Flodesk for Community Email Marketing?
Flodesk is built for small businesses, priced around 19 dollars a month with a free trial, and its templates already handle the branding work most email platforms leave you to figure out on your own.
I use Flodesk, and the reason comes down to who it’s built for. It’s not trying to be everything to everyone. It’s built with the small, early stage business owner in mind, though it can scale with you if your list grows.
Flodesk gets branding right from the first login. The templates already look considered, and building your brand into your account happens as part of setup, not as an afterthought you bolt on later. That matters more than people expect, and it gets a lot easier once you’ve done the work of branding your online community before you ever touch an email template. I don’t want a community member opening an email and wondering if it’s actually from me or from whatever platform sent it.
It’s also reasonably priced for what it does, and there’s a free trial if you want to test it before committing. Flodesk has added a way to sell digital products directly too, so the platform can do more than send newsletters if you need it to.
None of that makes Flodesk the right call for everyone. I have a client with a list of a little over 100,000 people who uses Mailchimp instead, and pays close to 700 dollars a month for it, because her business model needs features Mailchimp offers that we haven’t needed to replace. Her return on that list justifies the cost. The lesson isn’t “use Flodesk.” It’s pick the platform that matches what your list actually needs to do, and don’t assume the cheapest option is automatically the right one once your list gets big.
Whichever platform you land on, know going in that none of them connect to Circle natively. You’ll need Zapier or something like it either way, so that isn’t a reason to rule Flodesk out.
What Should Your Welcome Series Look Like?
Build three separate workflows: one for a new free member, one for a new paid member, and one for someone upgrading from free to paid. Sending the same welcome to all three is how you lose people.
This is where Circle’s own onboarding wizard runs out of road. It’s great at walking a person through setting up their profile and getting a community launch ready. It doesn’t do anything to nurture a member after they’ve joined, and email is what fills that gap.
I run three different workflows depending on where a person is when they land on my list.
New Free Member
Someone who joins for free doesn’t know how anything works yet, so the first email has to cover the basics: how to fill out a profile, how to talk to us, how to ask for resources, and what the community guidelines actually are.
- Send a welcome email the moment they join
- Follow up a few days later, checking in on one specific part of the community
- Check in again after another few days, asking about any issues and inviting feedback
- Ask for the upgrade to paid, once they’ve had a real chance to see the value first
That last email only works because the three before it earned it.
New Paid Member
A paid member gets a different first email entirely. They don’t need “here’s how to fill out your profile” if they’ve already been a free member for months. What they need is confirmation that they made a good decision and a nudge toward what’s actually inside the paid tier.
A small reminder to finish their profile is fine to include. Leading with it, as if they’re brand new, is not.
Free to Paid Upgrade
This one gets its own workflow because it’s neither of the other two. This person already knows your community. They’ve decided it’s worth paying for. Treating them like a brand new member right after they gave you money is how you make them feel unseen instead of welcomed.
Here’s a detail worth stealing directly: inside the email that tells free members about the paid option, if someone clicks through to actually look, that click tags them as a warm lead in my workflow. That triggers a separate follow up a couple of days later, checking in on whether they had questions and handing them another freebie in the meantime. It’s a small trigger, but it’s the difference between one generic email and a conversation that’s actually responding to what that person just did.
Once the welcome series ends, a member rolls into the same content plan as everyone else. That’s the part creating engaging content for your Circle community picks up, and it’s worth watching how members actually respond once they’re inside to see whether the welcome series did its job.
What Lead Magnets Work Best for Growing Your Community List?
A mix works best. Pair a straightforward PDF freebie with something more playful, like a quiz, and let your free community tier count as a lead magnet in its own right.
Once your segments and your welcome series are in place, the next question is how you’re actually growing the list. Promoting your community is part of it, but lead magnets do a lot of the work underneath that.
I like a mix. Some of mine are the expected kind: a PDF, a lighter version of a paid product, something genuinely useful on its own. Others are more playful. I build quizzes with a tool called Interact, and I’ve chosen not to gate the results behind an email address. Someone can take the quiz, get their answer, BuzzFeed style, and move on without giving me anything. I already have plenty of places on my site gathering emails. This one is just for fun, and it still brings people back.
Interact connects directly with Flodesk, so the two work together without you managing a separate export.
Don’t overlook the community itself. If you run a free tier, that free community is a lead magnet on its own, as long as the path from “found the community” to “on the email list” is actually automated. Connect the two with Zapier and new members land on your list the moment they join, tagged correctly from the start. You can export your community list manually and upload it instead, but that costs you real time, and it’s easy to miss people or tag them into the wrong segment along the way. We share the templates for exactly this kind of setup inside coCreator Society.
Try This Prompt
This turns your segments and your welcome series from an idea into something you can actually build this week.
“I run a [type of community] for [who it serves]. My members currently fall into these groups: [list two or three segments and what each one actually needs from you]. Based on the segmentation and welcome series approach in this post, draft three welcome email outlines: one for a new free member, one for a new paid member, and one for someone upgrading from free to paid. For each one, give me the subject line, what it should cover, and when it should send after they join. Give me the output as a simple table.”
You still write the actual emails. This just gets you a structure to react to instead of a blank page.
Your Email List Is the Backup Plan You Actually Own
Every platform you build a community on, Circle, Instagram, wherever comes next, is a platform you’re borrowing space on. You didn’t build it, you don’t control its uptime, and you don’t get a vote when it changes.
Your email list is different. Nobody can take it away from you, throttle its reach, or go down for an afternoon and take your ability to talk to your people with it.
That’s the whole case for building one, segmenting it, and actually nurturing it instead of treating it as a backup you’ll get to eventually. It isn’t a nice to have sitting next to your real community. For a lot of founders, it ends up being the steadiest part of the whole thing.
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Kickstarting Your Community with Email Marketing & Flodesk
More like it on Your Community Strategist, new every Thursday.
More Like This
Listen: Branding Before Building: The First Step to a Thriving Community on Circle. The tech stack decisions in this post go a lot smoother once your brand and vision are locked in first.
Listen: Crafting Engaging Content for Your Circle Community. What to actually send once your welcome series hands a new member off to the rest of your content.
Watch: Branding Before Building: The First Step to a Thriving Community on Circle. The on-screen version of picking your tech stack and visual identity before you build.
Listen: Decoding Digital Body Language: Enhancing Online Interaction. How to read what your new members are telling you once they’re actually inside.
Keep Going
coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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