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The last time you bought something, it probably wasn’t out of the blue.
Even for an impulse purchase, you likely had some relationship with the brand before you clicked ‘buy.’
Maybe you follow them on social media? Maybe a too-good-to-pass-up discount landed in your inbox? Something tipped you from thinking maybe to clicking ‘yes’.
That’s the same kind of journey your potential customers go through.
As a creator, you can’t dismiss the number of times someone needs to see your name, credits, content, and messaging to go from a casual browser to a follower, subscriber, customer, and loyal fan.
The best news? You can make this happen with flywheel marketing. Here’s how.
What is flywheel marketing?
Flywheel marketing is a marketing approach that places your customer at its center and delights your audience from the first interaction—turning them into first-time buyers, repeat customers, and loyal consumers.
The best part?
New customers also recommend you to others, further growing your audience even further.
Momentum is key in flywheel marketing.
Instead of only focusing on attracting as many new readers or viewers as possible and ignoring them once they buy from you, flywheel marketing nurtures relationships with people who want to do business with you—delighting and engaging them so they become repeat customers and advocates for your content and products.
What are the benefits of flywheel marketing?
Creators use flywheel marketing to reap rewards like:
- More and better leads: Recommendations are among the most powerful growth engines. People who saw results with your products— courses, ebooks, coaching—and enjoyed the process will gladly tell their friends and followers about it. The more you delight them, the more you grow.
- Marketing on autopilot: Even if you take a break from creating new content or running live launches, your customers will keep your marketing momentum going.
- A launch-ready audience: You can launch new products to your existing audience because they already know your paid content is worth their time and money. Building a new audience is helpful when launching, but a flywheel approach ensures your current customers are happy to buy from you again, too.
Marketing flywheel vs. funnel: What’s the difference?
The traditional marketing funnel is linear: it aims to add as many people as possible to the top of the funnel, nurture them through the middle, and convert them into customers at the bottom.
That’s where the journey—and engagement—stops.
In contrast, a marketing flywheel builds lasting relationships with customers, turning them into repeat buyers and brand ambassadors.
The funnel has a clear start and end to the marketing efforts for every new subscriber or sale.
The flywheel is a circle that never stops spinning.

Here’s what else to keep in mind when comparing a marketing funnel to flywheel marketing:
- A marketing funnel requires you to constantly create content from scratch to reach new audiences, while flywheel marketing leans on your existing base of customers and subscribers.
- Much of your success hinges on your own social media reach and the social media algorithms with the funnel; with a flywheel, you benefit from a combined reach of your subscribers and customers.
- The funnel pressures you into constantly chasing big numbers and growth; the flywheel fuels your revenue with the audience you’ve already attracted and nurtured.
Why is a flywheel better than a funnel? Because it allows you to be more efficient when marketing your creative business.
How the marketing flywheel works for creators
In the creator economy, flywheels are growth loops that feed on themselves to create results. Instead of focusing on creating content that attracts new people into your online world, you infuse value into every customer touchpoint.
That works whether you’re teaching dog training, conscious parenting, bullet journaling, or personal finances. It pays off whatever your goal, from running online courses and selling worksheets to offering group coaching and running live events.

Think of a flywheel as similar to a pinwheel, which requires force to spin. Two opposing elements make this happen:
- Forces: The strategies that speed up the flywheel, create a better customer experience, and turn casual readers into loyal customers. For example, great customer support, email automations for sending the right emails at the right time, a referral program, or a comforting refund policy.
- Friction: This slows down your flywheel by making the customer work harder to purchase from you or gain value from your products. For example, payment issues, poor customer support, or offering products that don’t match your audience’s goals.
Your goal is to decrease friction and increase the forces acting upon the funnel as much as possible.
One of the best ways to make this happen as a creator?
Email marketing.
Because emails cover every phase of the customer journey and the flywheel. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Flywheel marketing: real-life examples from creators
A flywheel marketing strategy is the foundation of a creator business that’s both thriving and sustainable. These creators know it—here’s how they use the flywheel:
Example #1: Course creator Marie Poulin
Marie Poulin is the Notion pro behind Notion Mastery, her flagship course with over 2,000 students to date. Her email list supports her online business and counts more than 20,000 subscribers.

Marie Poulin’s premium course Notion Mastery. Image via Notion Mastery.
Here are some ways Marie leverages a marketing flywheel in her business:
- Marie creates relentless value for her audience on her YouTube channel, X/Twitter, Notion’s YouTube channel, and events like webinars and online summits. She often ties that teaching to relevant lead magnets and landing pages, continuously growing her email list.
- For subscribers who aren’t ready to invest in Marie’s course, Marie offers an accessible entry point to the world of Notion: free and paid Notion templates.
- Finally, those who make the leap into her course get a personalized onboarding sequence of emails that lasts for a couple of months. It ensures students receive all the details and instructions they need to make the most from the course. Marie also makes it easy to refer others to the course using automations.
Bonus read: Check out how Marie Poulin manages her $40K/month course business with Kit.
Example #2: Consultant and educator Phil Pallen
Phil Pallen is a brand strategist who specializes in personal branding for coaches, speakers, bloggers, experts, and media personalities. He offers services and runs online courses that help creators and companies stand out and achieve their goals.

Phil Pallen’s website homepage. Image via Phil Pallen.
The flywheel is a big part of Phil’s success as a creator—here’s how:
- Phil created a library of high-quality freebies that he promotes on his website, social media, and YouTube channel. Some of his lead magnets have been downloaded more than 22,000 times, and his YouTube videos keep bringing subscribers even years after they were published.
- Each subscriber and customer Phil attracts goes through a smooth experience that includes onboarding info, course platform instructions, and more. Even though he uses multiple platforms, like Squarespace for his website and Teachable for courses, there are zero hiccups for students.
- Phil wraps up his sequences with a prompt for subscribers to reply to his emails so he can learn about them and their challenges—and serve them even better as a result.
Bonus read: Find out how Phil Pallen grew his email list to 30,000 subscribers with Kit.
Example #3: Influencer and coach Ellie Diop
Ellie Diop is a finance influencer who helps women start and scale their businesses. Ellie started building her email list and business from scratch in 2020—it became a million-dollar business within a year with more than 62,000 subscribers in 2023.

Ellie Diop’s website homepage. Image via Ellievated Academy.
Check out the role of the flywheel model in Ellie’s business:
- Ellie is persistent in creating in-depth content regularly. She offers free live webinars, free workbooks, giveaways for free coaching, and challenges—all of which are hands-on and thorough, attracting hundreds or even thousands of registrants.
- Ellie’s email segmentation focuses on behavior, like opening a sales email but not making a purchase. In that case, non-buyers receive six further emails about the product that include testimonials, prompts for questions, and a discount.
- Before creating a webinar, Ellie polls her audience over Instagram or email to find out which topics they want to hear about next. She also asks for feedback on things like product cover art or a YouTube video topic, deepening her relationship with those who already trust her.
Bonus read: Check out how Ellie Diop built her email list to 62,000 and keeps their attention with Kit.
How to set up your flywheel marketing strategy
Sold on the idea of implementing a marketing flywheel as a creator? Here’s what it takes to set it up with three stages: attract, engage, and delight—actionable email tips included.

Attract phase: Build a quality email list
The attract phase is sets your marketing flywheel into motion. It’s the initial push where you focus on building an email list of people excited to learn from you.
Use quality content like blog posts, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, X/Twitter threads, or TikTok videos to turn casual visitors into email subscribers who can’t wait for your next newsletter, tutorial, or insight.
How to attract subscribers with Kit
You don’t need a massive audience or years of experience to attract email subscribers. It’s much simpler than that. Use these Kit tools and tips to set up the first stage of your marketing flywheel:
- Create a valuable lead magnet: Create a piece of content so valuable that people are willing to give you their email address for access. Lead magnets like checklists, ebooks, templates, or cheat sheets that help your audience achieve something you teach about are all great options.
- Set up a landing page: Even though it’s free, your lead magnet needs its own sales page to show your audience it’s right for them. That’s where lead gen landing pages come in because they’re dedicated signup pages with a clear focus on your lead magnet and a single call-to-action.
- Promote your landing page: Maximize the potential of each lead magnet by promoting it on Instagram, Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, your website, and more—tap into 30+ ideas to grow your email list.
Engage phase: Nurture a value-based relationship with your subscribers
Your flywheel is rolling! Next up is the effort that keeps people inside it—engaging your subscribers with timely, consistent emails.
This can include welcome emails, weekly newsletters, product launch sequences, monthly updates, and even topic-specific emails based on the emails and links a subscriber previously engaged with.
When it comes to busy inboxes (which, let’s be real, includes all inboxes), relevance is key.
How to engage your audience with Kit
You already know the topics your audience is passionate about and what brought them to you. The next step is organizing those interests in your email marketing platform and personalizing your emails:
- Organize your email list: Keep track of what your subscribers care about with email tag management. For example, you can tag them based on the landing page they subscribed through, links they clicked on, and products they’ve purchased. This is essential for sending hyper-targeted emails with email segmentation.
- Send a welcome campaign: Welcome emails let you ride the excitement wave that comes after downloading a lead magnet, share your story to introduce yourself, and open up a dialogue by prompting new subscribers to reply to your emails.
- Automate behavior-based email sequences: Promote a product to a highly engaged group of subscribers, reach out to cold subscribers, check in with those who opened your product email but haven’t purchased—all on autopilot. Email automations let you set up rules and conditions that work around the clock for you, even when you’re not.
- Make buying from you easy: Whether you sell coaching, ebooks, presets, paid newsletters, online courses, or something else, you need a platform that’s both easy to set up for you and even easier to buy from for your customers. Our Kit Commerce features are exactly that (and it costs zero dollars to start selling).
Delight phase: Equip your customers for success
Finally, the delight phase is what keeps your flywheel moving. It’s where you double down on the experience your subscribers and customers have after signing up for your emails or buying from you.
Some people will lose interest over time and fall out of your flywheel. That’s okay! Focus on deepening your relationship with those who keep engaging with your content and buying your products.
How to support and retain your customers with Kit
Hands-on interaction with each subscriber or customer can easily become overwhelming. Luckily, you can streamline the delight phase with Kit with smart sequences and a referral program:
- Automate customer onboarding: When you’re getting a couple of new customers weekly, sending them manual welcome emails is doable. But what if that number increases? Or if you get busy with other things, or go on a vacation? Use sequences for automated customer onboarding to nurture that relationship from the moment of purchase.
- Ask for feedback: Feedback is a creator superpower because it gives you perspective on how people feel about your content and products and what keeps bringing them back. Run surveys to learn about new subscribers, find out why some people haven’t bought your product, their preferred channels, and more. Check out more ideas on using surveys to grow your creator business.
- Introduce a newsletter referral program: Happy subscribers and customers can get you even more of the best subscribers and customers. Referrals are liquid gold for any business, and creators are no different. Set up a newsletter referral program that rewards loyalty and keeps your email list growing.
Build a thriving creator business with flywheel marketing
There’s no such thing as a do-it-once-and-reap-rewards-forever strategy. You can’t fake value, quality, and audience relationships.
And that’s a good thing. By taking the flywheel approach, you can attract the people who care about your teaching, engage them with free and paid content, and delight them so they can’t wait to tell others about it.
Kit’s features match every phase of the flywheel, from landing pages and email segmentation to commerce and referrals. It’s all you need to get started— try Kit to see how it can support the business of your dreams.