Solutions

HubSpot is one of the world’s leading CRMs, seamlessly merging sales, marketing, and customer service into a single, powerful dashboard. With tools for email marketing, lead generation, and landing page creation, HubSpot enables you to connect with customers more effectively and drive meaningful results.

However, HubSpot’s design tools can sometimes feel restrictive for marketers looking to create distinctive branding or highly customized designs.

This is where Beefree comes in—the ideal solution for HubSpot users looking to flex their creative chops in designing emails and landing pages. With drag-and-drop editing, advanced customization options, and an extensive template library, Beefree makes it easy to capture your brand’s identity and stand out in today’s crowded market.

1. 1,700+ free customizable email and page templates

HubSpot’s templates work for simple designs, but users often describe them as “bland” or “limiting.” 

Beefree users are spoiled for choice with over 1,700 free customizable templates that go far beyond HubSpot’s basic designs. These templates serve as the perfect starting point for building impactful campaigns.

Beefree’s intuitive design tools let you tweak the template in real time, making it easy to produce professional-quality creations that perfectly reflect your brand’s identity—no design experience required. These pre-built layouts are major time-savers, too, with 82% of users reporting faster email creation using Beefree.

2. Advanced design elements for true creative freedom

Customization can be a challenge for many HubSpot users; for instance, some report that it’s “impossible” to create a table without coding the design yourself. Unfortunately, not every user has the technical skills—not to mention the time—to perfect their emails with HubSpot alone. 

Beefree elevates your designs with an extensive collection of creative elements, all easily customizable using its powerful editor.

Some of these elements, like rounded corners and unlimited columns, aren’t available in HubSpot. Others, like creating a table to present data in a clean and organized way, are far easier to build in Beefree.

These creative elements make it that much easier to showcase your brand identity, communicate your message effectively, and design beautiful, original campaigns. They help you move beyond cookie-cutter designs and deliver something truly unique.

Remember: Eye-catching emails grab your audience’s attention instantly, helping your message stand out in crowded inboxes while staying true to your brand.

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3. Reusable content blocks for always-on-brand campaigns

Beefree’s reusable content blocks make it simple to maintain consistency across all your campaigns.

Simply save your branded elements—headers, footers, logos, and CTA buttons—once, then re-use them in future designs with a single click of a button.

This convenient feature helps HubSpot users streamline their workflow by eliminating repetitive design tasks — potentially saving you hours per campaign. 

4. Mobile-responsive designs out the box

Beefree’s editor includes built-in mobile responsiveness, which means your emails and landing pages automatically adjust to any screen size with no extra effort. This ensures your campaigns look great on every device, from desktops to smartphones.

For even greater control, Beefree supports mobile design mode, enabling HubSpot users to fine-tune your designs for smaller screens. Simply select the device size you’re optimizing for and make adjustments using the intuitive visual editor.

This allows you to deliver a tailored, on-brand experience, no matter how your audience views your content.

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5. Easy integration

Whether you're crafting unique branded elements or designing dynamic content, Beefree gives you the tools to create campaigns that align perfectly with your brand vision. Best of all, integrating HubSpot with Beefree takes just seconds. 

Beefree and HubSpot: A match made in email heaven

Integrating Beefree with HubSpot offers a powerful solution for marketers looking to elevate their email campaigns. HubSpot provides the engine for powering your marketing, while Beefree boosts the creative aspect, letting you bring your brand vision to life with ease.

For example, one of Beefree’s customers, Folderly—an all-in-one email deliverability platform—experienced significant improvements by combining HubSpot and Beefree. 

By designing emails in Beefree and sending them using HubSpot, Folderly streamlined their workflow, reducing campaign creation time from days to hours. This efficiency freed the team to focus on other key tasks, while maintaining high-quality, on-brand designs.

This integration not only sped up their processes but also boosted open rates by 15%, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining Beefree's advanced design tools with HubSpot's marketing automation.

“With Beefree, we can create beautiful designs and quickly integrate them into our workflows. By connecting our HubSpot account to Beefree, we can easily transfer the email designs to HubSpot, making the entire process highly efficient and smooth.”
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- Kate Lavrenchuk, Marketing Lead at Folderly

Read more about Folderly’s success story with Beefree here. 

When you’re the only person running the entire marketing department of a startup, every minute counts. 

For Matt Byrd, Head of Marketing at TravelJoy, an all-in-one platform for travel advisors, managing his time while ensuring the quality of the company’s email campaigns has been a delicate balancing act. But it’s also something he takes great pride in, especially when it comes to creating emails that genuinely stand out.

In a recent conversation with Matt, he shared his journey from coding emails by hand to finding a solution that allows him to save time without compromising on quality. For Matt, email isn’t just another channel — it’s where he started in digital marketing, and it remains one of his favorite ways to connect with customers. 

What follows are excerpts from our conversation with Matt Byrd at TravelJoy, edited for readability and engagement. 

From hand-coding to WYSIWYG frustration

“I started out as an email developer, hand-coding templates for clients,” Matt explained. “I had a really high standard for email design and development, which is why I felt so restricted when I started using our email platform’s basic editor at TravelJoy.”

With years of experience, including leading email marketing for Uber and for a wedding tech company, Matt knew the impact well-crafted emails could have on customer engagement. But when he joined TravelJoy, the small startup environment meant that Matt was handling everything from web design to how-to videos on a daily basis. He simply didn’t have the time to code emails by hand and the WYSIWYG editor provided by their email service was too limiting.

“I was frustrated,” Matt said. “I knew that email needed to be a big channel for us, but the tools available just weren’t cutting it.”

The aha moment: when no-code means excellent code

Like many email developers, Matt had doubts about WYSIWYG, no-code editors. Having been burned by subpar no-code editors in the past, Matt was hesitant to trust another tool. He recalled thinking, “It’s going to export trash code that I’ll have to clean up.” But after searching for a more flexible solution, Matt stumbled across Beefree.

To his surprise, Beefree exceeded his expectations. “The code was good,” he said. “It tested across all platforms and gave me the flexibility I needed. I wanted my emails to look designed by hand but without the time commitment of coding each one from scratch. Beefree gave me that.”

Matt’s technical background meant he didn’t just need a tool that looked good on the surface. He needed something that could handle the granular details that make emails shine. “You can get as nuanced as you want with Beefree,” he said. 

“For example, if you want to adjust the border-radius on the top-left section of a content area, you can do that. It allowed me to create emails that felt custom, not cookie-cutter.”

Becoming the team’s hero

For Matt, the value of Beefree wasn’t just in the technical capabilities — it was also about how it made him feel as a creator. “I want my emails to look awesome. I’m proud of the work I do, and Beefree helps me create emails that I’m excited to show off,” Matt shared.

Using Beefree not only saved him time but also boosted his confidence. After sending one of his first newly-designed emails, the Head of Product at TravelJoy sent a company-wide Slack message saying, “Matt, these emails look so engaging.” This recognition made him feel like a hero to his team, and more importantly, it reinforced his pride in his work.

“I want my emails to look awesome. I’m proud of the work I do, and Beefree helps me create emails that I’m excited to show off”.

Matt’s advice for time-strapped marketers

When asked what advice he’d give to other marketers in small teams, Matt’s answer was simple: “If you want to save time and still look professional, you need the right tool that will give you an amazing-looking email in a fraction of the time it would take to code it yourself.”

For a startup marketer wearing multiple hats, tools that help streamline the creative process without sacrificing quality are essential. And for Matt Byrd, finding the right tool has been a game-changer — allowing him to create emails that not only engage TravelJoy’s audience, but also make him proud of the work he’s doing.

Final thoughts

Matt’s experience with Beefree highlights how the right tool can transform how marketers approach their work. What began as a search for a more efficient email editor turned into a game-changer, allowing him to create emails that look handcrafted without the time-intensive coding.

“I’m more excited to send these emails,” Matt concluded. “They’re helping me tell TravelJoy’s story in a way that connects more with our audience, and that’s something I’m proud of.”

For marketers like Matt, who juggle multiple responsibilities, finding a tool that offers both efficiency and creativity can make all the difference. If you’re looking for a way to create beautiful, professional emails in a fraction of the time, try Beefree for yourself. Discover how Beefree can help you save time and elevate your email marketing. 

Read more success stories or start your free trial here.

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In the world of email marketing, personalization is no longer optional—it’s a necessity. According to a study by Campaign Monitor, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, while segmented email campaigns can generate up to a 760% increase in revenue. Considering these resounding analytics, it’s clear that sending the right message to the right audience at the right time is critical to your email marketing success.

But how do you go beyond just inserting someone’s first name into an email? 

The answer lies in leveraging tools like conditional merge tags, which are available in sending platforms like Mailchimp, and combining them with tools that can handle sophisticated email logic, like Beefree. 

These tools allow marketers to create hyper-targeted email experiences that speak directly to each recipient’s needs, preferences, and behaviors. 

Let’s walk through how you can design beautiful, personalized emails for Mailchimp using Beefree.

Understanding Mailchimp’s capabilities and limitations 

With over 11 million users, Mailchimp has established itself as a leading marketing platform that empowers marketers to deliver targeted and timely campaigns effectively. Among its robust features, its automation and segmentation capabilities stand out.

Mailchimp’s advanced segmentation tools allow you to target users based on behaviors, tags, or custom data, ensuring your messages reach the right audience. Meanwhile, its automation features make it easy to set up workflows, enabling you to deliver the right message at the perfect moment.

However, Mailchimp does have some limitations. Many users encounter a steep learning curve, and the platform's higher price point can be a concern. More importantly, users often find its design capabilities somewhat lacking, which can hinder their ability to create visually compelling and truly personalized campaigns.

This is why many choose to use Beefree in conjunction with Mailchimp. This easy integration allows marketers to leverage Mailchimp’s powerful segmentation tools to categorize subscribers based on various criteria such as demographics, purchase history, or engagement levels. They then use Beefree to design personalized emails that align with each group's preferences and behaviors.

Thanks to Beefree’s seamless integration with Mailchimp, users can easily export their emails and utilize Mailchimp’s automation features to trigger these personalized messages. This synergy between Beefree's design capabilities and Mailchimp's automation and segmentation features maximizes engagement and conversion rates while enhancing the overall customer experience.

How to personalize mailchimp emails in Beefree

The foundation of a successful personalized email campaign is a well-designed email that adapts to different audience segments. Beefree makes this process simple with its drag-and-drop editor.

Step #1: Start from a template 

If you’re not sure where to start in creating a personalized campaign, Beefree offers an extensive library of Mailchimp-compatible templates.  

Begin by selecting a template that aligns with your campaign's objective, whether it’s a promotional email, newsletter, or seasonal message. You can then leverage Beefree’s modular editor to infuse your brand into the emails and add content blocks and interactive elements that are specific to different audience segments. 

Within the editor, tailor your email to offer unique experiences for mobile viewing using Mobile Design Mode.

Step #2: Add merge tags 

Merge tags are placeholder text that gets replaced by subscriber-specific data when the email is sent. Here’s how to use them in Beefree:

1. Choose the section of content where you want to insert a personalized element. For example, you can add a placeholder for the recipient’s first name.
   
   
2. Insert the Merge Tag – In Beefree, select an existing MailChimp merge tag or create a new one. You can select or add the |FNAME| tag for the recipient’s first name. This turns a generic greeting into something more personal. “Hi |FNAME|” becomes “Hi Jane” when Jane receives the email.

You can refer to Mailchimp’s Merge Tag Cheat Sheet to find additional merge tags you can easily copy and paste into Beefree to customize your email.

Step #3: Apply display conditions for personalized rows

You can set up rows of content that display only to certain segments of your audience using Mailchimp’s conditional merge tags.

These tags are snippets of code that control whether a section of content should appear based on specific data, such as whether someone is a VIP or a new subscriber.

Here is an example scenario: You want to show a special offer to VIP customers and a different one to new subscribers. To achieve this, you’ll use the following before and after logic in Beefree for the row containing the content for VIP customers:

*|IF:VIP="yes"|*
Hey *|FNAME|*, as a VIP, you get 20% off!
*|END:IF|*

For new subscribers, you’ll use the following before and after logic in Beefree for the row containing the content for new subscribers:

*|IF:VIP="no"|*
Welcome, *|FNAME|*! Get 10% off your first purchase.
*|END:IF|*

This logic ensures that only VIP customers see the first row, while new subscribers see the second one.

Implementing Display Conditions in Beefree

Display Conditions in Beefree apply to entire rows, allowing you to show different rows to different groups of recipients. This feature is incredibly useful for dynamically personalizing content at scale.

Here’s how to apply this logic in Beefree:

1. Select the row that contains the personalized content.
2. Set the Display Conditions – In the settings for that row, click “Display Conditions.” Copy and paste your Mailchimp logic (as shown above) into the condition box to control who will see the content.
3. Repeat for other rows – If you have multiple rows with different offers or content for different segments, repeat the process, applying the appropriate logic for each row.

Optional: Multilingual designs 

Beefree’s Multilingual Designs enable users to design emails in multiple languages effortlessly. This is particularly beneficial for brands targeting international markets or diverse communities. 

Designing for multiple languages in Beefree:

1. In the editor, click on the globe icon on the top bar
2. Select a primary language from the drop-down menu
3. Select the number of additional language (this varies by plan)

Once you add your Primary and Additional languages to your Multilingual Settings, you can add your translated content to each language design. The fastest way to translate your emails is by using Beefree’s AI Assistant. 

Step #4: Exporting your design to Mailchimp

Now that your email is designed with dynamic and personalized content, it's time to export it to Mailchimp, where you’ll handle audience segmentation and send the email.

1. In Beefree, click “Export” and choose Mailchimp as the destination.
2. Link your Mailchimp account – If it’s your first time, you’ll need to link your Mailchimp account to Beefree.
3. Review in Mailchimp – Once the design is exported, log in to Mailchimp and check the email. Use Mailchimp’s preview tools to ensure your Merge Tags and Display Conditions are functioning correctly.

Ready to create more personalized emails?

Beefree and Mailchimp provide marketers with the perfect blend of design flexibility and powerful automation, enabling them to craft visually stunning emails that resonate with your audience. 

Start harnessing the full potential of your email campaigns today with Beefree. 

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In a rapidly evolving digital landscape where algorithms and user preferences change at the speed of light, BlueprintNYC reminds us that email should be fun.

BlueprintNYC is an award-winning agency based in New York City that pairs “art and science to design experiences that engage hearts and minds to incite action.” As for all agencies, scalability, ease of use, and seamless integration with their clients’ ESPs are the key factors that enable real success from email campaigns. 

Today we bring Nicolas “Nico” Bogdan, Sr. Comms & Engagement Producer at BlueprintNYC to share how they transformed their email program from a time-sucking machine to a well-oiled collaborative effort. 

What follows are excerpts from our conversation with Nico Bogdan at BlueprintNYC, edited for readability and engagement. 

Struggling with design, collaboration, and deliverability issues

When we design emails, it’s not just for clients but also for our internal communications. These emails vary depending on what's happening in the company, but one of our regular practices is sharing weekend highlights. Every Monday, team members share what they did over the weekend—whether it’s something fun, personal milestones, or volunteer work—and we transform these into a quick-hit Monday afternoon culture & company news update called “THE WEEKENDER!”

This weekly email and our monthly newsletter became our creative playground. We experiment with layouts, different formats, spacing, and graphics. It was all about pushing the boundaries and having fun. But our old tool started holding us back. It was more of an email distribution platform than a true design tool. 

It lacked the flexibility we needed for customization and collaboration, not just for our emails but for our clients. As a team, it was difficult to work together efficiently, and design became frustrating instead of inspiring.

The tipping point came when we discovered that our emails weren’t just missing the mark visually—they were sometimes ending up in spam folders or being blocked entirely, depending on our client’s email suite. That’s when we knew we needed something more robust and reliable to keep up with our creativity and our clients' requests.

An unexpected, happy solution 

Beefree came to us by chance almost two years ago. One of our clients was using it, and it was really easy for us to design and push communications wherever they needed them. 

It took us a little while to finally create our own account, but once we did, it was seamless. 

Nothing changed for our clients, only fewer issues the ease of integrating our emails for distribution to their teams. We went straight to creating workspaces and folders to organize our comms plans and events of all sizes. 

The best part is, if clients have any changes, we can bring another teammate from a different department.They can be trained easily on Beefree because there really isn’t a learning curve once you understand the basics. 

"The collaboration on Beefree is also so much better than our previous ESP. It's really easy and accessible. Multiple team members can work on the communications simultaneously, so that's ideal."

The new standard for email production

I enjoy creating engaging internal campaigns with Beefree, and I love that it gives our team complete control over the visual elements across all our communications. 

Our email production process has become 25% faster, thanks to the use of standardized templates, Saved Rows, and more streamlined collaboration tools. This new approach allows us to cut down on repetitive tasks and focus more on creativity and execution.

Before, the process was tedious and full of unnecessary steps—we had to manually inspect HTML, import it into builders, and move it between platforms before sharing it with clients. This opened up countless opportunities for errors and wasted time.

Now, with a structured, efficient system in place, the quality of our work has increased by 50%, and we have a lot more fun designing, setting a new standard for email production within our team.

Wrap up

Using Beefree, the BlueprintNYC team experienced a significant transformation in their communication processes. The collaborative tools, improved asset management, and significant time savings all contributed to their success. BlueprintNYC’s success story demonstrates the importance of choosing the right platform to enhance communication efficiency. Read more about their success story with Beefree here.

To try first hand how Beefree can transform your organization's communications, create a free account and get started now!

If you’re in search of a new ESP, Gmail might not be your first thought. The platform is meant primarily for individual email accounts, not marketing purposes. But since it’s completely free, Gmail is hugely helpful for small businesses that are ready to expand their email marketing.

As of 2023, Gmail has added numerous features that make it more suitable for email marketing, like multi-send mode as well as pre-set layouts, so it’s more capable of email marketing than ever before. Check out these tips for free email marketing with Gmail as your email service provider.

#1. Choose Gmail marketing tools

There are many free Gmail marketing tools that can help you run email marketing campaigns out of Gmail. We recommend tools such as Gumbamail, a free Chrome extension, to help transform Gmail into an email marketing tool that lets you schedule and send mailing campaigns to your subscribers without leaving Gmail.

Another helpful tool for your Gmail email marketing is Google Sheets. Like Gmail, Google Sheets is free. It’s essentially Google’s version of Microsoft Excel, and it’s a fantastic tool for creating and managing your mailing lists so you can do a mail merge when you’re ready to send a newsletter (more on that momentarily).

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When you install Gumbamail and Beefree's templates for Gmail, you’ll be able to create beautifully designed mass email campaigns inside your Gmail account. (We’ll walk you through how towards the end of the article.)

#2. Creating your email list

There are many ways you can create an email list for Gmail campaigns. We recommend using either Google Contacts or Google Sheets.

Google Contacts is easy to access while you’re in Gmail. In Google Contacts, select the addresses you want to include and then add them to a new or existing label. When you’re through, send a Gmail message to each person with that label.

Alternatively, you can use Google Sheets to create a Gmail mail merge or use a free email marketing tool like Yet Another Mail Merge, which pulls addresses from a Google Sheet and then tracks your email campaigns.

How do you know which option is best for you?

It depends on your workflow and where your email contacts are coming in. When recipients are stored in Google Contacts, it makes sending easier: if each contact is labeled with the appropriate mailing list, you just type in the label name in the “To” field, and Gmail will send it to everyone with that label.The downside to Google Contacts is that you would generally need to add each contact manually.

If you have an existing list that is in Excel or another spreadsheet program, or if you’ve exported a list from another email marketing platform for example, it’s easier to convert that list to a Google Sheets document than to add each contact to Google Contacts individually.

In other words, if you already have a large, established mailing list, a mail merge from Google Sheets is best. If you’re just starting your mailing list and are building it a little at a time, Google Contacts is the better choice.If you want to send your email campaign with Google, ensure that your list has less than 500 users on it.

Gmail has a built-in send limit that caps you at 500 emails in a 24-hour period (this applies whether you’re sending to 500 recipients in one email or 500 separate emails in one day).

Based on these email-sending limits, Gmail is best for companies that have a small email list. Gmail’s free email-sending capabilities are an excellent choice for small businesses that are just getting started.

#3. Comply with local and international email regulations

To protect consumers against spam and data theft, there are certain requirements email marketers must follow. These can vary depending on where your recipients are.For example, the US has the CAN-SPAM Act, while Canada has the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation or CASL.

The European Union has the GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, which includes several guidelines that email marketers need to follow. For example, before sending someone a promotional email, you need to obtain their consent. Each of these laws is unique, but they contact requirements like:

• Receiving consent before sending emails to a new contact
• Telling recipients where you’re located
• Avoiding misleading headers and subject lines
• Provide an opt-out link for recipients who want to stop receiving your emails.

While some ESPs have built-in features to help you comply with these regulations, Gmail doesn’t. That means with a Gmail mass email. You’ll need to double-check that everyone on your email list has opted in and hasn’t unsubscribed, that you have included an opt-out link, and so on. This will take some time and work, but it’s an essential task to complete.

#4. Use a business domain name

If you send a mass email from your personal email address — one that ends with @gmail.com — there’s a greater chance that the message will be flagged as spam and never reach its recipient. Platforms like Gmail are truly meant for personal use, not marketing. So make sure your sender address incorporates a domain name.

This looks more official and boosts the chances that the message will land in your recipient’s inbox. Why is this the case?

When a recipient’s email program is trying to decide whether an email is spam, one of its tools is to check the domain name of the email address. If there have been numerous spam emails sent from a particular domain name, the email program will block other emails with that domain name as spam too. When you send from your own custom domain, you know for a fact that no one else with that domain is sending out spam.

#5. Consider segmentation and A/B testing

In email marketing, segmentation refers to separating your mailing list into different groups based on established characteristics or purposes. For example, you might segment your list into different age groups, locations, genders, and so on. This can allow you to send more relevant emails because you can tailor emails to a particular group.

Another email marketing practice you can use by breaking up contacts into groups is A/B testing. In A/B testing, you have multiple versions of an email, and you send them to randomly selected contacts so you can compare which version received more opens, more clicks, or more conversions.

Both segmentation and A/B testing are highly beneficial for email marketing, and you can do them in Gmail, but keep in mind that it isn’t as easy as it is with dedicated email marketing platforms. If you’re using Google Contacts, you can segment by giving appropriate labels to each contact. Or, if you’re using Google Sheets for a mail merge, you can have different sheets for different segments

#6. Track campaign performance

Perhaps the largest limitation or challenge to using Gmail for email marketing is the lack of out-of-the-box data tracking.

Traditional email service providers for email marketing will automatically track data like open rates, click rates, and so on. Gmail does not, although there are ways to gather data.

One option is to use read receipts. If you have a paid Google Workspace account, you can turn on read receipts so you’ll know how many recipients open your emails. Recipients can open the email and decline to send you a read receipt, though, so this data is only partially reliable.

You can also use Google Analytics to set up some data tracking features. For example, you can use Google Analytics to generate tracking links that don’t just take readers to the page they’re clicking on but also collect the click data.

#7. Use Beefree's gmail templates

Gmail has another big downfall as an ESP: its design capabilities are minimal. While Gmail does now have some layout templates, they are highly limited. Add-ons or extensions are the key ways to create beautiful HTML emails with Gmail. Luckily, with Beefree's templates for Gmail you can send professionally designed emails directly to your Gmail account, and it’s completely free.

To set up the add-on with your Gmail account, install Beefree Templates for Gmail in Google Workspace Marketplace.

After the installation process is complete, you’ll see the Beefree icon in the right-hand sidebar of your inbox. You can then open any email in your inbox and then click the Beefree icon to select a template.

Once you’ve added your images and text, send the message to your email list.

If you have a Beefree account, you can also connect integrate it with Gmail.

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Editor’s Note: This post was updated on September 2024 to ensure accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Optimite co-founders Sushant Yadav and Nishant Yadav join us for an insightful conversation on their early beginning and the challenges faced on their journey to to a successful “email production house.” 

Despite only being in business for four years, Optimite has created over 50,000 emails across 3,000 brands. For many clients, Optimite has become “a staple within their company,” allowing them to reduce costs by up to 60% while upholding the utmost quality.  

The Fiverr days 

“We started doing email template creation work during COVID. We created a really small gig on Fiverr, like $10, just to see if there was a demand. 

Even though we were techies and our background was in website design and development, we wanted to focus on a small niche where we could really stand out. Also, in those beginning days, it was important that we could just execute everything ourselves without a team, so we thought - let's do email templates.

We started offering our services at $10, then scaled to $50 a month to $100 per month until we landed at $5,000 a month. 

As we continued to grow, we started to think of scaling our services. We wanted to start custom coding emails in HTML, but with the volume we were seeing – we knew it wasn’t scalable. 

That’s when we started looking for alternatives.” 
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^{Excerpts from our conversation with Sushant Yadav.
Edited for readability and engagement.} 

The road to scale

Sushant Yadav: “We started to look for alternatives but found that there weren’t many. Beefree was one of the options alongside Stripo, but we found that their platform’s learning curve was not that easy. 

Eventually, we narrowed down Beefree as the platform on which we wanted to build our business on. 3-4 years later and here we are.” 

However, the road to Beefree didn’t come without its challenges. 

Nishant Yadav: “I remember the exact time that led us to start searching for a solution. We had spent two days figuring out how to create an email code, and Sushant came in and said, “I found this platform, and you can drag and drop.” 

That felt contradictory. It just didn’t make sense. I thought, surely, this would not work for Outlook. 

But then Sushant showed me the actual template, and once we loaded it on the platform, it worked fine. That was the moment we realized, “Okay, we found a platform, and from there onwards, we scaled it.” 

Sushant Yadav: “Since then, we have grown together with Beefree. I remember that everything was very basic in the initial days and both our company and Beefree have come far since then.

I personally have seen the platform evolve and take care of all the use cases that we require.” 
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_{Excerpts from our conversation with Nishant Yadav and Sushant Yadav.
Edited for readability and engagement.}  

Implementing Beefree

What was the moment you realized “this is the right tool for us?”

“Our template creation process in the beginning was time-consuming. Think about it, building it from scratch and customizing each section is a process.

In the same amount of time it would take us to create one email template, we realized that we could now produce 10 or 12 templates…  

Also, there is a higher chance of errors when manually coding emails. We spent a lot of time testing each template. 

In those initial days, we did thorough testing on emails designed with Beefree on Litmus and across ESPs to check how they were being rendered.

Pretty quickly we figured out that the code and rendering was fine and everything became a lot more seamless and easy to scale.” 
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^{Excerpts from our conversation with Sushant Yadav.
Edited for readability and engagement.}  

Growing pains

Having used our platform for almost four out of the 10 years we’ve been in business, Optimite is recognized as one of Beefree’s early adopters. They know our platform just as much as we do and have experienced Beefree before it was what it is today. 

Sushant Yadav: “In the early days, we thought Beefree’s code could not be run on Outlook. We approached this by manually deleting the MSO classes from the code and delivering it to the client. After 3-4 months of doing this, we started getting complaints that the code was still not rendering well on Outlook and that the client was getting a lot of CSS issues. 

We were under the impression that this was something on the Beefree side, so we used Chamaileon to help solve some of those Outlook issues.

After some time of using Beefree, we realized that the Outlook issue was our mistake—we were deleting an important part of the code! 

Once that was settled, we switched back from Chamaileon to Beefree.” 

Nishant Yadav: “Over the last four years, the platform has helped us evolve and expand what we can offer clients. When we began using the platform, Mobile Design Mode was not as robust as it is now.” 

Sushant Yadav: “Dynamic content was also not available, so we used to extract the code from Beefree and do some manual work to make it dynamic. Now, the platform has that function. 

One thing that has remained the same throughout the years is how easy it is to use. It has been an integral part of our business, and we will cherish it forever because “we were able to build a million-dollar business.”  

^{Excerpts from our conversation with Nishant Yadav and Sushant Yadav.
Edited for readability and engagement.}

Where they are today

“Today, we partner up with other email marketing agencies as an extension to their team. Our goal is to help them scale “email production with ease.”

We work behind the scenes, creating email templates for big agencies that need their emails to work across multiple platforms. Beefree makes this process easy because we can work directly in the builder and export the HTML code rather than using the ESPs' native editor. 

Personally, I’ve created over 3,000 templates in Beefree and if we combine our entire team, we’ve produced around 15,000-20,000 templates.” 

_{Excerpts from our conversation with Sushant Yadav.
Edited for readability and engagement.}

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While Optimite’s systems, processes, and services have changed over the years, we are happy that Beefree is the one constant that has allowed them to scale their operations. To learn more about Beefree’s business impact on Optimize - read their customer success story here.

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According to Gitnux’s MarketData Report 2024, 16% of all US email users use Outlook as their primary email provider, ranking Outlook among the most widely used email platforms in the country. 

With over 400 million users worldwide, the chances that your emails will land in an Outlook inbox are high if you're an email marketer. With this in mind, it’s important to acknowledge Outlook’s capabilities and limitations to build emails that render well for every recipient. 

Understanding Outlook's HTML design limitations

Despite its popularity, Outlook is primarily used for day-to-day communications between colleagues rather than mass marketing campaigns. Because of this, Outlook has a few limitations when it comes to rendering HTML emails, for instance: 
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Some of the most prominent rendering issues with Outlook Web or App include: 

• Gifs rendering with a play icon over the GIF
• Fonts not matching 
• Additional spaces in the layout 
• Icons stacking on top of one another or misaligned
• Mismatching background images 
• Misalignment across email elements 

These limitations mean that regardless of how much time is spent on creating the most engaging and on-brand email, Outlook may deliver a different outcome to recipients, affecting your email’s readability and impact.

While we recommend opting out of using Outlook as a sending platform and using a professional solution such as HubSpot and Mailchimp, we understand this is not always feasible.

Many email marketers who rely on Outlook have found creative approaches to address its rendering limitations, typically opting for either image-based emails or maximizing the impact of text-only emails. When it comes to HTML emails, while challenging, they remain a viable option for those willing to navigate Outlook’s quirks and optimize their designs accordingly.

Best practices for designing Outlook-friendly HTML email templates

You have two options for creating an HTML email template for Outlook. The first involves manually writing the HTML code with CSS and then saving the email as an Outlook template. While this approach doesn't require additional software tools, it can be time-consuming and requires CSS expertise.

Alternatively, you can use an external email design tool such as Beefree to create your HTML email template. This method is more user-friendly and efficient since it eliminates the need for CSS knowledge and manual coding.

Regardless of which option you opt for, here are some best practices to follow:

• Simplicity is key: Design simple, single-column designs. Complex layouts, while engaging, may not render correctly. 
  
  
• Use tables for the layout structure: Experiment with tables to ensure your design elements stay in their intended position, helping to tackle Outlook's misalignment issue. 

• Use inline CSS: If possible, embed inline CSS directly within your HTML elements to control formatting and layout; this will help minimize Outlook’s limited support for external and embedded stylesheets.
  
  
• Use web-safe fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, or Verdana are all safe bests when designing for Outlook.
  
  
• Alt text: Because Outlook blocks images by default, be sure to always include alt text for images to ensure accessibility but also to ensure that the lack of images doesn’t leave out important context from your emails. 

Designing HTML email templates in Outlook with Beefree

When designing HTML email templates that perform well in Outlook, leveraging the right tools can significantly simplify the process and ensure adherence to best practices.
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Beefree stands out as a versatile platform that not only facilitates creative email design but also supports the specific requirements of Outlook rendering, for instance:

• Designing for simplicity: Beefree’s drag-and-drop functionality allows for the easy creation of single-column layouts. Within Beefree, users can easily customize the alignment, spacing, height, and more of emails for mobile and desktop, ensuring a cohesive experience across multiple devices.
  
  
• Web-safe fonts: Within Beefree, you can set web-safe fonts as your default to ensure the consistent rendering of fonts across all email clients, especially Outlook.
  
  
• Alt text: This can be powered manually or via our AI integration. 
  
  
• Responsive design: While Outlook lacks robust support for responsive design, Beefree enables users to create mobile-friendly email templates through fluid layouts and scalable elements. This ensures that your emails adapt to different screen sizes and devices, enhancing user experience regardless of how recipients access their emails through Outlook.

Before finalizing your email designs, it's essential to conduct thorough testing to ensure they render correctly across different versions of Outlook. We recommend using Beefree’s preview feature to see how your emails appear in various screen sizes. We also recommend sending a test email to multiple Outlook recipients to help you identify any rendering discrepancies between Beefree and Outlook.

While we’d like to guarantee that Beefree will render emails 100% as intended,  it's important to remember that Outlook is an email client rather than a sending platform. As a result, it may ignore, remove, or alter HTML elements from our code. This can cause rendering issues that we can't resolve. Keep in mind that the more complex your design is, the more likely you are to experience rendering issues with Outlook.

Familiarize yourself with our Outlook rendering considerations: 

• Outlook App: https://support.beefree.io/hc/en-us/articles/18904867308818-Exporting-to-Outlook-App#h_01HZ0G5V4RXFPAW35S17P6KBBA 
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• Outlook Web: https://support.beefree.io/hc/en-us/articles/11964534263442-Exporting-to-Outlook-com#01H3WEHFRX79TRG6JSVW69HA0Z 

Embedding Outlook HTML email templates

Once your email is designed in Beefree following the best practices addressed above, you can easily export to Outlook Web or Outlook App.

Outlook Web
Connect Beefree to your Outlook Web account before designing or after completion.  Directly from the builder or via the Email Details page, click “Push to your sending system.” Within seconds, the email will be saved as a new template and appear in your Outlook account.

To learn more about how to complete the integration process, visit: https://support.beefree.io/hc/en-us/articles/11964534263442-Exporting-to-Outlook-com

For a step-by-step process:

Outlook Web and corporate email accounts
If you’re exporting emails designed in Beefree to your Outlook corporate business account, follow the same steps as above.

When integrating Beefree with an Outlook corporate account, you may encounter a message indicating that approval or authorization is required for the connection to succeed. To proceed, you will need to obtain the necessary approvals or modify your Outlook Web business account permissions settings to ensure a successful connection. Outlook App
The Outlook App integration with Beefree allows you to download your email designs as OFT and EMLTPL files that you can then upload into your Outlook App. To download the files, take the following steps:

1. Navigate to the email design you’d like to export.
2. Make and save any changes you’d like prior to exporting your design.
3. Select Push to your sending system.
4. Click the Outlook App connector.
5. You will be prompted to Download the Outlook App.
6. Select Download for Windows if you’d like an OFT file or Download for macOS if you’d like an EMLTPL file.

To learn more about how to complete the integration process and import HTML, watch the following video:

Or visit: https://support.beefree.io/hc/en-us/articles/11964534263442-Exporting-to-Outlook-com

Ready to start designing Outlook-friendly emails?

Whether you're navigating Outlook's rendering quirks or aiming to enhance engagement through responsive designs, Beefree is an intuitive solution that ensures your messages resonate effectively across Outlook versions and devices. 

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Start designing now - it’s free!

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The ideal email marketing software has two jobs: support your growing agencies marketing and deliver exceptional results for your clients. So, how do you know which tool is right for you?

Types of email marketing software

Email marketing encompasses a multifaceted process, involving strategic planning, creative design, content creation, list building, targeting, analysis, and more.

Different software tools cater to different facets of this process, each offering distinct features and functionalities. Broadly categorized, there are four types of email marketing software to consider:

1. Automation

Automation softwares can increase productivity by taking over of mundane and repetitive tasks involved in the email creation process. More importantly, automation solutions can help send the right emails at the right time. For example:

• Emailing a cart abandonment reminder to customers who put items in their cart but don’t buy them
• Sending a multi-email introduction campaign to customers or clients who sign up to a mailing list
• Sending product or service recommendation emails to users based on their past purchases
• Emailing a re-engagement email to clients or customers who haven’t made a purchase in a long time

2. Design and campaign creation

Email design software allows you to create effective, engaging email campaigns quickly and easily. These tools offer a user-friendly interface, often times with drag-and-drop functionalities that enable even those with limited design skills to create visually appealing emails swiftly.

Email design tools vs. email service providers

Moreover, these platforms often include features like A/B testing, dynamic content capabilities, and integration with other marketing tools, enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of email campaign creation.

An email service provider serves as the platform through which you send your emails, while an email design tool is specifically designed for creating visually appealing and professional emails. An effective email design tools should easily integrate with your ESP to ensure a seamless workflow.

3. Analytics and reporting

An email marketing analytics tool monitors and analyzes the outcomes of your email marketing initiatives, encompassing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and engagement rates. Additionally, it should report details about your audience, such as demographics and behaviour, to help you make data driven decisions on the type of content that appeals to your readers and who is the most engaged.

4. List management and segmentation

A list management and segmentation tool facilitates the efficient management, organization, and maintenance of your mailing lists. These tools empower agencies to create distinct segments based on demographics or user actions.

For instance, when promoting your agency, you can create segments for existing clients and prospects. Alternatively, you might segment based on industry, such as retail, healthcare, or B2B sectors. These segmentation capabilities streamline targeted marketing efforts and enhance campaign relevance and effectiveness.

Factors to consider when choosing email marketing software

Selecting the right email marketing software is a crucial decision for agencies. Given the vast array of options available, each offering unique features and capabilities, many agencies use multiple tools to maximize their email efforts.

Whether you're looking for an all-in-one solution or exploring different options, it is essential to carefully assess several factors to make an informed decision:

• Usability and interface: While there may be a learning curve with any new software, opting for a user-friendly interface ensures that your team can quickly adapt and efficiently create campaigns.
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• Pricing and plans: Budget considerations are paramount. Most software providers offer various plans tailored to different needs, so ensure you compare the appropriate plan options to your organization's unique needs.
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• ‍Specialization: Some email marketing tools specialize in specific industries or niches. For example, certain tools are tailored for healthcare and life sciences, while others cater to tech companies. Considering the specialization of each tool ensures that you select one aligned with your agency's industry focus and requirements.

Review of 5 email marketing software for agencies

There are countless email marketing software solutions on the market, each with its own pros and cons, so you could pour months into comparing each one. Ultimately, each agency needs to choose the right tool or combination of tools to suit their needs, but here are a few of the best email marketing software for agencies to consider.

Omnisend

Omnisend is a comprehensive email marketing platform, offering an array of features including a drag-and-drop email builder and automation capabilities. However, its standout feature lies in its robust email list management and segmentation functionalities. Omnisend simplifies the process of collecting email addresses and building lists while providing tools to segment these lists for highly targeted campaigns. Additionally, its A/B testing feature enables you to gauge the effectiveness of different designs and messages for each audience segment.

While there is a free plan to get you started, standard plans start at $16 per month and increase based on the number of contacts you’ll be managing.

Beefree

Beefree is an agnostic email design tool focused solely on delivering top-notch email design solutions. Boasting a collection of over 1,700 expertly crafted templates, Beefree emphasizes best practices while offering a user-friendly email builder and editor for customizable email and landing pages.

Beefree offers advanced functionalities such as responsive and mobile-friendly design, AI-driven content creation capabilities, and built in collaboration solutions. The platform follows a "start for free, upgrade as you grow" pricing method that makes it the perfect solution for agencies of any size.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a versatile email marketing platform that encompasses a wide range of functionalities, including list management, email design, and data tracking. However, due to its all-in-one nature, Mailchimp's advanced options within each feature category may be somewhat limited. For basic usage, Mailchimp offers a free plan and for advanced controls plans begin at $13 per month.

Learn more: Integrating Beefree with Mailchimp

Drip

If you want to take advantage of the latest in automation, Drip is a helpful tool to have in your toolbox. Drip is a robust marketing automation tool designed to streamline targeted email campaigns and multi-channel marketing initiatives. While it excels in catering to e-commerce clients, it may not be as suitable for B2B clients or internal agency marketing. Drip does have certain limitations, particularly in email design functionalities such as spam testing. However, it shines in efficiently managing substantial contact lists.

Pricing starts at $39 per month with a 14-day free trial.

Unlayer

Similarly to Beefree, Unlayer is also an email design tool with a drag-and-drop email editor. Due to its simplicity, Unlayer is a great solution for a broader audience, including marketing agencies, businesses, and individual designers. It's comprehensive set of features, include template and module organization, collaboration, and integrations with third-party apps.

Unlayer offers a free plan with basic essentials, as well as plans starting at $15 per month and $30 per month.

How to choose the right email marketing software for your agency

Now that we’ve taken a survey of the landscape and the types of email marketing software solutions available, how do you know which tools are best for your agency? Here are some key questions to ask as you’re narrowing your options:

• Can this tool manage multiple accounts effectively? As an agency, you'll likely need to handle your own email marketing as well as manage accounts for each client. Assess the tool's capabilities for managing multiple businesses or brands in an organized manner.

• Is this tool suitable for the types of clients I serve? Consider whether the email marketing tool is designed for retail, e-commerce, B2B, or specific industries. Ensure that the tools you choose align with the diverse needs of not just your agency, but your clients.
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• Does this product or plan offer support? Evaluate the available support options, such as phone support, online chat, etc., as you may require assistance with software features or technical issues. Understand the support provided with each plan to make an informed decision.
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• How scalable is this platform? Hopefully, your agency will grow to take on more clients. Anticipate future growth for your agency and assess whether the software can accommodate an increase in clients. Determine how seamless it is to upgrade to more advanced plans as your agency expands.
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• How does this tool integrate with or enhance my current workflows? Choose a platform that aligns with your desired email marketing workflow, such as easy internal or client approvals, integration with customer management software, and other related tools.

By addressing these questions, you can narrow down your selection to the top email marketing software options that best meet your agency's requirements and goals.

How Beefree helps agencies with email marketing

Selecting the appropriate solution for your growing agency is pivotal in not only enhancing the success and efficiency of your agency's email campaigns, but that of your clients.

While finding the perfect fit for each aspect of your email marketing program can be challenging, when it comes to email design, Beefree simplifies the process. Due to its agnostic nature, integrating Beefree into any sending platform is seamless and with a myriad of resources, there is minimal learning curve. Through its accessible pricing plans and enterprise-level solutions, Beefree paves the way for agencies to elevate their email marketing strategies and drive impactful results for clients.
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If you're a growing agency looking to see Beefree's full collaboration features in action, sign up for a 15-day free Business plan trial! 

Whether email marketing is a new adventure for you or you have years of experience in this excellent marketing strategy, the tools you use can make a world of difference.

The right email design tool can make the design process more efficient, more cost-effective, and more successful without the need for a background in coding or design.

Two of the top tools for email design are Beefree and Stensul. Which one is the right fit for your business? Let’s take a look at Beefree vs. Stensul.

Beefree: An overview

Beefree is a web-based email design application that’s all about making strong email creation accessible to anyone - small business owners, freelancers, marketing agencies, larger businesses, and more. Its goal is to empower any professional to harness the power of email marketing with no need for coding or design experience.

There are two ways to start designing with Beefree.

You can either start with one of Beefree’s 1,700+ templates, crafted by skilled designers for a wide range of industries and purposes, or you can use the drag-and-drop HTML email builder to design your own emails and landing pages from scratch. Both options make it easy and quick to create polished and professional emails that are fully customized for your business. These emails can be sent with any email service provider (ESP), either through a direct integration or by copying the HTML from Beefree and pasting it into your ESP.

Stensul: An overview

On the surface, Stensul is similar to Beefree. Stensul is a no-code email and landing page design platform that helps to streamline email marketing. The main difference between the two solutions is that while Beefree can be used by anyone from freelancers to enterprise business, Stensul is better suited to serve large businesses due to its structure and pricing.

Stensul is especially known for its robust support. Because its focus is on larger businesses and enterprises, it lives up to enterprise expectations with hands-on support during the onboarding process and throughout a business’s contract with Stensul. Stensul solutions prioritize collaboration,  allowing businesses to easily coordinate their email marketing across teams and tools.

Feature Comparison: Beefree vs Stensul

Since your business has its own needs and workflows, different tools will be better suited to meet your demands. Let’s take a look at Beefree and Stensul side by side to see how their key features compare.

Project capabilities

• Beefree: Emails and landing pages
• Stensul: Emails and landing pages

Is coding knowledge needed?

• Beefree: No
• Stensul: No

Collaboration capabilities?

• Beefree: Yes, built in-app
• Stensul: Yes via Integrations

Integrations:

• Beefree: Integrates with your email sending platform of choice and existing project management and communication tools using Webhooks.
• Stensul: Integrates with a variety of tools for multiple workflow aspects like email service providers and project management applications.

Setup support:

• Beefree: Enterprise level customers receive a Dedicated Success Manager. For lower tier plans, there is a wide range of public webinars, documentation, and a Beefree Academy for self-service support.
• Stensul: Customers receive a dedicated enterprise support team, but there is minimal training documentations or online resources available for self-service assistant.

Branding capabilities:

• Beefree: Extensive customization
• Stensul: Extensive customization

Templates vs. custom design:

• Beefree: Custom design and 1,700+ email and page templates.‍
• Stensul: Custom design modules only

In depth look into Beefree features.

In depth look into Stensul features.

Pricing: Beefree vs. Stensul

How do Beefree and Stensul stack up when it comes to a cost-benefit analysis? The pricing structures of the two tools are very different, so one may be a better fit for your organization than the other.

Beefree has four plan tiers:‍

• Starter: Great for occasional projects.
• Professional ($25 per month with a 15 day free trial): Best for solo creators or teams of two to three.
• Business ($134 per month with a 15 day free trial): A self-service solution for scaling organizations.
• ‍Enterprise (custom): Great for larger organization with complex email needs.

The Starter (free) tier includes many of the tool’s capabilities but in a limited capacity such as limited design storage, a limited number of exports per month, and so on. It’s an excellent way to try out the tool and see how it aligns with your workflows. The Professional, Business, and Enterprise tiers unlock more features and more capacity to allow for a more robust email marketing program. This pricing structure allows your business to easily scale operations with the peace of mind that your solution will grow alongside you.

Stensul has custom pricing for every business. To discover the pricing for your needs, you’ll need to contact the company and schedule a consultation with the team, after which you will receive a custom quote.

Essentially, Stensul has an enterprise-style pricing model that will vary based on your business size and other factors. This means that Stensul has a higher barrier to entry for small businesses and freelancers who don’t want to invest  time in a sales meeting. For enterprises, though, a custom quote from both Beefree and Stensul can allow you to compare the cost for your needs.
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User experience and support

User experience is a foundational priority for both Beefree and Stensul. After all, the purpose of these tools is to open the door to excellent email design for professionals who don’t write code or have design expertise, so both platforms are user-friendly and require minimal learning curve.

As for enabling users to get started, as mentioned previously, Beefree offers two ways to create your emails and landing pages: by designing them from scratch or choosing a templates and customizing it. Stensul, on the other hand, prioritizes custom design rather than templates which can result in a longer time to set up.

As for their customer support, each application takes a different approach. Because Stensul is an enterprise-level solutions they state that "Each of [their] customers receives a dedicated enterprise support team." They also have a Contact page for questions and inquiries.

Beefree, offers a myriad of support resources to help users find just what they need.

• Help center: Updates with the most recent feature releases.
• Community: A space for users to connect, collaborate, find design work, and get advice from other users.
• Beefree Academy: Real-world examples and tutorials to help you and your team optimize email campaigns, increase productivity, and follow email design best practices.

For Business and Professional plans, users receive access to their Beefree CX team and Enterprise plans receive a Dedicated Success Manager for onboarding, training, and success-driven best practices.

What customers say: reviews and feedback

As of April 4th, 2024 both Beefree and Stensul have a rating of 4.7/5 stars on the popular tech review site G2 with varying businesses reviewing each tools. Beefree seems to be most loved by small businesses (50 employees or less) and mid-market (51-1000 employees), while most of Stensul's review come from Enterprises (1,000+ employees).

In Beefree's G2 reviews, users rave about it's responsiveness, easy of use, and time saving features. Some users do note that they wish the platform has more platform had more organizational capabilities in its lower-tier plans.

Read more on what people think of Beefree on G2.

Stensul is enjoyed by users for it's customer support, onboarding process, and similarly to Beefree it's ease of use and integration. Users do note that Stensul can be limiting in terms of customization capabilities and its image editor.

Read more on what people think of Stensul on G2.

Making Your Choice

Beefree and Stensul are both stellar email design tools that work efficiently for their intended purposes. Choosing between Beefree vs. Stensul is a matter of your business’s size and configuration as well as which features are most important for your workflows.

For many businesses, it comes down to trying out various tools to see how they suit your needs. To get started, try Beefree for free.

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There's a multitude of factors contributing to successful email marketing, spanning from your subscriber list to segmentation, personalization, and notably, your email design. In fact, according to Hubspot, 20% of marketers witness enhanced email engagement as a result of enhancing their email design.

However, when it comes to email design, often times email builders in your ESPs can often feel limiting. To help you find the right fit, let’s compare two favorites in the field: Beefree vs Knak.

Beefree vs Knak: An in-depth comparison for digital marketers

Before we put Beefree and Knak head to head to see how they compare to meet the needs of your business, let’s get to know each of these tools.

What is Beefree?

Beefree is a web-based SaaS tool enabling email creators to design emails and landing pages without code. The application features an easy-to-use  interface and translates your design choices to HTML, assembling a responsive email that displays smoothly across all email client like Gmail, Outlook, and more. The ultimate goal of Beefree is to make efficient email design accessible to all, not just experienced coders. The drag and drop builder enables organizations including small businesses and freelancers to elevate their email marketing potential.

Knak at a glance

Like Beefree, Knak is a web-based platform that helps organizations develop professional emails and lancing pages without the need for coding or a design background. Knak’s core focus is streamlining email marketing for larger marketing teams and enterprises. Its features center around collaboration and brand control, allowing administrators to set clear limits so that emails always align with your organization's guidelines.

Feature comparison

How well an email design platform works for your business will largely depend on the features it offers. Which one has the feature lineup you need: Beefree or Knak? Let’s compare.

User interface and ease of use

Making email design easy and accessible for non-coders is the key purpose of both Beefree and Knak, so unsurprisingly, both offer an excellent ease of use. The design interfaces on both platforms are made to be intuitive and to make email design more efficient.

There are some user experience features that differ between the two platforms.

Email testing:

• Beefree: Users can test how emails will look directly in-app across different devices. You can also test how your email will render in dark mode, send tests, or scan a QR code to easily see how it will look on your mobile device.
• Knak: Offers an email testing center where users can see how emails will render across different devices and email clients.

AI capabilities:

• Beefree: In-app AI writing assistant to support copy, image ALT text, and CTAs.
• Knak: AI capabilities for email translation.

Multi-language content:

• Beefree: Beefree offers users with the ability to create emails and pages in one primary language and set additional language localizations directly in-app.
• Knak: As mentioned above, Knak's translation feature is powered by AI. Users can easily create up to 75 variants of your campaigns in different languages.

Integration capabilities?

• Beefree: Yes with a comprehensive list of integrations.
• Knak: Yes with a comprehensive list of integrations

Template design

Email templates enable professionals to quickly create and send campaigns without the need to start from scratch. Beefree's catalog is the largest in the market with over 1,700+ free email and page templates spanning across a wide range of industries, purposes, and seasons. Even if you prefer to start from scratch, the catalog is a great place to fuel your creativity.

Knak, on the other hand, takes a different approach to providing inspiration. Their Email Gallery showcases 50+ emails from different brands and categories with tips for users to implement into their campaigns. Additionally, to redeem a free template from Knak, there are some prerequisits:

1. Your company must have an annual company revenue of more than $500M

2. You must schedule a 30-minute demo with a Knak expert.

Knak takes a different approach that centers on brand consistency. This platform features an Admin Control Hub which allows administrators to limit users to only specific modules, colors, fonts, images, and customizations.

This way, especially on large teams, administrators will know that every email is on-brand because team members can’t use non-brand colors or design.

As a result, Knak relies less on pre-made templates and more on allowing administrators to create their own templates for internal use.

Customization

As mentioned previously, a downfall of many email builders, specially those in ESPs, is their rigidity. Both Beefree and Knak understand this clearly and aim to provide users with the in-depth customization capabilities.

Dynamic content capabilities?

• Beefree: Yes
• Knak: Yes

Brand control:

• Beefree: Yes with advanced style kits, reusable content blocks, and templates.
• Knak: Yes with an approved image library, custom colors and fonts, and modules and themes.

Collaboration

Collaboration features also allow both Knak and Beefree to fit smoothly into your workflows. They both allow team members to leave comments in the builder, request for approval, and apply user roles and permissions. Additionally, both solutions allow for integration with project management tools.

As part of their collaboration features, Beefree highlights the importance of organization for large teams. By offering dedicated workspaces for multi-brand businesses where you can add different brand assets, keep campaigns organized by folders, and integrate varying ESPs - Beefree understands the importance of not only seamless collaboration, but increasing productivity.

Cost-effectiveness for email marketing: Pricing structure overview

The Beefree vs Knak pricing is difficult to compare because they’re structured very differently. The pricing of each solution reflects their users. Knak is designed solely for enterprises while Beefree is designed for a wide range of organizations, freelancers, and small businesses. The cost-effectiveness of each solution will depend on your business structure.

Beefree Pricing

Beefree has four plan tiers:

• Starter: Great for occasional projects.
• Professional ($25 per month with a 15 day free trial): Best for solo creators or teams of two to three.
• Business ($134 per month with a 15 day free trial): A self-service solution for scaling organizations.
• ‍Enterprise (custom): Great for larger organization with complex email needs.

For more on Beefree's capabilities and customer reviews visit: https://www.g2.com/products/beefree-beefree/reviews

Knak Pricing

Unlike Beefree, Knak only offers customized pricing plans so you’ll need to work with a representative to find out your pricing. TrustRadius and SourceForge both report a cost of around $10,000 per year with Knak, but this will, of course, depend on your organization. Knak does offer a free trial of 5-14 days, but you must request it through a representative.

For more on Knak's capabilities and customer reviews visit: https://www.g2.com/products/knak/reviews

Building trust with email marketers

Beefree and Knak both have excellent track records of fostering customer success, ensuring security, and offering their communities with resources with premium support.

Support and client success stories

Due to their difference in users, Beefree and Knak offer different approaches to customer support. For Knak, each customer has an assigned customer support manager. Additional support is available online 7 days a week or you can find answers to FAQs via their Knowledge Base

For Beefree's Business and Professional plans, users receive access to their Beefree CX team and Enterprise plans receive a Dedicated Success Manager for onboarding, training, and success-driven best practices. Free users on the other hand rely on Beefree's Help center and their myriad of resources to help find answers to their needs.

As for client successes, both Beefree's and Knak's customers are proud to share their stories.

One of Beefree’s happy customers is Folderly, an email solutions and organization tool. Folderly had been using HubSpot but wanted more design capabilities, so they chose Beefree to integrate with HubSpot. After investing in Beefree, Folderly saw a fantastic 36% open rate - a 15% increase.

Similarly, Knak proudly serves Foursquare, a location data company formerly known as Factual. The Factual marketing team chose Knak for its smooth integration with Marketo and its email design process quickly simplified. It found that its former 1-to-2-week design process dropped to around ten minutes of work.

Resources and community

Both solutions offer a range of resources to help support and nurture their communities.

Beefree:

• Community: A space for users to connect, collaborate, find design work, and get advice from other users.
• Beefree Academy: Real-world examples and tutorials to help you and your team optimize email campaigns, increase productivity, and follow email design best practices.
• Email Design Blog & More: Go-to resource for all things email creation. From design inspiration, tips, to industry specific solutions.
• Webinars: Live and recorded sessions to learn and discover the power of Beefree's design suite.

Knak:

• Unsubscribed! Podcast: Guests join Knak to discuss marketing, technology, career, and life in general.
• Inside Marketing Blog: Written by Knak's COO, this blog helps "marketing leaders and marketing ops teams up their game."‍
• The Knak Blog: Ranges from events, email marketing news, to trend insights and more.

Security and compliance

Beefree and Knak have both done their due diligence when it comes to compliance and information security.

Both applications are SOC 2, GDPR compliant, ISO 27001 certified. In addition, Beefree is AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and an AWS Certified Solutions Architect.

The better choice for your business depends on the security certifications you prioritize.

You can learn more about Beefree's security measures here and learn more about Knak's here.

Making the right choice for your email marketing needs

Ultimately, the decision between Beefree and Knak hinges on the needs and preferences of your organization regarding your email design platform. Will you prioritize the flexibility and creativity of Beefree or opt for the structured brand uniformity provided by Knak? Selecting the right option will enable you to either kickstart or enhance your email marketing initiatives.

To learn more about Beefree, sign up for a Beefree trial.

The rise of no-code email design tools has made it astronomically easier for anyone to create professional campaigns without any knowledge of HTML or email development. 

Beefree and Stripo are among the best email design platforms in the game. But how do the two compare, and which one is a better fit for your business? Well, that depends on what you’re looking for. 

The battle of the user-friendly editors for email design

When it comes to email design, Beefree and Stripo are leading solutions enabling users, regardless of design skills, to craft engaging campaigns easily. 

Both editors are sophisticated and advanced, allowing you to drag and drop multiple content types such as images, videos, banners, forms, GIFs, and more. For more advanced users and needs, both allow adding HTML blocks for interactive elements such as countdown timers, polls, and questionnaires. 

Stripo takes this one step further by pre-building customizable gamification interactive modules. These modules allow users to easily create engaging content while Stripo generates the HTML code for any email editor (including Beefree). 

Email template designs 

Both platforms offer a wide range of templates that vary in industry, usage, and season. Beefree has slightly more templates, with a library of 1,700+ templates compared to Stripo’s 1,500+. 

It’s worth noting that Stripo only offers email templates, while Beefree’s catalog also includes landing pages. Within the Beefree catalog, you can find matching email and landing page pairings and curated collections for specific use cases and industries. 

A differentiating factor of Beefree is its Design Community. Within the template catalog, you can see who made your favorite templates and quickly source other templates from that designer. The Beefree Designer Marketplace also allows you to hire a trusted designer for all your email creation needs.  

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Beefree’s landing page builder 

Unlike Stripo, Beefree offers a landing page builder. Much like their email builder, the landing page builder allows users to design professional-looking landing pages without coding or technical expertise. 

The landing page and email builder work together seamlessly, allowing users to generate a landing page from an email with one click and vice versa. This makes creating cohesive multi-channel communications effortless. 

Users can then host landing pages within Beefree or export to their preferred sending platform. 

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Integration capabilities

Email builders are excellent tools, but they work best when seamlessly integrating with your existing tech stack. Stripo and Beefree offer a variety of ways to export your emails to your sending platform of choice, including:

• Downloading HTML
• copying and pasting HTML,
• or downloading as a PDF

However, one of the most convenient ways of exporting lies in their integrations with many of the top email service providers, such as Mailchimp, Gmail, HubSpot, and Outlook. 

As of June 7th, Stripo has integrations with over 80 ESPs, while Beefree only has 16 integrations. While the difference in numbers is drastic, this does not mean that you can only send emails from Beefree to 16 platforms. Beefree offers a “Custom Connector” option that leverages Webhooks and Zapier to send your design’s HTML to any ESP, CRM, MAP, and everything in between.

Stripo also has a similar capability. 

Artificial intelligence 

Stripo and Beefree have been early adopters of AI. Both solutions have a built-in AI assistant to optimize email copy, but they have a few differentiating features. For instance, Beefree’s AI assistant works on image ALT text and CTAs, while Stripo’s can be used for writing subject lines and preheaders. 

Pricing and plans: What you need to know

Cost is a factor for any business. Both Beefree and Stripo have a free plan with limited abilities, as well as, paid options with growing capabilities.  

Free vs. paid plans

The limitations of the free plan for both platforms vary. 

For instance, Stripo limits access to its template catalog, while Beefree offers full access for all plans. Some other limitations of Stripo’s free plan include: 

• 5 test emails per day, 
• 4 exports per month with limits on its exporting options.
• 1 user 

Even within their free plan, Stripo allows users advanced customization options, such as a Gmail promo builder that allows recipients to see the promotion's value before they open their emails.

On the other hand, Beefree’s free plan offers: 

• 6 exports per month with no limitations on integrations 
• Unlimited users
  

Given that Beefree prides itself on being a collaborative platform, even with the free plan, users get access to robust features such as design-specific commenting. 

Stripo’s paid plans are as follows: 

• Basic: $15/m
• Medium: $45/m
• Pro: $95/m

Additionally, they offer a “Prime” subscription. While there is not much information on what this option entails or its pricing, as stated on the website, it allows for “100 members, unlimited number of projects, exports, countdown timer opens, daily tests, and more.” 

Beefree’s paid plans are as follows: 

• Professional: $30/m
• Business: $160/m
• Enterprise: Custom 

Beefree follows a “start for free, upgrade as you grow” pricing structure that allows users and their teams to scale as needed. All pricing options and their features are available on their pricing page. 

In-app collaboration

Collaboration is a key factor whether you’re a team of one working with multiple clients or a team of 10 managing numerous clients and brands. 

Both Stripo and Beefree offer strong collaboration features such as user roles and permissions and distinctive workspaces, but Beefree's ability to streamline email creation for teams of all sizes surpasses Stripo's. 

As a remote-first organization, Beefree understands the importance of efficient teamwork, and this is evident in its application, which centralizes all collaboration and creation in one place.

One of Beefree's standout in-app collaboration tools is a review-for-approval workflow. Team members can easily submit designs for review, track approval status, and incorporate feedback seamlessly. 

Additionally, Beefree’s real-time co-editing and design-specific feedback capabilities collaborators to give feedback and make edits to designs simultaneously without conflicts or delays. While not yet available, Stripo does plan to release both of these features in the future. 

Moreover, Beefree enables real-time push notifications into your existing project management and communication tools using Webhooks, further helping to facilitate clear communication amongst teams. 

Beefree's existing and fully integrated collaboration tools provide a more comprehensive and immediate solution for teams seeking efficient email creation and collaboration capabilities.

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Building effective email marketing campaigns with Beefree or Stripo

Whether you choose Beefree or Stripo, there's no denying that both platforms offer robust tools and features for easily building effective email marketing campaigns. Whichever you choose will strongly depend on your needs. 

With gamification modules, a banner generator, and a Gmail promo builder, Stripo is a great solution for folks looking to create highly customizable and personalized email campaigns.

On the other hand, Beefree truly excels in collaboration and helping folks centralize all aspects of their email marketing campaigns, from organization to design to collaborating company-wide.

Luckily, both solutions offer a free plan to help you get started, so try it for yourself. Try Beefree for free, and happy designing!

For many email creators, one of the most daunting challenges is manually writing HTML code or an over-reliance on external support to create HTML emails. Although email has been around since the early 70’s and is one of the best marketing strategies to implement (due to its high ROI and cost-efficiency), email continues to be a specialized skill only acquired by some.

That’s where HTML email builders, such as Beefree, come in. These solutions serve as a saving grace for many who heavily rely on email marketing programs but don’t have the deep HTML expertise, design skills, or resources to hire external support.

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Who is Beefree for? 

Beefree is a comprehensive email builder designed for both email novices and seasoned professionals. With its intuitive interface and robust features, Beefree empowers everyone to streamline their email design processes and independently design, customize, and deploy HTML emails and landing pages. 

In short, Beefree is for everyone.

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For beginners, Beefree’s drag-and-drop functionality, complemented by our extensive learning resources and design tools, simplifies crafting full email campaigns. No intricate coding knowledge or design expertise is necessary.

For seasoned email professionals, eliminating manual HTML coding reduces errors and enhances productivity, allowing for a greater focus on refining email campaign strategies and fostering innovation. 

Lastly, for Designers who have grown accustomed to outdated and rigid solutions or juggle multiple design and development tools, Beefree’s flexibility is a breath of fresh air. Beefree’s intuitive platform allows for maximum customization of emails and pages to create innovative designs. Additionally, time-saving features such as reusable content blocks and templates help Designers save valuable time, allowing them to focus their creativity on other projects. a

Regardless of skill level, Beefree serves as a catalyst for bringing creative visions to life. Whether you're exploring basic design concepts or pushing the boundaries of innovation, Beefree provides the tools and resources needed to transform ideas into impactful email campaigns.

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The Beefree philosophy: “Start for free. Upgrade as you Grow.” 

At the heart of the Beefree philosophy lies the principle of accessibility and scalability. That is why we have prioritized making our solutions intuitive, easy to learn, and adaptable to anyone. 

Over the years, we’ve ensured that our pricing options reflect that. In 2022, we launched a Free plan. Since then, the addition of the free plan has empowered thousands of users to begin crafting visually stunning campaigns without barriers. 

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Following our transition from BEE to Beefree in late 2023, we embarked on a journey to reevaluate our pricing options to better meet the evolving needs of our valued customers.

After many ongoing conversations with you, our community, we found a gap between our offerings from “Team” to “Enterprise.” It became clear that there was a growing demand for a more comprehensive option tailored to the requirements of businesses and organizations that weren’t quite ready for enterprise-level but had outgrown solutions catered to small teams. 

Understanding our users' challenges and aspirations drove us to refine our approach and introduce enhancements that would serve businesses at every stage of their growth journey. 

Today, we’re thrilled to take another significant step as we launch the new Beefree “Business” plan.

We recognize the importance of bridging the gap between our existing plans and ensuring each tier provides you with the necessary features and capabilities to support your diverse needs. As well as, empowering businesses of all sizes to effectively maximize their email marketing and communications efforts.

Which Beefree plan is right for you? 

Here at Beefree, we've carefully crafted our plans with your needs in focus. Each plan is tailored to correspond with different stages of your journey, enabling you to scale your email marketing endeavors as your business flourishes. Each of our plan names resonates with the various phases of your creative exploration:

• The "Starter" plan: Ideal for beginners and freelancers dipping their toes into email marketing. (Previously known as the “Free” plan).
  
  
• The "Professional" plan: Tailored for small teams to create targeted campaigns and optimize strategies for better results. (Previously known as the “Team” plan).
  

• *NEW* The “Business” plan: Geared towards growing businesses and marketing professionals who need a comprehensive solution to streamline their email marketing workflows and collaboration.
  
  
• The “Enterprise” plan: Custom plan for enterprise-level businesses and organizations with extensive email marketing requirements, operations, and high volume.  

Our “start for free, upgrade as you grow” philosophy allows you to choose the option that best aligns with your current goals and budget while offering the freedom to adapt as your business evolves easily.

Starter ($0/free)

Whether you're a freelancer building your portfolio or a small business testing the waters of email marketing, the Starter plan provides all the essential tools and resources necessary to help dip your toes into the world of email marketing without feeling overwhelmed. 

The Starter plan capabilities: Up to 10 designs (emails and pages), 6 monthly exports, and unlimited users with no roles. In addition, you’ll find a wealth of resources at your fingertips to support your journey: 

• Beefree Academy: To support email beginners on their journey to email design, we offer users a free comprehensive learning guide. The Beefree Academy offers various real-world examples and tutorials to help new Beefree users get the most out of the platform and learn email design best practices and techniques.
  

• Free template catalog: Access Beefree’s catalog of pre-designed email and page templates, covering a wide range of industries, occasions, and purposes. This enables beginners to create visually appealing and engaging emails quickly and effortlessly without extensive design expertise.

• Integration with sending platforms: With the Starter plan, users can connect their Beefree account to the leading sending platforms, allowing for seamless design export. By connecting Beefree with their ESP, users can leverage the full capabilities of both tools to reach their audience effectively and maximize campaign performance.

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Join the thousands of beginners and small businesses already experiencing success with Beefree’s Starter plan.

Professional ($30/month)

Say goodbye to constraints and hello to boundless creativity with the Professional Plan. This plan serves as a dynamic catalyst, propelling small teams into the realm of advanced email marketing strategies with confidence and ease. With more robust brand controls than the Starter plan, the Professional plan allows teams to tailor their email designs to perfectly reflect their brand identity and messaging while saving time.

• Unlimited design and templates: With no limits on creativity, you have the flexibility to explore endless possibilities and bring your ideas to life with ease. Create unlimited templates and reusable content to speed up email creation.
  
  
• Expanded exporting options: Distribute email campaigns as often as you like with unlimited exporting. Share your messages via your ESP, ZIP file, or download as PDF.
  
  
• Stronger collaboration features: Share ideas, provide feedback, and iterate campaigns together effortlessly. With features like design-specific commenting, user permissions and roles, and version history, staying organized and aligned is effortless. 

• Dynamic campaigns and analytics: Take your campaigns to the next level with personalized, data-driven strategies. Personalize your emails and pages with dynamic content and track the performance of landing pages designed in Beefree with tracking codes.

Plus, everything in the Starter plan.

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Unleash your creativity, drive engagement, and achieve your business goals with confidence and flair. Start a free trial. No credit card required!

⭐️ NEW ⭐️ Business ($160/month)

If you’re a business gearing up to scale your email marketing processes and campaigns, this plan is for you. The Business plan supports growing teams to optimize their strategies, streamline their workflows, and achieve better results without the complexity of enterprise-level solutions.

With advanced features for seamless collaboration, organization, and team and brand control, the Business plan helps navigate the intricacies of modern email marketing processes. 

A glimpse of what the Business plan offers:

• Tailored environments (also known as Workspaces): Create personalized and structured areas where your teams can collaborate seamlessly on different campaigns, departments, or projects. Included: 2 free workspaces. 
• Advanced user controls: Make sure every team member can access the necessary tools and resources for their roles while also protecting sensitive data and preventing unauthorized access. Included: 2 free users + 10 view-only members.  
• Integrated approval flow: Keep communication and feedback centralized by using an in-app approval workflow, making the approval process efficient and hassle-free. Included: 4 simultaneous “review for approvals” per workspaces. 
• Increased CDN/monthly data traffic: Ensure your business has the bandwidth and flexibility to handle the growth of your email marketing efforts smoothly. Included: 1TB of monthly CDN usage, 

Plus, everything in the Professional plan.
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Ditch manual processes and disjointed workflows—unlock the full potential of your team and watch your email marketing efforts thrive with the Business plan. Start a free trial.

Enterprise (Custom) 

The Enterprise plan is the cornerstone of our offerings, designed for those requiring the utmost in functionality, support, and customization. With unparalleled functionality and customization, this plan serves as a strategic asset for businesses seeking to thrive and succeed in an ever-evolving marketplace.

Whether managing multiple brands, business units, or campaigns, the Enterprise plan provides the flexibility and scalability needed to execute sophisticated, high-volume email marketing campaigns while maintaining control and compliance. Each Enterprise plan is personalized to suit your unique goals and objectives. 

Enterprise plan highlights: 

• Custom users & workspaces: Set up and organize your teams and projects to best suit your organization's structure and objectives.
• Premium support: With priority access to support resources and expertise, you can minimize downtime, maximize productivity, and achieve your business objectives with confidence.
• Dedicated Customer Success Manager: Your customer success manager will work closely with you throughout your onboarding and training process, providing strategic advice, personalized recommendations, and proactive support to ensure your success with Beefree.
• Advanced security measures: Protect your organization's sensitive data and ensure compliance with our premium security features, such as Okta SSO. 

Plus, everything in the Business plan. 
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Interested in learning more about our Enterprise plan? Book a free demo!

Benefits of an HTML email builder 

The benefits of Beefree as your HTML email builder are multifaceted, offering a range of advantages that enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, and visual appeal of email marketing campaigns. Regardless of your chosen plan, you'll enjoy a host of benefits designed to elevate your campaigns and drive results.

• Increase brand recognition: While many ESP editors are rigid and have design constraints, Beefree allows the freedom to design emails and pages that perfectly align with your campaign’s goals, audience preferences, and brand identity. With features such as layout adjustments, mobile design mode, and dynamic elements, your emails are guaranteed to always fall within the lines of your brand guidelines. 

• Save time and money: Create professional-looking emails quickly, request feedback, and work simultaneously, reducing the turnaround time for campaign creation and deployment.
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• Guarantee a seamless experience: Reach your audience anywhere on any device. Beefree’s HTML email builder generates responsive designs that adapt seamlessly to various devices and screen sizes. By delivering a consistent and user-friendly experience across devices, you can maximize engagement and drive better results for your email campaigns.

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Now, which plan is right for you? 

If you’ve made it this far then the Beefree HTML email builder might be for you ;). Now it’s time to find the perfect plan. 

Explore our plans and pricing page where you'll find a comprehensive breakdown of all of our options and features. Whether you're a newcomer eager to kickstart your email campaigns or a seasoned professional aiming to expand your reach, we're confident that you'll find exactly what you need to achieve your goals.

Embracing our "start for free, upgrade as you grow" philosophy, we offer you the flexibility to adapt and evolve seamlessly as your business progresses. We hope your Beefree journey is filled with opportunities for creativity, collaboration, and growth. 

Happy designing! 

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