A few weeks back, we kicked off the first-ever 2024 Really Good Email Awards (cue the confetti). The “award show” was paired with downloadable resources sharing the ins and outs of what made these emails winners. Today, we’re taking it one step further and sharing how you can build award-winning emails in Beefree.
But first, what is an award-winning email?
Winning emails like Miro’s welcome series and the AllTrails x Calm collab didn’t just meet expectations—they redefined them. Besides being the most loved by the RGE community, the winning emails beautifully balanced creativity, trends, and best practices. They gave us insight into the future of email design and how to break the rules intentionally.
While each email was different in its own unique way, we noticed a consistent pattern in them all: On-brand, but never boring. Let’s take the emails by Sundays as a really good example of staying on brand. Everything from their Black Friday emails to their order confirmation emails follows the same brand guidelines, ensuring a cohesive experience at every touchpoint.
This realization was validating! As marketers, we know how important presenting a cohesive experience is for brand recognition, awareness, and loyalty. But as passionate designers, we're always looking at the next cool design trend. This pattern of "on-brand, yet never boring" pushes us to explore new and creative ways to showcase our branding and spread our message.
Designing on-brand, never-boring emails with Beefree
Beefree makes balancing creativity with your brand guidelines seamless. Its combination of brand management, productivity solutions, and a no-code drag-and-drop editor enables everyone to create beautiful designs that inspire people to action and drive results.
Step 1: Set your brand guidelines
Your brand, your rules. Lock in colors, fonts, and logos so your emails look like you —even if Greg from accounting gets a little too creative with the copy.
There are several ways to set your brand guidelines in Beefree, but our favorite is to use our “Get Brand Styles” feature, which can be accessed in your workspace’s style settings.
Once you’re in your settings, click on “Get brand styles” and input your website’s URL. From there, Beefree will retrieve your brand’s colors, fonts, and social links. You can learn more about this feature here.
Once you import your brand’s essentials, you can continue to add brand elements. You can get as granular as you’d like. From a predefined width for emails and pages, to the appearance of your CTAs.
With our Advanced Style Kit, you can even set predefined background colors, set the appearance of lists, and tables.
Once you add your style settings, every email your team creates with Beefree will have the same brand colors, icons, links, fonts, and whatever else you decide to assign. Now, let’s say you want to take things one step further.
Step 2: Create re-usable content blocks
Beverage brand and winner of our Endless Cheer Award, “Athletic Brewing,” is a great example that following a template doesn’t have to be restrictive.
All of their holiday templates follow a similar layout: A hero section with a standout image, a large title, body text, and a CTA followed by a similar content block below.
Beefree’s Saved and Synced Rows are an easy way to build out templated layouts for your emails. Most users turn frequently used content blocks, such as headers or footers, into Saved Rows so they can easily use them in other designs. You can also save rows as “Synced” when you want to apply any changes made to a row to all of your other email templates.
You can find all of your Saved and Synced Rows in the builder's Rows tab by selecting “My Saved Rows.”
Templates and re-usable content blocks aren’t just made to help you speed up creation time; they’re about allowing you and your team more time to be creative. The less time you spend worrying about what layout to create, the more time you can spend coming up with clever messaging or taking high-quality product shots.
Let’s get to the fun stuff.
Step 3: Bring your visions to life
In our downloadable resource, we shared the characteristics of each email that made it stand out. We highlighted key elements such as persuasive copy, value-driven content, actionable CTA’s, interesting layouts, and so much more.
We could spend hours sharing tips and tricks to emulate the award-winning characteristics of an email, but for now, we’ll share some of Beefree’s features that can help take your emails from “meh” to “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Display conditions
Why settle for one-size-fits-all when you can design emails that feel like a direct DM to each recipient? Beefree’s Display Conditions feature allows you to pick a condition (or write one from scratch if you are technically savvy), apply it to a row, and thus show different content based on the recipient.
We can see a great example of how Display Conditions could be used in Rael’s award-winning email below:
The “Hook, Line, and Sinker” Awards goes to Rael for its charming abandoned cart email that feels like a warm reminder rather than a hard sell. Instead of just pushing one product, the thoughtfully curated product suggestions make it easy to explore complementary items.
Interactivity
Throughout all winning emails, we saw brands bring their message to life with movement. Whether they used videos, gifs, icons, or crafted visually interesting layouts – making their emails interactive was crucial in getting our attention.
With Beefree, you can turn your designs into playgrounds. Easily add videos, GIFs, countdown timers, surveys, hover effects, and more. To see what’s possible, we recommend browsing through our template catalog!
Mobile design mode
Part of crafting a truly on-brand experience is ensuring that your brand looks good anywhere. Beefree takes responsiveness and dynamic design to the next level by allowing you to create custom mobile experiences. With Mode Design Mode you can re-arrange, re-size, and remove elements for smaller screens.
Step 4: Let AI take care of the little things
Creating award-winning emails takes vision, creativity, and time. But let’s be honest—sometimes, the little tasks, like tweaking ALT text or sourcing the perfect image, can slow you down.
With Beefree’s AI-powered solutions, you can let your eager intern handle the busy work while you focus on making your emails unforgettable.
AI Image Generator
Struggling to find the perfect image? Beefree’s AI Image Generator lets you create custom visuals that enhance your email’s message. Just add an image block to your email and in the Content Properties panel on the right, click “Create with AI,” then fill out the details. For additional prompt suggestions visit this support page.
Alt Text Generator
For us, alt text isn’t just a best practice—it’s essential for creating accessible emails. But crafting the perfect descriptions for every image can feel like a chore.
Beefree’s AI ALT Text Generator takes care of it for you, automatically generating accurate and descriptive ALT text for your images, gifs, icons, and stickers.
AI Copy Assistant
When Greg from accounting gets a bit of writer’s block or when you need a little help writing a catchy CTA, AI is here to help generate bold and fresh ideas.
Ready to start designing?
A really good email involves a balance of best practices and bold moves. The winning emails didn’t just make an impact; they set the standard for what’s possible in email marketing. Now, it’s your turn to take the lessons, insights, and inspiration from these campaigns and channel them into your next great idea. Start designing with Beefree for free!
If you’re looking for even more inspiration or tactical takeaways, don’t forget to download the deck or watch the Award ceremony replay!
