Email Icons: Our Guide to Brand Inspiration and Best Practices

2024 was a banner year for email markers everywhere. From sleek newsletters to interactive promos, you flexed your creative muscle to new heights and did it with a level of speed and efficiency that made crafting award-worthy emails look easy. 

At Beefree, we’ve had a front-row seat to all the incredible ways you scaled your email production. With templates that sped up creation and workflows that brought your team closer, you’ve redefined what it means to create emails that inspire and deliver.

Let’s dive into the numbers, trends, and stories that made this year unforgettable for email makers like you. 

Total number of emails created: 1,648,180

That’s right—over 1.6 million emails were crafted using Beefree this year, each one a testament to your creativity and efficiency. Everyone from small startups to large enterprises, and teams across the globe harnessed the power of Beefree.

The templates that powered your success

Out of the 1.6 million emails created this year, 178,199 started with a little help from our template catalog.

Our most loved categories included:

• ‍‍‍Templates for Gmail & Mailchimp: Whether you were crafting a campaign or a one-off blast, these platform agnostic templates made it easy to integrate design and delivery effortlessly.‍
• Password-reset emails: You proved that even the most utilitarian messages deserve to be noticed.
• ‍Notification email templates: From order confirmations to system alerts, these templates kept your communications clear, concise, and on-brand.

These favorites highlight a vital truth: even the simplest communications can leave a lasting impression. Templates have become your secret weapon, allowing you to hit the ground running, save time, and focus on the creative flair that makes your emails stand out.

Total time saved per week: 2 hours

Time is money, and in 2024, Beefree users saved big. On average, 59% of users shaved off at least 2 hours per week on email creation, giving them more time to focus on strategy, creativity, and all the other things that make their emails shine. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

An impressive 81% of users reported being able to design emails at least 3x faster since implementing Beefree. What used to take hours now takes mere minutes with pre-designed templates and built-in collaboration tools. 

More time saved = more time to design

By cutting down on the nitty-gritty of email production, like formatting, coding, and repetitive edits, Beefree gave you the freedom to focus on what truly matters: design. 

With more time on your hands, you experimented with bold new layouts, fine-tuned your visual storytelling, and perfected those interactive elements that kept your audience engaged.

84% of Beefree users saw an increase in design quality after implementing our tool and 84% have increased on-brand email creation by 50% or more. 

Think about it: The less time on production meant more time to think creatively and innovate.

New height reached 

With more time on your hands and even more accessible design solutions, 2024 became the year you pushed boundaries and achieved more than ever before. And as your email production scaled, so did your ambitions. 

This surge in productivity and creativity signaled that you were ready for the next step—a plan that could grow alongside you and offer even more tailored support for your evolving needs. Recognizing this, we launched our Business Plan in May, designed specifically to meet you where you’re at. 

This plan was crafted to offer the advanced features and scalability that busy teams need, like enhanced collaboration tools and more customization options. 

Is the Beefree HTML Email Builder Right for You? >

After upgrading to a paid plan, 41% of Beefree users saw an ROI in just under a month! 58% report that Beefree has been a KEY part of scaling their email programs. 

Beautiful design matters 

A well-crafted email design does more than look good; it communicates your brand’s personality, values, and message in a way that’s instantly recognizable and engaging. It draws the reader in, guides their eyes through the content seamlessly, and encourages action, whether it’s clicking through to a website, signing up for an event, or making a purchase.

In 2024, you embraced the power of beautiful design like never before, and you were rewarded for it. Beefree users increased their CTR by an average of 25%.

The marketing ROI on the one email alone was immeasurable. Open rates increased by over 20%, engagement rates by 31%, and best of all, the subscribers fell under a healthy .1%. All are driven by the creative firepower of Beefree. 

Aimee Meester, Founder and CEO, Madison Taylor Marketing 
Read the case study

In a digital landscape where first impressions are everything, beautiful design isn’t just nice to have—it’s a necessity. And with Beefree, creating visually appealing emails has never been easier, empowering you to continue delivering designs that captivate and convert.

We can’t wait to see what you create next.

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. 

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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. 

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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! 

Universities are like small cities. They are made up of dozens (sometimes hundreds) of departments, schools, and initiatives. Each of them has their own goals, audiences, and communication needs. While this decentralized structure is great for creativity and independence, it often leads universities to struggle to balance the creation of on-brand newsletters with data security. One always has to give, and it’s not the latter. 

So, how do you give all these teams the freedom to create without compromising brand integrity and data safekeeping? Well, the right tools and a little strategy can make all the difference.

In a recent conversation with Rice University’s Owl Business Analyst, Sonja Fulbright, we revealed all the challenges that led the university to lean on Beefree—not only to bring their decentralized teams together in one platform but also to increase the speed and quality of the university’s emails. 

What are the challenges universities face in email creation? 

As mentioned above, universities thrive on independence. Each department has unique needs, whether it’s rallying support for the latest research initiative or getting fans hyped about SEC football rankings. While this setup fuels creativity, it also brings some serious challenges:

• Off-brand emails: A well-meaning department might throw together something that doesn’t quite hit the mark.
• Inefficiency: Teams spend hours wrangling email tools that just don’t cut it.
• Data risks: Sensitive info gets passed around in ways that make everyone nervous.

In an effort to tackle some of these challenges and unify teams, Rice University chose to integrate the Blackbaud CRM. However, for Sonja Fulbright and her team, this meant folks felt less empowered to design on their own. The accompanying Blackbaud Internet Solutions (BBIS) platform, used for managing emails and landing pages, was so complex that different schools and departments became heavily reliant on Sonja’s team for design support and sending. Sonja shares:

"Building emails in BBIS was like coding an entire website from scratch—it was a nightmare. 

Although we could create decent emails in BBIS, they were all built-in tables, which required someone skilled in HTML. When something went wrong, we had to dig through code to fix random formatting issues.”

It’s no wonder Universities sometimes feel stuck trying to stay on brand. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Overcoming the challenges with Beefree

Decentralized teams doesn’t have to mean off-brand communications and bringing everyone in one place, and finding new solutions that don’t impact data security doesn’t have to be complex. For Rice University:

“Adopting Beefree was incredibly easy… We were able to get started right away.”

With Beefree, every department gets the tools they need to create standout emails without compromising the university’s brand or security – here’s how:  

#1: On-brand communication becomes a non-negotiable 

Your university’s brand is more than just colors and logos. It’s your identity. It’s how people recognize you, trust you, and connect with your mission.

When branding is inconsistent, it can cause confusion—or worse, make your school seem less credible. In many universities, the people creating and sending emails are not marketers or designers, just regular folks who have a message to get across.

Sonja states, “We're not the public affairs department. We're not the keepers of our University's brand, but we are trying to be good campus partners and encourage the use of Branding standards.

The best part about Beefree is being able to lock down assets like logos, colors, and fonts and say, ‘Here’s everything you need to follow the university’s brand guidelines—go forth and build emails.’”

#2: Designing is faster than ever 

Sonja Fulbright from Rice University shared she “spent six hours trying to create one email template, and it still wasn’t finished.” 

This is a relatable challenge for many Higher Education teams juggling tight schedules. Time spent trying to figure out complex solutions is time taken away from what really matters, like connecting with their alumni, donors, and engaging their student body.

Sonja adds, “Even though it was not technically my job description, I got sucked up into building templates for people in that platform, and I was like, there has got to be an easier way to do this.”

Luckily, there was. In six hours, Sonja created 8 newsletter templates in Beefree, and designing an email went from a 48-hour affair to only 45 minutes. 

A standout time-saving feature for Sonja and other universities is the ability to save and sync reusable content blocks.

“The ability to save rows made a huge difference for us. We used building blocks like standard footers and headers to quickly assemble emails in various ways. It’s definitely made everyone’s job a lot easier.”

Additionally, our integrations have made designing for all sending platforms a breeze. Sonja shares, “Outlook is the ruiner of all things visual; it is at the absolute worst, so the fact that I can paste code from Beefree and it renders like 99% correctly in Outlook is huge.”

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#3: Empowering everyone to create 

Many professionals in the Higher Education space struggle to bring their creative visions to life, often tied down to complex or limiting tools. For Rice University, this was no different. Remember the template referenced above that took Sonja six hours to make? Sonja shares the full story: Our Architecture School came on board and wanted us to build out templates in our old platform. I thought it was no big deal.

They had a designer share with me the most detailed markup I have ever seen in my entire life, with pixel dimensions and all of that. I knew that it'd be like coding a whole website from scratch kind of thing.” 

Whether you’re creating templates for your student body or engaging donors, your designs should make an impact. Beefree’s solutions are loved by universities because they empower anyone – regardless of skill level to design with ease. 

With a template catalog of over 1,700+ email and landing page templates and dozens of free guided courses and tutorials in our Beefree Academy, we have everything you need to get started. Sonja shares:

"Beefree has been a key tool in making it easier to get people on board. The [enterprise plan] lets us extend access to people using our database for email campaigns. At the same time, departments can set up their own [workspaces], and we can collaborate easily.”

#4 Data security is top of mind

If there’s one thing universities juggle as much as emails, it’s sensitive data—donor lists, alumni records, student info. The last thing you want is for that data to get mishandled in the shuffle of creating and sharing emails. That’s why many universities opt for Beefree. Beefree integrates seamlessly with your CRM, keeping all that valuable info exactly where it belongs.

As Sonja Fulbright from Rice University puts it:

“The fact that Beefree doesn’t store any of our data made adoption easy. Everything stays within our CRM.” 

The big picture: Empowered teams, consistent branding, zero hassle

Successful university communication comes down to balance. Departments need space to create and connect with their audiences. But that creativity doesn’t have to come at the cost of branding, security, or efficiency.

Beefree can bring it all together by providing a centralized university email tool that can help universities go from overwhelmed to organized and from inconsistent to cohesive.

The Senior Web Content Specialist at Rice University shares:

‍“Beefree is the best email designer I've ever used. It gives me the ability to take a design from a print piece and customize it for the best viewer experience in an email format." 

Ready to simplify your email marketing efforts? Join hundreds of university teams like Rice University in transforming their email workflows with Beefree. Sign up now -- it's free!