Beefree blog

Tutorial: How to Make Festive Holiday Ecards for Anyone on Your List

Beefree team
Beefree team
Dec 14, 2018
Tutorial: How to Make Festive Holiday Ecards for Anyone on Your List
Tutorial: How to Make Festive Holiday Ecards for Anyone on Your List

Wise email geeks know the holiday season isn't just about promotions and deals. It's a time to show gratitude and appreciation. That's where holiday ecards come in. Whether the message is a "thank you," a simple season's greetings, an invitation, or something else, holiday ecards are a great opportunity to share a little merriment and cheer. Today we'll show you how to build one in just a few minutes, whether you start from scratch or use a template. Speaking of templates, be sure to scroll down for our gift to you :) Let's get started!

Tips for planning the best holiday ecard

In a previous post,Holiday e-Cards for Your Clients, we established four important things to consider before sending an ecard. Here's a quick refresher.Before you begin designing your holiday ecards this year, take into account:

  • Your recipients. Will all your clients, vendors, and customers receive the same message? Consider customizing your email for different segments, or creating different holiday ecards for business sectors.
  • Your reason for sending it. Some holiday emails have a call-to-action; others don’t. Some have a note from the CEO; others offer a last-minute promotion. Before you assemble your email, consider why you’re sending it and what your objective is. Your reason will determine the message and the design.
  • Your brand identity. A holiday e-card can be one of the easiest emails you’ll send all year. But in order for the message to be effective, readers should feel that it's sincere and reflective of your brand. Use the holiday email as an opportunity to build trust and loyalty.
  • Your timing. In the past, many customer-facing holiday ecards have landed in our inbox on December 24th or 25th. Because these emails don’t usually include a CTA, many brands focus on sending a timely message (assuming most recipients celebrate Christmas) vs. being strategic about when most readers would be online and shopping. According to GoDaddy, Christmas Day might have one of the lowest email open rates of the season (but this doesn’t mean your message won’t get read later—which, in this case, is perfectly fine). Once you determine the reason for sending the email, you can choose the right date to send it.

Inspiring holiday ecard designs

Check out a sampling of holiday ecards and their respective approaches to messaging and design—

Uniqlo

Subject: To you + yours

Uniqlo holiday ecard

This email came in on Christmas day 2017 and includes a secondary call to action. Here's the animation from the image above:

holiday ecard GIF

Coyuchi

Subject: Happy holidays from the Coyuchis

Coyuchi holiday ecard for business

Like Uniqlo's email, this one from Coyuchi begins with a simple holiday message and continues with a few CTAs and offers.

Patagonia

Subject: Happy Holidays

Christmas ecard for business

No CTA in this holiday ecard from Patagonia – just footer content if you do choose to shop.

Tutorial: Design your own holiday ecard

Ready to design your own email? Here's how to do it in just a few minutes!

Step 1: Set up your email structure

In BEE Pro (access a free trial), we'll start with a blank template. Drawing inspiration from Patagonia, let's set the email up to include the following:

  • A simple logo header (image)
  • A holiday stock photo (image)
  • Header copy (text)
  • Body copy (text)

One we drag in the corresponding content blocks, our email structure looks like this:

drop your file

Step 2: Add your content

We'll drag in our logo to the first content block and type out our content in the following text blocks. For our hero image, we'll use BEE's stock image library to choose something fitting.How to access free stock photos:

  • Click Browse
  • Click Search free photos
  • Type in your search term (e.g., "holiday") and browse
find images for email marketing
  • Click Import when you've found an image you like
  • Click Insert to add the photo to your email
insert photo into email

Here's how our email is shaping up, before we format the images and text—

christmas ecard for business

Step 3: Format images

First, let's adjust our images. The logo looks like it could use some padding. Let's tap it, then use the content properties menu to add padding to the bottom edge, so there's a buffer between the logo and hero image.

add padding in email design

We'll also link the image to the BEE website.

link image in email design

For the tree image, we don't need to add padding, but we can also link it and determine how it will show up on mobile. For instance, we can opt for it to be full width on mobile:

select width in email design

From the Actions menu in the upper left, we can preview how our email will look on desktop and mobile to make sure our design decisions are coming along okay.

preview business emails before you send

So far, so good!

holiday ecard in progress

Step 4: Format text

Simply select your text box, then use the pop-up menu to change the font, size, color, treatment, and so on. For our header, we're going with a large 38px font and choosing a serif, Courier New.

format text in Christmas ecard

Our body text will be Helvetica, a sans serif, and size 18px. We selected a dark blue color for both, which is easy to read against a white background (remember contrast!).

completed holiday ecard

In just a few minutes, we have a beautiful holiday ecard.

Getting Started with Beefree: A Guide to Streamlined Email and Landing Page Creation

Whether you're designing a newsletter, promoting an event, or driving a marketing campaign, ensuring that your emails and landing pages are visually appealing, engaging, and efficient to produce is no small task. That’s where Beefree comes in.
Beefree team
Feb 26, 2025

8 Common Email Spam Triggers That Can Damage Your Sender Reputation

Whether you’re employing a lifecycle email marketing strategy or simply confirming an order, we’ve outlined the basics of how spam prevention works, why it matters, and how to avoid running afoul of some commonly used triggers.
Beefree team
Feb 14, 2025

Email strategies you’ve likely heard of but haven’t implemented yet

While email marketing has come a long way and is changing faster than ever, there’s only so much you can do within 600x1,500 pixels. However, there are no limits to where your creativity can take you. 
Kruti Shah
Feb 5, 2025

Getting Started with Beefree: A Guide to Streamlined Email and Landing Page Creation

Whether you're designing a newsletter, promoting an event, or driving a marketing campaign, ensuring that your emails and landing pages are visually appealing, engaging, and efficient to produce is no small task. That’s where Beefree comes in.
Beefree team
Beefree team
26 Feb
2025

Creating professional emails and landing pages can be challenging for businesses of all sizes. Whether you're designing a newsletter, promoting an event, or driving a marketing campaign, ensuring that your emails and landing pages are visually appealing, engaging, and efficient to produce is no small task. That’s where Beefree comes in.

Beefree is a robust tool for designing emails and landing pages with ease, offering templates, automation features, and seamless integrations. Regardless of your industry or goal, Beefree empowers you to craft high-quality communication and marketing materials quickly and effectively. By providing an intuitive and user-friendly experience, it helps businesses transform their creative ideas into polished campaigns without requiring extensive technical expertise.

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Why use Beefree for professional email campaigns?

Before we jump into the nitty-gritty of using Beefree, let's quickly go over why this tool is worth your time. There are a lot of email marketing tools out there, but Beefree stands out from the crowd for a reason. Let’s break down the unique benefits that make it an invaluable asset for anyone serious about email marketing:

Design made easy:

According to HubSpot, well-designed emails can drive open rates as high as 30%. Maybe you’re following up with leads from a recent webinar or you want to reach potential clients after a product launch. But you're finding yourself stuck because crafting professional emails and landing pages that capture attention is no easy feat.

With Beefree’s intuitive design tools and a library of over 1,700 templates tailored for various industries and purposes, you can achieve professional results without the guesswork. The wide variety of pre-designed options ensures that you can find a solution that aligns perfectly consistent with your brand.

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Time-saving features:

Speed is key, especially if you’re running time-sensitive campaigns. Beefree simplifies the design process with reusable content blocks, real-time collaboration tools, and the ability to transform emails into landing pages with a single click. These features enable you to produce high-quality materials in less time, allowing you to focus on strategy and content rather than struggling with technicalities.

According to a Beefree report, 82% of users report faster email creation. The ability to save and sync reusable content blocks means you can replicate what’s working without reinventing the wheel each time. Once you find a winning format, you can use it again and again with minor tweaks to fit the audience or campaign.

Maybe you’re following up with leads from a recent webinar or you want to reach potential clients after a product launch. With Beefree’s templates, you can get those messages out quickly and make sure your brand stays top-of-mind for your audience.
Using email cadence software like QuickMail ensures that outreach campaigns maintain a structured and effective flow, preventing overwhelming inboxes while keeping engagement high.

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Increased engagement:

A significant 64% of Beefree users report an 11% or more increase in click-through rates after using the platform. By enhancing the visual appeal and personalization of your emails, Beefree helps you achieve better engagement with your audience. The ability to test and iterate your designs ensures continuous improvement in performance.

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Getting started with Beefree templates

Alright, now that you know why Beefree is so powerful, let’s talk about how you can get started with their massive library of templates. This section will walk you through choosing and customizing a template that works for you.

1. Choose your template

The first thing you want to do is pick a template. Beefree’s catalog has templates for just about every sector—whether you're in retail, healthcare, SaaS, you name it. With a variety of options, you can find something that suits your goals perfectly, whether for a simple newsletter or detailed marketing report templates. Say you're promoting a webinar—just pick a template that’s built to highlight your CTAs, and you're off to the races.

The best part? You’re not starting from scratch. You save hours by picking a pre-designed template, and then it’s just a matter of customizing it to fit your brand. Beefree's templates are super flexible—add or remove elements, change colors, switch up the fonts, rearrange layouts—make each email uniquely yours without the hassle. This flexibility is especially beneficial for maintaining a low code architecture in website design.

2. Personalize

Consistency is key to building trust, and when your emails have a cohesive look, it helps recipients recognize your brand. It is also important to follow a brand style guide for your email campaigns so that the audiences can associate elements like your logo, colors, and fonts easily with your brand.

When using a template, customization is key to making your emails and landing pages feel unique and relevant. With Beefree’s drag-and-drop editor, you can easily tweak templates to align with your branding. Adjust colors, fonts, and layouts, or add personalized content such as recipient names and company details. The flexibility ensures that your final output is as distinctive as your brand’s voice.

Plus, with so many people opening emails or landing pages on mobile devices, Beefree’s mobile design builder guarantees that they look great no matter what device they’re on. When your emails look good, people trust your brand more, and that makes them more likely to click through and take action.

Personalization isn’t just a nice touch; it’s essential for engagement. According to Campaign Monitor, personalized subject lines can increase open rates by 26%. By tailoring your designs to speak directly to your audience, you can create a more impactful experience. Furthermore, the platform’s collaborative features allow team members to provide input and make edits in real-time, enhancing efficiency and creativity.

1. Export

So, you’ve picked and customized your template—now it’s time to send those emails.

One of the coolest things about Beefree is that it plays nice with just about every major email platform out there—Mailchimp, HubSpot, Outlook, Quickmail—you name it. This means you can create a killer email in Beefree, connect it to your favorite email platform, and schedule it all from one place. For more advanced needs, many businesses choose a CRM with email integration, to seamlessly combine customer management and automated outreach.

Start designing for free

Beefree simplifies the process of creating visually appealing, professional emails and landing pages, saving you time and boosting engagement. Whether you’re looking to streamline your workflow or enhance your marketing efforts, Beefree offers the tools and flexibility to meet your needs.

The best part? You’ll save time and see increased engagement, connecting with your audience in a meaningful way. In a world where everyone’s fighting for inbox space, Beefree helps you stay ahead of the game by simplifying the process while delivering professional results. So, why wait? Dive into Beefree today and see how it can transform your email campaigns.

8 Common Email Spam Triggers That Can Damage Your Sender Reputation

Whether you’re employing a lifecycle email marketing strategy or simply confirming an order, we’ve outlined the basics of how spam prevention works, why it matters, and how to avoid running afoul of some commonly used triggers.
Beefree team
Beefree team
14 Feb
2025

In 2024, roughly 361.6 billion emails were sent per day. Whether you're using email for business or to keep in contact with your long distance cousin (do people still do this?), it’s easy to picture just how clogged someone's email can get. That's where modern day Email Service Providers (ESPs) come to save the day with trigger-based spam filtration tools.

For user these spam filters help ensure a smooth email experience, free of spammy and fishy emails. However, as email marketers, these filters lead us to be overly cautious out of fear that our emails are not accidentally filtered out.

Whether you’re employing a lifecycle email marketing strategy or simply confirming an order, we’ve outlined the basics of how spam prevention works, why it matters, and how to avoid running afoul of some commonly used triggers.

Why you need to avoid email spam triggers

Whether you’re an ESG reporting software or a travel company email spam triggers can email marketing performance and in turn hurt your business. For one, there’s the obvious reason that if your emails get sent to the spam folder, they probably won’t be seen. That's time and effort wasted.

Beyond that, being sent to the spam folder too many times delegitimizes your email marketing, which damages what’s known as your sender reputation. When just starting out, this reputation is effectively neutral. But if it gets too low, it could damage your marketing performance and even result in being blocklisted.

How email spam filtering works

As mentioned above, spam filters are implemented as a form of quality assurance and protection for end-users. Here's how ESPs determine content to be spam:

  • Sender reputation analysis: ESPs check sender reputation based on authentication, user complaints, bounce rates and sending patterns. They’ll also check the reputations of your IP address and web domain.

  • Content analysis: Content filtering uses triggers like keywords, formatting and error detection to distinguish spam from legitimate email marketing.

  • Blacklists: Along with sender reputation metrics, ESPs also cross-reference email senders against any of several blacklist databases. Being on even one of these means you’ll struggle to climb out of the spam folder at all.

8 common email spam triggers and how to avoid them

Now let's get to the good stuff. Prevention is generally the best strategy when it comes to avoiding email spam triggers. Here are seven factors commonly used by ESPs to filter spam emails, and the simplest solutions for dealing with them.

1. Lack of authentication

Missing authentication is one of the first red flags an ESP will pick up on. Authentication shows you’ve taken certain steps to establish legitimacy. It’s also used to prevent fraudsters from impersonating your brand online. There are three commonly used forms of email authentication:

  • Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This means publishing a list of mail servers and IPs with permission to send messages using your domain. This is one reason it’s important to conduct email marketing through a branded business email, rather than a personal account.

  • Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM): A cryptographic signature which shows a message’s original content has not been altered during sending. Think of it like the tamper-proof seal on a bottle of milk.

  • Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC): A way for you to establish how you want receiving platforms to handle authentication failures related to your domain.

2. Shady linking practices

Link placement and presentation play an important role in email marketing. Aside from engaging recipients and securing click-throughs, using links appropriately helps avoid your emails looking like spam.

Questionable linking practices include:

  • Links to domains with poor reputations
  • Excessive numbers of in-email links
  • Compressed, modified or obscured links, particularly when generic link shorteners are used

Only link to your own authenticated domain. Also, use an unlimited bandwidth VPS to help ensure your website access speed is always stable and fast. This will give visitors the assurance that your site is legitimate.

Don’t forget to make the purpose of any in-email link absolutely clear.  

3. Content

Although the reason for an email landing in a spam folder is often related to authentication, reputation, or poor formatting, content can at times be the culprit. Here are elements that you should look at if you suspect that your content is why your emails are not reaching their recipients:

  • Typos
  • Irrelevant content that doesn’t foster positive engagement
  • Poorly translated text
  • Partner content with poor reputation
  • Possibly offensive content
  • URLs or images with poor reputation

Another thing to note is language detection filters. Various words, phrases and tone choices have strong associations with scam emails. This includes certain buzzwords, vague or exaggerated claims, or excessive sales jargon. However, this is only really an issue when you already have a bad reputation.

Nevertheless, let’s say you’re beginning to build your reputation back up and are conducting Black Friday email marketing. While it’s important to use engaging language and strong CTAs, you should avoid terms like:

  • Limited time only
  • 100% free
  • Make money from home
  • Avoid bankruptcy
  • You have won

4. Bounce rates

A ‘bounce’ is when an email doesn’t arrive in the recipient’s inbox. This could be due to it being sent to a fake email address, an out-of-date email that is no longer in use, a full inbox, etc.

When a sender frequently experiences high bounce rates for their emails, this damages their reputation with ESPs.

But how do you improve bounce rates and, therefore, your reputation? The best way is to have good segmentation practices to ensure the right content goes out to the right people. You should also keep your list clean by regularly evaluating it and removing hard-bounce email addresses as well as inactive subscribers.

Moreover, ensure you send relevant messages that your audience actually wants to receive. Of course, always be mindful of the rest of the triggers on this list to make sure you’re protecting your sender reputation.

5. Misleading email subjects

Even if you’re not trying to do anything malicious, misleading subject lines can trigger email spam filters. For example, an email might claim to promote educational B2B content about internal audit controls. Then, instead, link the user to a landing page to sell them a product.

Always set clear topic sentences as email subject lines. Try to summarize the content and intent of the email. If you’re sending a welcome email for customer retention or promoting, say, a product or sale, make it obvious before the recipient clicks on it.

6. Poorly written and formatted emails

Poor formatting and low-quality writing are other important email spam triggers. Common writing triggers include:

  • Overly vague language lacking personal detail
  • Typos and spelling errors
  • Being too brief

A marketing email can trigger spam filters if it lacks formatting of any kind, or if there are inconsistencies. It’s also suspicious when marketing emails lack branded color schemes, imagery or the correct logo design.
Avoiding these email triggers is simply a matter of emphasizing professional communication standards in email marketing.

7. Poor engagement

Low engagement manifests itself through a lack of interaction with your emails from the recipients—low open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, as well as low subscriber count are all indications. 

Consistently low engagement will likely result in your emails being filtered into spam. To combat this, you should strive to deliver good and captivating content tailored to your audience. More specifically, you can:

  • Use segmentation to personalize your emails and craft the most compelling content for each segment.
  • Put together attractive subject lines
  • Make use of solid and clear CTAs

8. Getting blacklisted

Improving your sender reputation, also means you don’t run the risk of being blacklisted. Blacklists are a useful prevention tool, but if you end up on one of these lists, your email marketing is more or less guaranteed to end up in spam folders.

Aim for prevention with email security and compliance training, and don’t send unsolicited marketing emails. You can also use a blacklist checking tool to make sure your sender emails haven’t been compromised.

Maintaining your sender reputation is essential

Email spam triggers aren’t all bad, they ensure that your well crafted messages aren’t drowned out and that users are able to easily see the emails they’re interested in. 

To reap these benefits, you need to keep an eye on these triggers and protect your sender reputation. Don’t worry, though. It’s easy to deliver marketing copy that avoids email spam triggers once you know what they’re looking for.

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