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Higher Ed institutions rely on Slate CRM to power communications across the entire student journey, from recruitment and admissions to alumni engagement. Slate is powerful and highly customizable, especially for data and workflow management. But when it comes to creating high-quality emails, many teams hit a wall. What should be a quick communication often turns into a time-consuming, code-heavy task that delays outreach and complicates collaboration.
That’s where Beefree comes in.
Beefree gives you the creative freedom to design accessible, mobile-optimized, on-brand emails quickly, without requiring coding skills. Then you can easily bring that content into Slate with just a simple copy and paste. It’s the perfect combination: design freedom in Beefree + powerful CRM capabilities in Slate.
Let’s walk through how it works and why Higher Ed teams love the pairing.
What is Beefree?
Beefree is a web-based app that empowers Higher Ed teams to design polished, on-brand emails and landing pages quickly and confidently right from the browser, without any coding experience.
With an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder at its core, Beefree includes customizable templates, reusable content blocks, brand style controls, and mobile responsiveness built in. Designed for teams without dedicated design or development resources, it helps institutions streamline their workflows and elevate the look and feel of every email.
Why use Beefree with Slate?
Slate is a robust CRM platform designed to centralize data and communications workflows. But its native email editor often requires coding knowledge, which can create a bottleneck for teams that want to design high-quality emails efficiently.
For many Higher Ed professionals, Slate also lacks a flexible content creation environment. This becomes especially important in university settings where multiple departments need to send communications with different goals but a unified brand. This leads to common challenges like:
- Siloed content development
- Inconsistent branding
- Duplicated efforts across teams
Beefree solves this by providing a shared, centralized email design workspace that gives every team—from admissions to alumni relations—the tools to create high-quality, branded content that’s easy to review, reuse, and adapt across use cases.
Key benefits of using Beefree with Slate:
- Design freely. Use intuitive drag-and-drop blocks to build modern, custom, and on-brand layouts—no coding required.
- Save time. Reuse templates and branded content blocks across departments and campaigns.
- Improve mobile performance and accessibility. Every Beefree design is mobile-optimized and built to follow accessibility standards, without any extra effort or coding.
- Collaborate in one central workspace. Beefree gives teams across departments a shared environment to create emails that align with institutional branding, reducing silos, streamlining workflows, and avoiding duplicative effort.
Once your email is ready, it’s just a matter of copying and pasting your HTML into Slate.
What makes Beefree different from other email builders?
What sets Beefree apart from typical CRM email builders, like the one in Slate, is its focus on both non-technical usability and institutional consistency. Here’s why Higher Ed teams choose it:
- No coding required. Beefree’s intuitive drag-and-drop builder empowers anyone to create polished emails, regardless of technical background.
- Built-in accessibility. Every design is mobile-optimized and follows accessibility best practices by default, so your communications reach everyone.
- On-brand customization. Create templates and reusable content blocks that reflect your institution’s visual identity, and apply them consistently across departments.
- Centralized collaboration. Give distributed teams shared, easy-to-use workspaces where they can create content independently while staying aligned on brand.
- Flexible with your process. Beefree integrates into your existing content review and approval workflows. Export clean HTML and bring it directly into Slate without disrupting how your team works.
Bonus: Native integration with Canva
Need to include graphics or event flyers? Beefree’s Canva integration makes it easy to import already-designed visuals directly into your email.
Whether you're working with event banners, personalized graphics, or department-specific visuals, you can quickly add them to your message without leaving the editor, no downloads or reuploads needed.
How to bring Beefree emails into Slate
It’s simple! Here's how to use Beefree and Slate together:
- Design your email in Beefree: Start from scratch or use one of our professionally designed templates.
- Copy the HTML: When you’re ready, use the Export feature to grab the HTML.
- Paste it into Slate: In Slate, create a new mailing and paste the HTML into the source editor.
- Preview and send: Your email is now ready to go, with your brand and design fully intact.
Pro tip: Finalize your layout in Beefree to minimize formatting issues in Slate.
Need a visual walkthrough? We’ll be adding a step-by-step video guide soon!
Trusted by Higher Ed institutions of all sizes
Beefree gives different departments the flexibility to manage their own communications needs. These institutions often use different CRMs and communication systems, but they all chose Beefree to:
- Promote admissions events
- Send newsletters to prospective students, alumni, or donors
- Support fundraising and annual giving campaigns
- Communicate with faculty and staff
- Share campus-wide announcements and updates
- Highlight student stories or program spotlights
- Send post-event follow-ups or surveys
- Launch onboarding and orientation campaigns
University of Denver
At the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, the communications team uses Regroup for sending, but needed more design flexibility and mobile optimization than the platform could offer. With Beefree, they now create custom-branded, mobile-ready emails quickly and confidently. Beefree’s HTML export made it easy to plug into their existing Regroup workflow, improving the email experience without adding complexity.
“I knew what I wanted my templates to look like, and I knew that I could build it if I found the right tool. Beefree has done what I needed it to do—and it does it in an easy way.”
— Nathan Willers, Director of Communications
Read the case study
From brand styling to mobile optimization, Beefree gave the university everything it needed to build modern, engaging campaigns while staying within budget and avoiding costly rework.
Rice University
At Rice, the team supporting development and alumni relations faced major bottlenecks using their CRM's email tool, which required HTML and was difficult to scale across departments. After adopting Beefree, they cut design time by 85%, going from six hours to just 45 minutes to produce eight complete email templates. With brand kits, reusable content blocks, and mobile optimization baked in, Beefree gave designers and non-technical users alike a central space to collaborate, move faster, and stay fully on brand.
“One of our team members isn’t a marketer or designer. They don’t know HTML—they just needed a drag-and-drop experience that’s super easy to use, and Beefree provided exactly that.”
— Sonja Fulbright, Owl Connect Business Analyst
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Even though different departments at Rice use various sending platforms, Beefree acts as the common design layer that brings them together, something many Slate users can relate to when navigating decentralized communications needs.
Minnesota State University, Mankato
With decentralized teams using multiple tools, Minnesota State Mankato faced challenges around brand consistency, workflow inefficiencies, and data security. Beefree provided a FERPA-compliant, secure environment for email creation—while empowering non-technical users to build responsive, on-brand campaigns with ease. Teams across departments now work inside Beefree’s shared workspace, using drag-and-drop design and centralized brand controls to streamline content creation without touching code.
“The drag-and-drop editor is incredibly intuitive. You can quickly create content without looking at code, and it seamlessly integrates with our CRM.”
— Kyle Snay, CRM System Administrator
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The result: better collaboration across departments, improved consistency, over a million emails sent, and high-performing campaigns, some with open rates as high as 48%.
USC Marshall School of Business
Supporting 11 graduate programs with complex email campaigns, the USC Marshall team needed a fast, scalable solution to replace the slow and clunky design workflow inside Pardot. With Beefree, they now create polished HTML emails in minutes, no coding needed. Modular templates, reusable elements, and shared workspaces allow multiple departments to collaborate efficiently and stay on brand.
“The only steps for inputting a Beefree email into Pardot are copy HTML and paste HTML. It’s an easy process.”
— Dwayne Rice, Senior Associate Director of CRM, Management and Digital Marketing
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Beefree has helped USC Marshall bring email production in-house, reduce third-party vendor costs, and onboard new team members quickly—showing how powerful and flexible the tool can be across a large, decentralized organization.
Commonly asked questions about using Beefree with Slate
Does Slate support external HTML?
Yes! You can paste HTML into Slate’s mailing builder using the source code view. Beefree’s exported HTML works great out of the box.
Can I edit the design after pasting it into Slate?
You can make light edits, but we recommend doing all layout/design work in Beefree to preserve formatting and responsiveness.
Do I need IT to set this up?
Nope! Beefree is ready to use in your browser. Just design, copy, and paste into Slate—no integration or IT support required.
Design in Beefree, send with Slate
Whether you’re using Slate or another platform, Beefree helps your institution scale great design without sacrificing speed, compliance, or consistency. We’re proud to be a Silver Partner of Slate CRM and excited to support the Higher Ed community with better email creation tools.
Ready to create better emails, faster and without the tech hurdles? Start your free trial of Beefree today.
