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What You Can Learn From These 7 Online Education Emails

Beefree team
Beefree team
Oct 30, 2017
What You Can Learn From These 7 Online Education Emails
What You Can Learn From These 7 Online Education Emails

Pretty much anything you want to learn, you can take a class online.When LinkedIn bought the online education website Lynda for $1.5 billion in 2015, it was clear that the e-learning industry was having a moment, and it's still growing by leaps and bounds. So we got curious: how do online education emails measure up? We researched how seven prominent online learning companies approached their email design to improve our knowledge.

#1. Webflow

Webflow is primarily known as a responsive web design tool, but the company also offers courses through its "Webflow University." There, users can watch tutorials or take free video-based courses with lessons on building a blog, CSS styling, and more. When Webflow University recently added a new course on interactions and animations, this was one of the announcement emails the company sent.Subject: New course: IX2.0

webflow online education emails

The message below came on the heels of the above announcement, about a design tool upgrade to the brand's interactions capabilities. Webflow first rolled out the new feature and then followed up two days later with an alert about its latest training course. The two emails work together in messaging and in design.Subject: Interactions 2.0: Bring the web to life

What we noticed right away is that the email's main header—Bring the web to life again—and the text beneath it, are both live. The text exists against a blue HTML background that blends seamlessly into the image beneath it. This isa simple trick that optimizes the email for mobile screens. The beauty of this email is that it shows how well-styled plain text is just as effective as a non-web-friendly brand font.

#2. Udacity

Udacity offers massive open online courses—MOOCs—mostly in the tech industry, from data science to machine learning to VR and more. Here's a look at its welcome email, which you can see is personalized in two places: in the subject line and at the top of the message.Subject: Welcome to Udacity, Kelly! Let’s discover what your future holds

udacity online education emails

The email has a series of .JPGs that align to give the message an appearance of one cohesive infographic. The colors, spot illustrations, and minimal text make the "journey" easy to follow. Plus, the pot-of-gold payoff at the end is the email's single CTA button.

#3. General Assembly

General Assembly offers both in-person and online classes indesign, marketing, tech, and data. We've featured their emails beforebecause they tend to be clutter-free, direct, and visually effective. Here's the brand's recent announcement about a new course.Subject: UX skills + dedicated career coaching = A new path in 10 weeks

general assembly online education emails

We don't often see two CTA buttons side by side, but this tactic meets readers where they are. Whether users are ready to attend an info session or to view the syllabus first, they can click on either CTA to check out more info. This approach might help remove the pressure for readers to decide immediately if they're ready to RSVP, which could also improve engagement.Here's a look at the cinemagraph from the header, too:

general assembly online education emails

#4. Brit + Co

Brit + Co produces content and classes that center around all kinds of creativity. You can find courses like "Lettering for Lefties" and "Intro to Chalk Ink Art" on its site. Recently, the brand announced a new class in digital pet illustration with the message below.Subject: New Class! Digital Pet Illustration

brit + co online education emails

The email uses a combination of photo-based modules, text blocks, and illustrations to communicate its key value propositions. This is one of the denser online education emails, but it strongly conveys Brit + Co's visual identity.

#5. Codecademy

Codecademy offers—you guessed it—online coding classes. Here's an email introducing one of the brand's 10-week programs.Subject: Learn everything you need to build and deploy pixel-perfect websites

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codeacademy online education emails

Somewhat similar to General Assembly, this brand also offers two CTAs: one at the top, for more eager and ready readers, and one at the bottom for those who still want to learn but don't want to take the plunge yet. The top half of the email is all about acting now—Seats are limited! I want to build websites!—with a sense of urgency, vs. the bottom half of the email takes an easy-to-read descriptive approach supported by aLearn More CTA.The layout makes an effort to meet two types of readers by offering different ways to capture clicks.

#6. Bloc

Bloc is another online coding school that offers "bootcamps" in areas likeweb development, mobile development, and design. A recent brand email introduced a scholarship opportunity for women in tech.Subject: $1 Million 'Close the Gap' Scholarship Fund

bloc online education emails

The email has a classic inverted pyramid layout, which is particularly effective when the purpose of an email is to alert readers to one important thing. This email is clean and simple, and that's the point: Bloc wants you to be able to read it, get it, and click on it without wasting time.

#7. Skillshare

Skillshare is another popular online learning platform. The company offers over 17,000 classes in categories like film, design, business, and tech. In a recent new class email, Skillshare introduced its floral lettering course, along with a few other new offerings (email trimmed for length).Subject: New Classes: Lettering with Gemma O'Brien, Marketing for Writers & More

skillshare online education emails

Skillshare follows in Bloc's footsteps and uses a simple inverted pyramid module layout. The email uses plenty of white space and a pared-down color scheme to create a light-and-bright aesthetic, which all works beautifully, though we'd love to see more creative CTA copy.

Inspired to level-up your own online education emails?

Any of the design tricks mentioned above can be easily executed in our own BEE editor. Just take the techniques and make them your own bytrying BEE Pro for free!You can build modular designs with a simple drag-and-drop functionality, and all your designs will even be mobile responsive (no coding needed).

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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.

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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.

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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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