Beefree blog

Tutorial: How to Add Background Images in Email

Beefree team
Beefree team
Oct 27, 2016
Tutorial: How to Add Background Images in Email
Tutorial: How to Add Background Images in Email

For today's exciting workshop, we have a new feature introduced in the BEE editor: you can now add background images to your emails. We promise this is going to be your new favorite email design trick, so let's dive in!

Background images in action

Start looking for them, and you'll find images with text overlay in most emails in your inbox. Here's an example from Skillshare:

skillshare email background images

Anotherfrom Huckberry:

huckberry email background images

And one from Brit + Co.:

brit+co email background images

One from Everlane:

everlane email background images

And on andon. Adding text to images is a great way to:

  • Customize stock photos to make them your own
  • Encourage readers to click on an image
  • Bring text "above the fold" in your email (instead of positioning text beneath an image)

However, these "email background images" aren't really background images at all. That's because the text and the image are part of a single JPG, PNG, or other image file. The text isn't plain text; it's part of the image, added in Photoshop or with another tool. As a result, if the image doesn't show up because of image-blocking, the text doesn't appear either. And changing the text requires editing the image.Today, we're going to show you how to create true email background images with plain text on top.This means that even if your images don't load, your text will be preserved, and changing the text does not require editing the image.We'll also show you how you can repeat an image across an entire row to create pattern or texture.This new capability in the BEE email editor is one thatdesigners have been asking for.It doesn't require any coding and is much easier to implement than in other design tools, or even in an ESP like Outlook. Let's take a look athow it works!

Using email background images

Let's use this module from a Litmus email as today's inspiration.We'll recreate it in BEE.

litmus-header email background images

Video tutorial

Want to see how to add a background image in your email quickly? Watch our video tutorial and follow along step-by-step below:

Choose an email template

Open the BEE editor at beefree.io.Choose a template to get started. We typically choose the basic one-column template. (Tip: If you need a ready-to-goprofessional email template for business, BEE has those, too!)

Enable the row background image

Simply click on any row of content, and you'll see there's now a Row background image option in the Structure menu in the right panel.Enable it, then click "Change image" to browse for a photo.

BEE tool email background images

Browse for an image

You can find free, high-resolution stock photos in BEE, so let's look forone. (You could also upload your own image or paste in animage URL).On the next screen, tap the "myfiles" folder or open one of your folders from the file manager.

BEE tool email background images

Then, press "Search free photos" CTA at the top.

BEE tool email background images

Drawing inspiration from the Litmus email, let's search "stars" or "night sky" to see what turns up.

BEE tool email background images

Choose an image to import, then insert it in the email. Here is the result:

BEE tool email background images

Drag-and-drop content

Using the image placeholder that's already in the template, add the calendar image by dragging it in. Continue adding content placeholders for the Litmus logo, text, and CTA button. After dragging and dropping each module, take a look at how the email is shaping up:

BEE tool email background images

Notice how the text, images, and even the CTA button sit on top of the background image. This allows for plain text and a bulletproof CTA—email design best practices—to build the entire email all within BEE.To finish up, add other necessary images and text, then format the styles, colors, and padding. Here's howthe finished product looks:

BEE tool email background images

Pretty awesome, right? Email background images are simple and straightforward to use in BEE. With background images, youremails won't just look beautiful—they'll be more functional and effective than ever before.

Background image settings

Once you selectyour background image, you can also adjust how it appears in your email. There are three key settings: Full width, Repeat, and Center.

BEE tool email background images

Use them to findthe best fit for your background image. Select "repeat," for example, to create a pattern. This is especially useful if your image doesn't span the entire width of the email but you want it to.As with any image in BEE, you can also edit it using the built-in photo editor. You can alwayscrop, filter, add in specialeffects,etc.

BEE tool email background images

Email client compatibility & setting up a fallback background color

Just like with any advanced email design, you need to keep an eye if any mobile and email clients support background images. According to our recent tests, the only email clients that did not show email background images were:

  • Outlook 2016 on MAC OS X 10.10
  • Lotus Notes 7
  • Xfinity / Comcast email client

For those email clients (and for best results when images are blocked) make sure that you set a background color in the necessary row as a fallback background color in those cases when your background image doesn't render.To set a background color, simply select the row, then use your Structure menu to choose a Row background color or Content background color.

BEE tool email background images

Tip: Add background images to Gmail emails with BEE Pro Connector

Did you knowany email designed in the BEE editor can be exported to Gmail?The BEE Gmail connector lets you design any email in BEE, then move the fully-designed email over to your Gmail drafts folder—ready to be sent—in a matter of clicks. Check out our quick tutorial to learn how.

Using background images in your emails? Go Pro!

We hope you enjoy this new email background images feature, as we're striving to build the Best Email Editor or BEE in short! If you're not already usingBEE, sign-up for a BEE Pro free trial and have access to additional templates and design features.SaveSave

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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