Beautifully designed email campaigns or newsletters are a key feature of effective marketing. Empower anyone in your organisation to quickly create powerful emails with award-winning BEE – Best Email Editor – and its extensive range of vibrant, simple to use templates.
There are 3.9 billion daily users of email, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further increased our use of this familiar tool. In fact, 78% of marketing executives indicate email marketing is vital to the overall success of their company. Whilst the rising popularity of social media channels has undoubtedly opened up new ways of addressing audiences, email marketing is still a thriving communication strategy. After all, regardless of the nature of our business, we all tend to check both our personal and work email inboxes on a regular basis.
Email is cited by consumers as a preferred method of contact by brands, and loved by marketers for its ease of use and rapid response rates, but how can you ensure your emails resonate with their recipients, speak directly to their needs and most importantly convert leads? And how can you ensure that email campaigns are created quickly and effectively by the different departments in your organisation which need to deploy them? From HR to billing to customer support, there are many actors in a company that use email to communicate, way beyond the marketing team.
Similarly, newsletters are also seen as a valuable means of promoting sales campaigns, offering products and services and generally keeping customers updated. Creating both thought provoking and eye-catching content is time-consuming and stressful when up against urgent deadlines. It’s vital to make the most of graphics, font sizes, colours and backgrounds, whilst ensuring your content is compatible with the multitude of systems, devices and platforms your customers use.
Award winning BEE – Best Email Editor – provides marketers, start-ups, entrepreneurs, iconic brands and multinational corporates with the tools they need to create beautiful and effective emails, fast. Business Worldwide Magazine speaks to Massimo Arrigoni, CEO of California based BEE to learn more about the world of online and embedded marketing content creation and the functionality and solutions his organisation provides.
Massimo, could you give us a brief overview of your digital marketing career journey and the background to BEE?
Studying ecommerce during my college years really served as a stepping stone into digital marketing. As a new retailing concept with great potential, my interest in the subject led to establishing ProductCart, a software company which powered thousands of online stores with its shopping cart system. Ten years later myself and my two co-founders sold ProductCart to one of our largest resellers and ultimately resulted in me moving into email marketing.
I’d always kept in contact with Nazzareno Gorni, the CEO of Italy-based MailUp, which in its early days was a web agency and ProductCart reseller. They later decided to focus solely on email marketing, and when I joined them in 2011, the company was expanding rapidly.
I was in charge of products at MailUp, and one of the projects we worked on was a new, better drag-n-drop email editor for the MailUp platform. Happy with what we had developed, we decided to test whether it could have a life of its own. Internally, its project name was “best email editor” or “best editor ever”. We wanted to make it available for free on the Internet and see what reaction it would trigger, so we bought a domain that put together “bee” and “free.” That’s how beefree.io came about.
People loved it. They enjoyed being able to quickly design a good-looking email, download it, and use it anywhere, often in marketing systems that did not have an easy way to do so. Users grew into the thousands, and BEE quickly proved sufficiently viable to launch as a spin off from MailUp.
Can you tell us how BEE has successfully expanded its services since these early days and how it’s positioned in today’s marketplace?
We’ve used an approach called product-led growth: put the product in the hands of your customers as quickly as you can, and good things happen. When you visit beefree.io, you can start designing an email literally within two clicks. No signup. No paywall. No friction.
Product-led growth seems like a simple concept, but it’s actually not that trivial. You have to be relentlessly focused on reducing to a minimum the distance between the value you create, and your customers’ ability to experience it. Not just at the top of the funnel, but also when you create new features, etc. When you get it right, it leads to a seamless user experience that really fuels acquisition, conversions, and retention.
It also leads to a tremendous amount of product feedback, which has led over time to us offering two products – BEE Pro and BEE Plugin.
BEE Pro is a hosted email design suite which is popular for team collaboration within marketing teams and agencies. It’s a three level plan which incorporates the features and benefits of BEE Editor into a comprehensive package of design functions.
BEE Plugin enables developers to embed BEE Editor into their own SaaS software, again with a range of plans and pricing, all fully customisable with the ability to integrate into hundreds of software applications.
We’re delighted with the adoption rates both these products have been experiencing. BEE Pro recently exceeded 10,000 free trials in a month (and over 8,000 paying customers, growing fast) and BEE Plugin has been embedded in over 600 SaaS platforms around the world, in all sorts of industries. Combining both products, hundreds of thousands of people design millions of emails every month with BEE. It’s very exciting.
That’s a remarkable success story. Tell us more about the BEE Editor and how it stands out from its competitors.
One of the greatest strengths of the BEE Editor is that it uniquely combines ease of use with tremendous design flexibility. So whether you’re a professional designer building a complex marketing email or an HR specialist designing an onboarding message for new hires, BEE helps you get the job done quickly.
This is true whether you use BEE online at beefree.io or if you find it embedded in some other marketing platform, CRM software, HR system, event management tool, … you name it. When BEE is embedded, it merges so seamlessly with the rest of the application that those application’s users typically have no idea that they are using BEE. They just find this great visual content builder and enjoy its ease of use.
The great user experience translates into time and cost savings. The ability for virtually anyone to create email and newsletter templates eliminates the need to wait for marketing teams to design customised content.
Those that use BEE at beefree.io also love the design inspiration they get by leveraging our catalogue of over 500 templates, created by lots of artists that collaborate with us from around the world. The templates are easy to find, categorised into those suitable for specific industries and also themes for customisable promotions. For instance, simply click on ‘Halloween,’ for a ghoulish variety of templates ready to adapt to events, promotions, email campaigns, click through the list of industry sectors for related professional imagery, or even merge the two for a truly customisable email experience! Alternatively start from scratch with your own ideas, bringing them to life with our graphics, fonts, colour palette and changeable backgrounds.,
Are you able to elaborate on the type of SaaS applications and industries using the BEE Plugin?
It’s a really diverse list which includes some of the world’s most successful marketing platforms, but also lots of startups. Five of the top 13 email marketing platforms in the world (according to Forrester) have embedded BEE, for example.
In terms of industries, it’s a really broad spectrum, including some that we did not expect, like automotive, hospitality, education, healthcare, etc.
Can you share what’s on the horizon for BEE?
We’re expanding the types of content people can create with BEE. Earlier this year we shipped a version of BEE for landing pages, which had been a consistent request from many of the SaaS companies that embedded the email editor: Their customers often needed to create both an email and the landing page that the email links to. We’re looking at other types of content as well.
We’re also introducing more and more tools that help with collaboration. We recently added the ability to co-edit and comment directly while designing, so members of a team can really work together and get things done even faster.
For further details and specifications on all BEE products, or to check out the growing template catalogue and design with the free editor, please visit the company website at https://beefree.io/