MailUp has announced a new release of the BEE email editor, and introduced the BEE Plugin, an embeddable version. BEE Free is the free email newsletter editor version of MailUp’s drag-and-drop editor for creating responsive emails.
Note: On August 30, 2023, BEE changed its name to Beefree along with a rebrand. Now the BEE Plugin is called Beefree SDK. Check out beefree.io to learn more.
The Embeddable Newsletter Editor is the big news
With more than 30,000 active users per month, BEE has become a popular email design tool since the launch of the free email newsletter editor last fall.
They are now allowing other vendors to include the editor through an embeddable plugin. I think this is big news. Mailup went public with their IPO last fall and since then is taking a pretty strategic approach to expand their user base.
Through launching the free version of their editor and now allowing others to embed it they are seemingly expanding the pie rather than just getting a bigger piece of the ESP market. Which is already pretty crowded. MailUp is the biggest ESP in Italy, both in terms of number of customers and for number of emails sent. They are looking to expand their reach dramatically.
Here is a video of Massimo Massimo Arrigoni Chief Product Officer at Mailup about the new launch.
BEE plugin also available for other ESPs
MailUp confirmed that they will also allow other ESPs to embed the email creator. There is certainly a need. Many email software providers recognise that users want a drag-and-drop editor and are sometimes struggeling.
24% don’t offer any kind of drag-and-drop
Our own research for the email marketing software buyer’s guide shows that from the 110 email software providers that are worth considering, 24% don’t offer any kind of drag-and-drop functionality in their editor and 38% won’t allow for areas to be defined for responsive email.
Some ESPs have released a responsive / drag-and-drop editor recently, but not all are equally good. The release of embeddable editor goes head-to-head with the other embeddable email editor EDM designer and the (discontinued) Easy Peasy Newsletters editor.
Breaking open a different piece of the market
Breaking open a new market could be a game-changer. CRM, CMS, ecommerce, or other applications and providers that need to build email externally now, or do a poor job at the moment can almost instantly get a much better experience for their users with embedding the drag-and-drop email creation tool. Vendors and users that are interested can check out the tool at Beefree and apply for the Bee plugin from their site.
They allow any CRM, CMS, ecommerce, or other application that needs email designed to offer its users a drag-and-drop tool for creating responsive design emails, regardless of HTML or design knowledge. The BEE Plugin is in the form of a JavaScript web widget that allows software developers to embed the drag-and-drop BEE editor. Right now the BEE Plugin is in beta, which is expected to last around 6 weeks.
Pricing of the embeddable app
While BEE is a free email newsletter editor for the public, the embedable version is paid. Pricing will be finalized soon, the communicated price is on a per user basis of $1 per month, with tiered discounts for applications with a lot of users.
New features for the free email newsletter editor in BEE v2
In October, 2014, MailUp launched the free email newsletter editor. Based on the input of the now more than 30.000 users, MailUp has updated both the paid and the free email newsletter editor versions and released it as BEE v2. BEE allows email marketers to quickly design fully responsive email newsletters without the need for HTML or CSS coding knowledge, simplifying the HTML email creation process.
The new version now offers more features for email design and customization. These more advanced features include:
- Control at the row level
- Control at the column level
- Granular control on padding
- Granular control on borders
- Message-level settings that are inherited by all other content items
- More control on social media icons
Here are some screenshots of the BEEfree V2 improvements.
You can try the new version of the BEE free email newsletter editor at beefree.io/ or have a look at our full MailUp review.
