Over two years back, I was reading one of my favorite email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked on it and promptly began wrecking Superpower Daily Beehiiv.
I had not been sure why I felt so emotional.
Being a full time maker is difficult. I’m often obtaining pitched different devices and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was emotional since I invested the last six months checking out different email and e-newsletter systems to assist build my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific choices for creating newsletters. But I couldn’t locate one that made me provide a precise “yes”.
The concern with numerous existing e-newsletter platforms is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter system that lets me fully tailor my e-newsletter styles, makes it incredibly very easy to create and send out e-mails, and offers me devices that help me assess metrics and obtain even more clients.
I think I have actually lastly located the appropriate device.
Yet, I recognize beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it easy to design, write, send, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by former workers at the famous e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help makers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking lots of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this post, I’m mosting likely to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to finally select it as my newsletter system of choice.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I inadvertently stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve been on the lookout for a contemporary newsletter platform for fairly time currently. I have actually put things off hard when it concerned lastly launching my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie systems. After that, Substack. And finally, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I’m sure lots of e-newsletter creators appreciate preferred e-newsletters with numerous subscribers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a lot. They have great content, lots of clients, and a creative referral program that permits them to get back at much more clients.
So, I took place a hunt to find out just how these huge e-newsletters established their logistics. What system do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more customers? How do they create an e-newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to address all of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that built this device actually comprehend e-newsletter development and growth.” I questioned who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the initial marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on designer growth.
Due to the fact that, any kind of maker recognizes, you require growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the right newsletter stack (that ranges) commonly indicates making use of multiple various devices to help achieve one objective– one platform for your newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one system to establish recommendations. It can get expensive.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was complimentary to start utilizing, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content creator that desires a system that allows them to send out custom-made e-newsletters with or without requiring to have an internet site.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv focuses on providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or web content designer, you need to seriously taking into consideration checking out beehiiv. It’s totally free to start and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 subscribers on your list.
If you in fact wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a great indication that people enjoy reading your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is an excellent system made use of by hundreds of independent authors. With Substack you get your own website and make use of the platform as your all-in-one remedy for sending out emails (while creating an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv permits you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing subscribers to obtain words out.
beehiiv also provides you a website comparable to Substack. But, if you have your very own site already, you can also use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your website customers directly to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to permit individuals to sign up for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to utilize various marketing channels to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack alternative.
Exactly how to start utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Enroll in a free plan
The very first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 customers, provide you access to site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advance personalization, analytics, exterior embed types, and much more. It’s a really charitable offering for those just starting out (or for those looking for a brand-new platform to move to).
Onboarding Superpower Daily Beehiiv
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and extra.
You’ll then develop a name and link for your e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your internet site link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll also pick your brand name colors and design to make certain your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
Once you reach your major dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have described information on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Start creating,” “Articles,” “Audience,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Layout,” and” Assess.” And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the setups alternative.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot over), Begin writing is where you produce and publish newsletters, Articles is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can view who your subscribers are (and break them down into segments), Grow is where you have access to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run ads, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with ads, Style is where you develop your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of all of your admin things.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start creating, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just starting out, and have a concept you intend to cover, I suggest just going to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning writing”.
You can modify your template and styling later on– focus on the content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and straightforward user interface for composing.
Once you begin creating, you can optimize headings, add web links, and style your material exactly how you such as.
beehiiv provides you lots of alternatives for various kinds of content like videos, web links, pictures, and a lot more.
The group at beehiiv is additionally constantly releasing item feature and updates so I make certain there will be a lot more content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to make your email template and adjust some setups.
Right here, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a summary, add your logo design, turn on or off a welcome email to first time subscribers, and more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can edit background shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, picture formats, and extra. I’m not going to go through ever single thing you can maximize with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a whole lot. Just try out the platform absolutely free and see it on your own!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of incredible features that make it a wonderful publishing system for any kind of newsletter maker.
Right here are a few of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it incredibly very easy to create and send out e-mails. I stated over several of the things you can do with your setups and e-mail design so I’ll spare you some additional analysis.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely one of the much better e-mail editors I’ve ever written in.
Website hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you want) survive on a site. Consider it as a website for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and an area where people can register for your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, including the complimentary one, offer you a site. Nonetheless, the free plan areas your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a customized domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter directly from your beehiiv internet site or via embed forms.
If you currently have a site, and want people to subscribe to your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to utilize an embed kind. This is what I use on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three different alternatives– a full size, a fixed width, and a slim installed. I directly make use of the slim embed.
You can discover the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s also a choice for attribution tracking if you wish to forward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– pretty neat.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make certain the team is dealing with updates for these, but I stated a couple of concerns I had in the advantages and disadvantages section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a solution for producing a referral program.
You can urge existing customers on your checklist to ahead your e-mails to friends and associates and if they get other people to register for your listing, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever form you want. I’ve seem many newsletter business provide benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your subscribers right into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– giving you another opportunity for growing your email list.
However, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to an extra premium plan. I’ll go over all the plans later on in this post.
Costs memberships
They state all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Membership revenue is absolutely a beast of its very own. If you’re trying to find a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” issues of your newsletter that are just sent to paying subscribers. This can be extremely profitable depending on what your newsletter needs to supply. For example, Trends.co is a preferred premium newsletter that produces millions in profits a year just by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Information analytics
One of the important things I enjoy concerning beehiiv is exactly how clean and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on just how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber count Superpower Daily Beehiiv.
You obtain access to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye sight on just how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that client count increase is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (totally free) Launch plan provides you whatever you require to start and grow your newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom-made domain name, surveys, and access to premium subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of top priority assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my opinion.
As an example, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 monthly. In contrast to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 monthly for the same amount– making beehiiv an excellent Kit choice for numerous individuals.
I’m uncertain exactly how the system business economics work on this, however beehiiv is definitely more affordable (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Certainly, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Here are some of the pros and cons I’ve personally experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of option:
Easy to set up and start sending newsletters free of charge.
Clean and modern-day client analytics.
Lots of adaptability with email styles.
Referral program feature.
Web site hosting.
Produce premium choices to generate income from.
Polls.
To be honest, I haven’t seen an additional newsletter platform that has had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
However obviously, I do not intend to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to discuss some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the cons I have actually located while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including custom-made font styles.
I utilize Webflow as my website building platform of option (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in too much detail why I enjoy Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to learn more.
Right now, there really is no other means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website besides using an iframe embed. I directly don’t such as making use of iframe’s due to the fact that they often tend to reduce my site a bit. Whenever a web page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last thing to load on the page. It’s really obvious when you get on a slow net link. However I can get around that.
The main complaint I have is that I can not use a routine Webflow kind (which I love utilizing). There are means around this by using a tool like Zapier yet that would simply add added prices that I do not need. To be truthful, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage however I believed I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far surpass the disadvantages below. I’m additionally confident that Webflow will at some point develop a much better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
In general, beehiiv is a wonderful service for any individual aiming to study the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this newsletter platform much exceeds numerous that are presently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally rather inexpensive wherefore they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t compose review messages typically. I just do when I really make use of the device myself and would certainly advise it to a close friend.
I wish you located some quality on whether or not beehiiv is a good system for you.