Over two years ago, I was reading one of my favorite e-mail 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 quickly began tearing up Advertise on Beehiiv.
I had not been certain why I really felt so emotional.
Being a full-time developer is difficult. I’m usually getting pitched different devices and solutions that do not seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional because I spent the last 6 months trying various email and newsletter systems to aid construct my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some fantastic options for writing e-newsletters. However I couldn’t discover one that made me give a certain “yes”.
The problem with many existing newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter platform that lets me completely customize my e-newsletter styles, makes it incredibly easy to write and send e-mails, and provides me tools that help me examine metrics and get more clients.
I assume I have actually finally found the right tool.
Yet, I know beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually ideal for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it simple to layout, create, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Developed by former workers at the renowned e-newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help developers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking great deals of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this article, I’m going to discuss my personal experience with beehiiv, the important things I enjoy (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to ultimately opt for it as my e-newsletter platform of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I mistakenly came across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve watched for a contemporary e-newsletter platform for rather a long time currently. I’ve hesitated hard when it concerned ultimately introducing my e-newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a couple of other indie systems. After that, Substack. And lastly, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make sure lots of e-newsletter makers appreciate preferred newsletters with countless clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a lot. They have wonderful content, tons of clients, and a creative referral program that allows them to get even a lot more subscribers.
So, I went on a quest to figure out how these large e-newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain even more customers? How do they produce an e-newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to answer every one of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that built this device really recognize e-newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were some of the initial marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on creator growth.
Because, any type of designer understands, you need growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the appropriate newsletter stack (that scales) usually implies utilizing several various devices to assist accomplish one goal– one system for your e-newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to establish referrals. It can obtain costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did every one of these things in one platform, and it was free to start using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material creator that desires a platform that permits them to send out personalized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a site.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or material designer, you ought to seriously thinking about trying out beehiiv. It’s totally free to get going and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your checklist.
If you actually wind up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly a good indicator that individuals love reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a fantastic platform made use of by countless independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own site and utilize the system as your all-in-one solution for sending emails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv enables you do to all the things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, even more design flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing subscribers to get the word out.
beehiiv also offers you a website similar to Substack. Yet, if you have your own internet site already, you can additionally make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your site clients straight to your beehiiv email listing. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable individuals to sign up for your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to leverage various marketing channels to obtain your e-newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv an excellent Substack alternative.
Just how to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Enroll in a free plan
The very first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you access to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance customization, analytics, outside embed kinds, and more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those just starting out (or for those searching for a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding Advertise on Beehiiv
After developing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your initial e-newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you made use of?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that develop a name and URL for your newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site URL may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll likewise choose your brand design and colors to make certain your newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
As soon as you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed information on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Beginning creating,” “Messages,” “Target market,” “Grow,” “Generate income from,” “Style,” and” Assess.” And at the really bottom you’ll see the settings option.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot above), Beginning writing is where you develop and release newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Audience is where you can view who your customers are (and break them down right into segments), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your e-newsletter with ads, Layout is where you create your e-newsletter landing page and message template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle all of your admin stuff.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin creating, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply starting, and have a concept you want to cover, I recommend just mosting likely to the “Create” section in the navbar and clicking on “Begin creating”.
You can tweak your template and styling later on– concentrate on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and easy to use user interface for composing.
Once you start creating, you can optimize headings, add web links, and style your material just how you like.
beehiiv gives you lots of options for different sorts of material like videos, links, images, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is additionally constantly releasing product feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a whole lot much more content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to design your e-mail template and readjust some settings.
Below, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a description, include your logo, turn on or off a welcome email to very first time customers, and much more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify history shades, boundaries, spacing, font styles, image layouts, and extra. I’m not going to experience ever before solitary point you can optimize with your e-mail template because it’s a lot. Just try out the system free of cost and see it on your own!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of outstanding features that make it an excellent publishing platform for any type of e-newsletter developer.
Below are some of the important features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it extremely very easy to write and send emails. I pointed out above several of the things you can do with your setups and e-mail design so I’ll save you some additional reading.
The important things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really modern-day and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely among the better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) reside on a site. Think of it as a website for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and a place where people can sign up for your e-newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s pretty much similar to that.
All plans, including the totally free one, offer you a site. Nonetheless, the free plan places your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to include a customized domain to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is very important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter directly from your beehiiv site or via embed types.
If you already have a website, and desire people to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to use an embed type. This is what I utilize on this website (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 different alternatives– a full width, a taken care of width, and a slim installed. I personally use the slim installed.
You can discover the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s also a choice for acknowledgment monitoring if you want to ahead UTM parameters for tracking purposes– pretty cool.
However, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make sure the team is working with updates for these, but I stated a couple of issues I had in the pros and cons section listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter platform, is an option for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing subscribers on your list to forward your e-mails to friends and colleagues and if they get other people to sign up for your listing, you can compensate them. These rewards can be in whatever form you want. I’ve seem many e-newsletter companies give rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your customers right into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– giving you another opportunity for expanding your email checklist.
However, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a more premium plan. I’ll go over all the plans later on in this article.
Costs subscriptions
They state all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 real followers. Subscription income is absolutely a beast of its own. If you’re looking for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” issues of your newsletter that are only sent to paying clients. This can be very financially rewarding depending upon what your e-newsletter needs to provide. As an example, Trends.co is a preferred premium newsletter that generates millions in earnings a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
Among things I love concerning beehiiv is just how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on exactly how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and client matter Advertise on Beehiiv.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye sight on just how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that client matter increase is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you every little thing you need to begin and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain, surveys, and accessibility to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of concern support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly charitable in my opinion.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 monthly for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a great Kit option for several customers.
I’m uncertain just how the unit business economics work with this, however beehiiv is certainly less costly (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Certainly, with every system, it has its pros and cons. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve personally experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of selection:
Easy to establish and begin sending out e-newsletters for free.
Clean and modern-day client analytics.
Great deals of flexibility with e-mail layouts.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Create premium alternatives to generate income from.
Polls.
To be sincere, I have not seen one more e-newsletter system that has actually been able to package all of these features together so well.
Yet of course, I don’t want to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to point out some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are several of the cons I have actually found while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom font styles.
I utilize Webflow as my website structure system of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in too much detail why I like Webflow a lot however you can review my Webflow evaluation if you want to find out more.
Today, there really is nothing else method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site other than using an iframe embed. I directly do not such as making use of iframe’s due to the fact that they have a tendency to reduce my site a bit. Every single time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last point to fill on the page. It’s very visible when you’re on a slow net connection. But I can navigate that.
The major complaint I have is that I can not make use of a normal Webflow type (which I enjoy utilizing). There are methods around this by using a device like Zapier but that would certainly just add additional expenses that I don’t require. To be truthful, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage yet I thought I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far outweigh the disadvantages right here. I’m also confident that Webflow will eventually produce a much better method to integrate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
On the whole, beehiiv is an excellent service for anyone looking to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter platform much surpasses many 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 fairly economical wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your list is uncommon. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not create evaluation messages typically. I only do when I in fact make use of the tool myself and would suggest it to a good friend.
I hope you found some clearness on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.