Over 2 years back, I read one of my favorite e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo design for the very first time. I clicked it and quickly started destroying Beehiiv A/B Testing.
I wasn’t sure why I felt so psychological.
Being a permanent developer is difficult. I’m frequently getting pitched various devices and services that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was psychological due to the fact that I spent the last six months trying out various email and newsletter systems to help construct my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic choices for composing e-newsletters. But I could not locate one that made me offer a definite “yes”.
The concern with several existing e-newsletter platforms is that they do not feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter platform that lets me fully customize my newsletter layouts, makes it incredibly simple to write and send out emails, and provides me devices that help me analyze metrics and get even more clients.
I believe I’ve finally found the right tool.
Yet, I understand beehiiv might not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it very easy to layout, create, send out, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former staff members at the well-known e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist makers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this short article, I’m mosting likely to discuss my individual experience with beehiiv, things I like (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to finally go with it as my newsletter platform of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve watched for a modern-day e-newsletter platform for fairly time now. I have actually hesitated hard when it concerned lastly releasing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a few various other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I’m sure many e-newsletter creators appreciate preferred e-newsletters with countless customers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I looked up to a whole lot. They have wonderful web content, tons of customers, and a creative referral program that permits them to get back at more customers.
So, I took place a search to determine just how these large e-newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get more subscribers? How do they develop a newsletter design that remains on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to address all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn the people that developed this device actually comprehend e-newsletter creation and growth.” I questioned who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were a few of the initial marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on developer growth.
Due to the fact that, any kind of developer understands, you require development to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the appropriate newsletter pile (that scales) frequently implies utilizing multiple various tools to help achieve one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can obtain costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was totally free to start using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material developer that desires a system that allows them to send custom-made newsletters with or without requiring to have a web site.
The most successful e-newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media business, startup, or material creator, you ought to seriously considering trying out beehiiv. It’s totally free to get started and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you in fact wind up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly a good indication that people enjoy reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is an excellent platform utilized by hundreds of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own internet site and utilize the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending out emails (while creating an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv permits you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing subscribers to obtain words out.
beehiiv also provides you a web site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your own internet site already, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site customers straight to your beehiiv e-mail list. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to enable people to subscribe to your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to leverage various marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack option.
How to start utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Sign up for a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, offer you accessibility to website hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance personalization, analytics, external embed forms, and more. It’s a very generous offering for those just starting out (or for those trying to find a new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv A/B Testing
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what other systems have you utilized?”, “do you have any type of paying customers?”, and extra.
You’ll after that create a name and link for your newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll likewise pick your brand colors and design to ensure your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
Once you reach your main control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will have described information on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Begin writing,” “Posts,” “Audience,” “Grow,” “Generate income from,” “Design,” and” Evaluate.” And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the settings alternative.
Control panel is your primary nerve center (screenshot above), Begin writing is where you produce and release e-newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can view who your clients are (and break them down right into sectors), Grow is where you have access 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 advertisements, Design is where you develop your newsletter landing page and message template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can manage all of your admin things.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin creating, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have a concept you wish to cover, I advise just going to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking “Begin writing”.
You can modify your template and styling later– focus on the content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and straightforward interface for composing.
When you begin writing, you can maximize headings, add web links, and style your web content how you such as.
beehiiv provides you tons of options for different types of material like video clips, links, photos, and a lot more.
The group at beehiiv is additionally frequently releasing product feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a great deal more material features relying on when you read this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to develop your e-mail template and adjust some settings.
Below, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a summary, include your logo, turn on or off a welcome email to first time subscribers, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit background colors, boundaries, spacing, fonts, image formats, and much more. I’m not mosting likely to go through ever before single point you can optimize with your email template because it’s a great deal. Just experiment with the system free of cost and see it on your own!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of fantastic features that make it an excellent posting platform for any e-newsletter maker.
Here are a few of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it extremely very easy to write and send e-mails. I stated above several of the important things you can do with your setups and email layout so I’ll spare you some extra analysis.
The thing to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly among the better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a site. Think of it as a site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and a location where people can register for your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s practically comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, provide you an internet site. Nevertheless, the free plan places your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a customized domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is very important. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can sign up for your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv internet site or with embed types.
If you already have a web site, and desire individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this web site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have three various options– a complete size, a taken care of size, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim installed.
You can discover the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally an alternative for acknowledgment monitoring if you want to ahead UTM parameters for tracking purposes– rather cool.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I want beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I’m sure the team is working with updates for these, but I mentioned a couple of concerns I had in the pros and cons section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is an option for producing a referral program.
You can urge existing clients on your checklist to forward your e-mails to close friends and associates and if they get other people to subscribe to your listing, you can reward them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you desire. I have actually seem lots of e-newsletter firms provide benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– giving you one more opportunity for expanding your email list.
However, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to an extra exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this short article.
Premium memberships
They state all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership profits is definitely a monster of its own. If you’re seeking a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” issues of your newsletter that are just sent out to paying subscribers. This can be really rewarding depending upon what your e-newsletter has to offer. For example, Trends.co is a preferred costs newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Information analytics
Among the important things I enjoy about beehiiv is how tidy and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer matter Beehiiv A/B Testing.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye sight on just how your newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that subscriber count go up is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (totally free) Launch plan gives you everything you require to get started and expand your e-newsletter (as much as 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, personalized domain name, surveys, and accessibility to costs memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you whatever in the Grow plan with addition of concern assistance and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are quite charitable in my point of view.
For example, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 per month. Rather than some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 monthly for the exact same amount– making beehiiv an excellent Kit alternative for lots of individuals.
I’m unsure exactly how the device business economics work on this, yet beehiiv is absolutely more affordable (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Naturally, with every platform, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Right here are some of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve personally experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of selection:
Easy to establish and begin sending out newsletters free of charge.
Clean and contemporary customer analytics.
Lots of versatility with email styles.
Referral program feature.
Web site hosting.
Produce costs choices to monetize.
Surveys.
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen one more e-newsletter platform that has been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
But naturally, I do not intend to be biased so I’m going to discuss some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are some of the disadvantages I have actually discovered while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including custom font styles.
I make use of Webflow as my web site structure system of selection (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter excessive information why I enjoy Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow evaluation if you want to find out more.
Now, there actually is nothing else means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site besides utilizing an iframe embed. I directly don’t such as using iframe’s since they have a tendency to decrease my site a bit. Each time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last thing to fill on the web page. It’s really obvious when you’re on a slow-moving web link. Yet I can get around that.
The major complaint I have is that I can’t use a normal Webflow form (which I love using). There are methods around this by using a tool like Zapier yet that would just include added expenses that I don’t require. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con but I assumed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far outweigh the disadvantages right here. I’m additionally hopeful that Webflow will eventually develop a far better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
In general, beehiiv is a great option for anybody wanting to dive into the globe of email marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this newsletter system much exceeds numerous that are currently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you actually have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are also rather affordable of what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not create review blog posts often. I only do when I in fact make use of the tool myself and would certainly recommend it to a pal.
I wish you found some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is a great platform for you.