Over two years ago, I was reading one of my preferred e-mail e-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 destroying Beehiiv Automations.
I had not been certain why I felt so psychological.
Being a full time creator is tough. I’m commonly getting pitched different devices and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was psychological because I spent the last six months checking out different e-mail and newsletter systems to assist develop my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some wonderful options for writing newsletters. But I could not discover one that made me provide a guaranteed “yes”.
The issue with several existing e-newsletter systems is that they do not feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter system that lets me fully tailor my e-newsletter designs, makes it very easy to write and send emails, and provides me devices that help me evaluate metrics and obtain more customers.
I believe I have actually lastly discovered the best tool.
But, I understand beehiiv may not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it very easy to design, create, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Developed by previous employees at the famous e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help makers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking lots of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this short article, I’m going to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, things I love (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to ultimately select it as my e-newsletter platform of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a contemporary e-newsletter system for fairly a long time currently. I have actually procrastinated hard when it involved lastly releasing my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a few various other indie systems. Then, Substack. And lastly, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I’m sure many e-newsletter makers appreciate popular newsletters with numerous clients– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I looked up to a whole lot. They have terrific web content, tons of subscribers, and a smart referral program that allows them to get back at much more customers.
So, I went on a search to determine just how these large e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get even more clients? How do they create an e-newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to respond to every one of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn the people that developed this tool actually understand newsletter creation and growth.” I questioned who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were some of the first marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I recognized this was going to be a various e-newsletter platform. One that’s focused on creator development.
Due to the fact that, any designer knows, you need growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And locating the ideal newsletter pile (that scales) commonly implies utilizing multiple different devices to help achieve one goal– one platform for your newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one platform to establish referrals. It can get pricey.
So when I discovered beehiiv did every one of these things in one system, and it was totally free to start utilizing, 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 permits them to send out personalized e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media firm, start-up, or content maker, you should seriously thinking about trying beehiiv. It’s entirely cost-free to begin and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you really end up having to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly a great indication that individuals love reviewing your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a terrific system made use of by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you get your very own internet site and use the platform as your all-in-one service for sending out emails (while developing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing customers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv also provides you a website comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own site already, you can also utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site clients right to your beehiiv e-mail list. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit individuals to sign up for your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This provides you the versatility to utilize different marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack choice.
Just how to start using 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 the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will certainly permit you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, offer you accessibility to web site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, development personalization, analytics, external embed forms, and extra. It’s a really charitable offering for those simply starting (or for those looking for a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Automations
After producing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your first e-newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you made use of?”, “do you have any type of paying customers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that develop a name and link for your e-newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll likewise select your brand design and colors to make sure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
As soon as you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have detailed info on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start composing,” “Articles,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Style,” and” Examine.” And at the very bottom you’ll see the settings alternative.
Dashboard is your major control center (screenshot above), Beginning creating is where you develop and release newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can watch who your clients are (and damage them down into sections), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and development tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your e-newsletter with advertisements, Layout is where you make your newsletter landing page and article template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can manage all of your admin things.
Creating your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to start composing, with little to no friction. If you’re just starting out, and have an idea you wish to blog about, I recommend just going to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking “Beginning writing”.
You can modify your template and designing later– focus on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and easy to use interface for writing.
Once you begin writing, you can enhance headings, include links, and style your web content how you such as.
beehiiv gives you tons of options for various sorts of material like videos, web links, photos, and more.
The group at beehiiv is additionally constantly launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a lot extra material features depending on when you read this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to develop your email template and change some settings.
Here, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a description, include your logo, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to first time clients, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit background shades, borders, spacing, typefaces, photo styles, and more. I’m not going to go through ever before single point you can maximize with your e-mail template because it’s a whole lot. Simply check out the platform absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it a wonderful publishing system for any kind of newsletter creator.
Here are some of the crucial features you can locate with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform. It makes it extremely very easy to create and send out e-mails. I stated over a few of the important things you can do with your setups and e-mail design so I’ll save you some added analysis.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a really modern-day and minimalistic feel. It’s absolutely one of the far better e-mail editors I’ve ever before written in.
Internet site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) reside on an internet site. Consider it as a site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and an area where people can sign up for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, offer you a web site. However, the free plan locations your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a custom domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is essential. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv website or with embed forms.
If you currently have a site, and desire people to sign up for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to make use of an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have 3 various alternatives– a complete width, a repaired size, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim embed.
You can locate the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s also an option for attribution monitoring if you want to ahead UTM specifications for tracking purposes– pretty neat.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I desire beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I make sure the group is working on updates for these, yet I stated a few issues I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is an option for developing a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your checklist to forward your e-mails to pals and coworkers and if they get other people to sign up for your listing, you can reward them. These incentives can be in whatever type you want. I’ve appear numerous newsletter companies provide incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you another method for expanding your email listing.
However, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to an extra superior plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this post.
Premium registrations
They claim all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real fans. Subscription income is definitely a beast of its own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” problems of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying clients. This can be very rewarding depending upon what your newsletter needs to provide. For instance, Trends.co is a preferred premium e-newsletter that produces millions in revenue a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter material.
Information analytics
One of the things I enjoy regarding beehiiv is exactly how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer count Beehiiv Automations.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye sight on exactly how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that customer matter go up is definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies four various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (free) Launch plan provides you every little thing you need to begin and grow your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom domain name, polls, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you everything in the Grow plan with enhancement of concern assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 per month. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would charge $679 per month for the same amount– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit choice for several customers.
I’m uncertain just how the unit economics work on this, but beehiiv is absolutely less expensive (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Of course, with every platform, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Right here are several of the pros and cons I have actually personally experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of option:
Easy to establish and begin sending out e-newsletters absolutely free.
Clean and modern customer analytics.
Lots of versatility with email layouts.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Create costs options to generate income from.
Surveys.
To be truthful, I have not seen another newsletter system that has actually been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
But naturally, I do not want to be prejudiced so I’m going to state some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the disadvantages I’ve discovered while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom-made typefaces.
I use Webflow as my website structure system of option (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter too much information why I enjoy Webflow so much however you can review my Webflow testimonial if you would love to find out more.
Now, there actually is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site besides utilizing an iframe embed. I directly don’t like using iframe’s due to the fact that they have a tendency to reduce my web site a little bit. Every single time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last thing to pack on the page. It’s very obvious when you get on a slow-moving net connection. Yet I can get around that.
The main gripe I have is that I can’t utilize a routine Webflow kind (which I enjoy making use of). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier yet that would simply include additional costs that I do not need. To be honest, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con but I believed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far outweigh the cons here. I’m also confident that Webflow will eventually produce a much better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Overall, beehiiv is a great option for anyone looking to study the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter platform far surpasses many that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you actually have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are also fairly affordable of what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your checklist is unusual. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not create evaluation articles commonly. I just do when I actually make use of the device myself and would suggest it to a buddy.
I hope you located some clearness on whether beehiiv is a great platform for you.