Over two years ago, I was reading one of my preferred e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked on it and immediately began wrecking Beehiiv Black Friday.
I had not been certain why I really felt so emotional.
Being a permanent developer is difficult. I’m typically obtaining pitched various devices and solutions that do not appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was psychological since I spent the last six months trying various e-mail and e-newsletter platforms to aid develop my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some excellent choices for creating newsletters. Yet I couldn’t discover one that made me give a precise “yes”.
The concern with many existing newsletter systems is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me totally customize my newsletter designs, makes it super very easy to compose and send out e-mails, and gives me devices that help me analyze metrics and get even more customers.
I think I’ve lastly found the ideal device.
But, I understand beehiiv may not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it easy to style, compose, send out, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by previous workers at the popular e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist creators launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking lots of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this write-up, I’m going to explain my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to lastly select it as my e-newsletter system of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I inadvertently stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern newsletter system for fairly time currently. I’ve procrastinated hard when it concerned finally introducing my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And finally, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I make certain many e-newsletter creators admire preferred e-newsletters with millions of customers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a lot. They have great web content, lots of clients, and a clever referral program that permits them to get back at a lot more subscribers.
So, I took place a hunt to identify exactly how these big newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more subscribers? How do they produce a newsletter style 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 tool actually comprehend newsletter development and growth.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were a few of the very first marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my brain blew up.
I knew this was mosting likely to be a various e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on maker growth.
Due to the fact that, any designer recognizes, you need development to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that ranges) frequently suggests making use of several different devices to help attain one objective– one platform for your newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one system to set up recommendations. It can get pricey.
So when I found out beehiiv did every one of these things in one platform, and it was cost-free to start using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content creator that desires a system that permits them to send out custom e-newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most successful newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or material maker, you ought to seriously thinking about trying beehiiv. It’s completely complimentary to begin and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 subscribers on your listing.
If you in fact wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a good indicator that individuals enjoy reading your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a terrific system used by countless independent authors. With Substack you obtain your own site and make use of the system as your all-in-one remedy for sending out emails (while producing an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing subscribers to get words out.
beehiiv additionally gives you a site comparable to Substack. But, if you have your own site already, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I use) to send your site subscribers directly to your beehiiv email listing. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a device like Revue to allow individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the flexibility to utilize various marketing channels to get your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack alternative.
Exactly how to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Sign up for a free plan
The very first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will enable you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you access to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, breakthrough personalization, analytics, outside embed forms, and extra. It’s an extremely generous offering for those just beginning (or for those trying to find a new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Black Friday
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and more.
You’ll then produce a name and link for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll also select your brand colors and design to see to it your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
Once you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will have described info on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start writing,” “Posts,” “Audience,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Design,” and” Analyze.” And at the extremely lower you’ll see the settings alternative.
Control panel is your major nerve center (screenshot above), Begin writing is where you create and release e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Audience is where you can view who your clients are (and break them down into sections), Expand 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 newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you develop your newsletter landing page and post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle all of your admin stuff.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to begin writing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply starting out, and have a concept you want to blog about, I suggest simply going to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning writing”.
You can modify your template and designing later– focus on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a tidy and user-friendly user interface for creating.
Once you start creating, you can enhance headings, add links, and style your material how you like.
beehiiv offers you lots of choices for various types of content like video clips, links, images, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is additionally regularly launching item feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a whole lot more content features depending on when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
Once you have a newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to make your e-mail template and adjust some setups.
Below, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a summary, include your logo, activate or off a welcome e-mail to very first time clients, and much more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify history colors, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, image formats, and more. I’m not going to experience ever solitary point you can maximize with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a whole lot. Simply try out the platform for free and see it on your own!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of remarkable features that make it a great posting platform for any type of newsletter developer.
Below are a few of the vital features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it extremely simple to compose and send emails. I stated over several of the things you can do with your setups and e-mail layout so I’ll spare you some extra reading.
The thing to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely one of the better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a website. Think of it as a website for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and a location where people can sign up for your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, including the complimentary one, provide you a site. However, the free plan areas your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a customized domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is necessary. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv site or with embed forms.
If you already have an internet site, and desire individuals to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to utilize an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three various alternatives– a full size, a fixed size, and a slim embed. I personally make use of the slim embed.
You can locate the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s additionally an option for attribution monitoring if you wish to ahead UTM criteria 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 team is dealing with updates for these, yet I discussed a few issues I had in the benefits and drawbacks area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is a service for developing a referral program.
You can urge existing customers on your checklist to ahead your e-mails to friends and coworkers and if they get other people to sign up for your checklist, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever kind you desire. I have actually appear several e-newsletter companies give incentives in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your clients right into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– offering you another avenue for expanding your email listing.
Nevertheless, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll review all the plans later on in this article.
Costs memberships
They state all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real followers. Membership revenue is certainly a monster of its own. If you’re looking for a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” concerns of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying subscribers. This can be extremely rewarding depending on what your newsletter has to offer. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent costs e-newsletter that creates millions in revenue a year merely by having pay-only newsletter content.
Data analytics
One of the important things I love regarding beehiiv is just how clean and basic the analytics are. You get real-time date on exactly how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber count Beehiiv Black Friday.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your newsletter is in fact doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that customer count rise is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan provides you every little thing you need to get started and grow your newsletter (approximately 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, customized domain name, surveys, and access to costs registrations. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of priority support and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my opinion.
As an example, if you have 100,000 clients you will pay around $329 per month. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the very same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for lots of users.
I’m not sure how the system business economics deal with this, however beehiiv is most definitely cheaper (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Of course, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Below are some of the advantages and disadvantages I have actually directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of selection:
Easy to establish and start sending e-newsletters completely free.
Clean and modern client analytics.
Lots of versatility with e-mail styles.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Develop premium alternatives to generate income from.
Surveys.
To be sincere, I have not seen an additional e-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 biased so I’m going to discuss some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are some of the cons I have actually found while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom-made font styles.
I make use of Webflow as my site structure platform of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much information why I love Webflow so much yet you can review my Webflow testimonial if you ‘d like to find out more.
Right now, there actually is nothing else way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow site apart from making use of an iframe embed. I directly don’t like utilizing iframe’s because they often tend to slow down my web site a little bit. Every single time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last point to pack on the web page. It’s really noticeable when you’re on a slow net connection. Yet I can get around that.
The main gripe I have is that I can’t use a regular Webflow type (which I like using). There are means around this by using a device like Zapier but that would certainly simply add additional prices that I don’t need. To be truthful, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage yet I thought I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far exceed the disadvantages here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will at some point produce a better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Overall, beehiiv is a great option for anyone aiming to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this newsletter system much outweighs numerous that are presently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you really have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally rather economical of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your listing is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t compose evaluation posts often. I only do when I in fact utilize the tool myself and would certainly advise it to a close friend.
I wish you found some quality on whether beehiiv is a good system for you.