Over 2 years ago, I was reading one of my favorite email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked on it and promptly started destroying Beehiiv Embed A Name.
I had not been sure why I really felt so emotional.
Being a full-time developer is tough. I’m typically obtaining pitched different devices and solutions that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional because I invested the last six months experimenting with various e-mail and e-newsletter systems to help build my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic alternatives for composing newsletters. But I could not locate one that made me provide a precise “yes”.
The concern with several existing newsletter platforms is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter system that lets me fully customize my e-newsletter designs, makes it super simple to compose and send e-mails, and provides me devices that help me examine metrics and obtain more clients.
I believe I have actually finally located the best tool.
However, I know beehiiv may not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually best 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 easy to style, write, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by former employees at the renowned newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help makers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking lots of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m going to explain my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to lastly opt for it as my newsletter system of choice.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months ago, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a contemporary newsletter platform for rather a long time now. I’ve put things off hard when it concerned finally launching my e-newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few various other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And finally, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I make sure several e-newsletter makers look up to prominent newsletters with millions of customers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I looked up to a whole lot. They have wonderful material, lots of customers, and a clever referral program that permits them to get even much more clients.
So, I went on a search to figure out exactly how these large e-newsletters established their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get even more subscribers? How do they produce a newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to answer every one of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn the people that built this tool really recognize e-newsletter creation and growth.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were several of the initial marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s focused on designer development.
Because, any kind of designer understands, you require development to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the best e-newsletter pile (that ranges) usually suggests making use of numerous different tools to aid achieve one goal– one platform for your newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to set up referrals. It can get costly.
So when I learnt beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was free to begin using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material designer that desires a platform that allows them to send out personalized newsletters with or without needing to have an internet site.
One of the most effective e-newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or web content developer, you should seriously taking into consideration experimenting with beehiiv. It’s totally free to get started and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your checklist.
If you in fact wind up having to pay for beehiiv it’s probably a great indicator that individuals love reading your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a great system utilized by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own website and utilize the platform as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while producing an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to development. beehiiv permits you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing customers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv likewise offers you a website similar to Substack. However, if you have your very own site currently, you can additionally make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your site subscribers right to your beehiiv email list. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to enable people to register for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the versatility to take advantage of various marketing channels to obtain your newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a great Substack alternative.
How to begin utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Register for a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you access to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, development modification, analytics, external embed types, and a lot more. It’s a very charitable offering for those just starting (or for those looking for a new platform to move to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Embed A Name
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process 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 subscribers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that produce a name and URL for your newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your web site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll additionally select your brand design and colors to see to it your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have detailed details on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Begin composing,” “Articles,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Design,” and” Assess.” And at the very lower you’ll see the setups alternative.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot over), Start creating is where you produce and release e-newsletters, Posts is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter editions, Target market is where you can see who your clients are (and damage them down right into sections), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and development tutorials) and boosts to run ads, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you create your newsletter landing page and article template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of all of your admin things.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to begin writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting out, and have an idea you wish to blog about, I advise just mosting likely to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking “Start creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later– focus on the material first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and straightforward user interface for creating.
As soon as you start writing, you can maximize headings, add links, and design your web content just how you such as.
beehiiv offers you tons of alternatives for various kinds of content like video clips, links, images, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is also frequently launching item feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a whole lot more material features relying on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your setups and templates
Once you have a newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your email template and change some settings.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, give it a summary, add your logo, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to first time clients, and much more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify background colors, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, photo layouts, and more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever before solitary thing you can enhance with your email template since it’s a great deal. Simply try the system completely free and see it on your own!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it an excellent publishing system for any kind of e-newsletter creator.
Below are a few of the essential features you can locate with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing system. It makes it incredibly easy to create and send out emails. I stated above some of the things you can do with your settings and e-mail layout so I’ll save you some added analysis.
The thing to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s absolutely one of the much better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Site hosting
When you create a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you want) live on a web site. Think of it as a site for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and a location where individuals can register for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, give you a website. However, the free plan areas your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a custom-made domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is essential. After all, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv website or through embed types.
If you currently have an internet site, and desire people to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed form. This is what I use 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 3 various alternatives– a complete size, a repaired width, and a slim installed. I directly utilize the slim embed.
You can discover the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise an option for attribution monitoring if you wish to onward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– pretty neat.
However, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I’m sure the team is servicing updates for these, however I mentioned a couple of issues I had in the advantages and disadvantages section below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a service for creating a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your listing to forward your emails to friends and associates and if they get other individuals to sign up for your checklist, you can reward them. These benefits can be in whatever kind you want. I have actually seem numerous newsletter companies give rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your subscribers into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– offering you another opportunity for growing your e-mail checklist.
Nonetheless, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a much more premium plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this write-up.
Premium registrations
They claim all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 true fans. Subscription profits is most definitely a beast of its own. If you’re searching for a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “premium” issues of your e-newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be extremely lucrative depending upon what your e-newsletter needs to use. For example, Trends.co is a prominent premium e-newsletter that creates millions in revenue a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Data analytics
Among the things I love concerning beehiiv is how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber matter Beehiiv Embed A Name.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye sight on just how your newsletter is really doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that customer matter increase is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies four different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan offers you everything you require to begin and grow your newsletter (approximately 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, customized domain name, polls, and accessibility to premium subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you everything in the Grow plan with addition of priority support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are quite generous in my point of view.
For instance, if you have 100,000 clients you will pay around $329 monthly. In contrast to some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 monthly for the very same amount– making beehiiv an excellent Kit choice for many customers.
I’m uncertain just how the device business economics deal with this, however beehiiv is definitely less costly (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Obviously, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are several of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of selection:
Easy to establish and start sending out e-newsletters completely free.
Clean and contemporary client analytics.
Lots of versatility with e-mail layouts.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Create premium alternatives to generate income from.
Surveys.
To be honest, I have not seen another newsletter system that has been able to package all of these features together so well.
Yet of course, I do not intend to be prejudiced so I’m going to point out some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the disadvantages I’ve discovered while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom-made font styles.
I use Webflow as my web site building system of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to enter way too much detail why I enjoy Webflow a lot yet you can read my Webflow evaluation if you would love to find out more.
Today, there actually is no other method I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow website aside from using an iframe embed. I personally don’t like utilizing iframe’s because they often tend to slow down my internet site a little bit. Whenever a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last thing to load on the page. It’s very recognizable when you get on a slow net link. Yet I can navigate that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can’t utilize a normal Webflow kind (which I like using). There are methods around this by using a device like Zapier but that would certainly just include added expenses that I don’t require. To be sincere, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con but I thought I would mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much outweigh the disadvantages below. I’m likewise enthusiastic that Webflow will ultimately develop a much better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Overall, beehiiv is a fantastic solution for any person seeking to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter platform far outweighs many that are currently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you truly have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively economical wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your listing is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands each month.
Anyways, I do not compose evaluation articles commonly. I just do when I in fact use the tool myself and would suggest it to a close friend.
I hope you located some quality on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.