Over 2 years back, I read among my favorite email e-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 immediately began destroying Beehiiv FAQs.
I wasn’t certain why I really felt so psychological.
Being a full time creator is tough. I’m often getting pitched different tools and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional because I spent the last 6 months checking out various email and e-newsletter systems to assist develop my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some fantastic options for composing newsletters. However I could not find one that made me give a definite “yes”.
The issue with many existing e-newsletter systems is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter platform that lets me fully customize my newsletter layouts, makes it super simple to write and send out emails, and offers me tools that help me examine metrics and get more customers.
I think I have actually ultimately found the best device.
Yet, I know beehiiv might not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually 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 style, write, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former staff members at the well-known e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to aid designers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to finally select it as my e-newsletter platform of option.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I have actually watched for a modern-day newsletter system for rather time currently. I’ve put things off hard when it involved ultimately launching my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a few various other indie systems. Then, Substack. And lastly, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I make sure lots of e-newsletter creators look up to prominent e-newsletters with countless clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a great deal. They have terrific content, lots of clients, and a clever referral program that allows them to get even much more clients.
So, I took place a search to identify exactly how these huge newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more customers? How do they develop a newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to answer every one of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn the people that developed this device actually understand e-newsletter creation and development.” I examined who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the very first marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my mind took off.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s focused on maker growth.
Because, any type of maker recognizes, you need development to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And finding the ideal e-newsletter pile (that scales) typically suggests making use of multiple different tools to aid attain one objective– one system for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one platform to set up references. It can obtain costly.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, 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 designer that wants a platform that enables them to send out custom-made e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
The most effective newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media business, startup, or material creator, you should seriously considering trying out beehiiv. It’s absolutely complimentary to begin and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 subscribers on your list.
If you in fact wind up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely an excellent indicator that people love reading your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a terrific system used by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your very own website and utilize the platform as your all-in-one option for sending out e-mails (while developing an archive of previous concerns).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to obtain words out.
beehiiv likewise offers you an internet site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your own site already, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I utilize) to send your site subscribers directly to your beehiiv email list. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to enable individuals to register for your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to utilize different marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack choice.
Exactly how to begin using beehiiv email marketing software program.
Sign up for a free plan
The primary step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will certainly permit you to have up to 2,500 customers, give you accessibility to website hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance customization, analytics, outside embed types, and more. It’s a very charitable offering for those simply starting out (or for those seeking a new platform to move to).
Onboarding Beehiiv FAQs
After producing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your initial e-newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you utilized?”, “do you have any type of paying customers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that develop a name and URL for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your internet site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally choose your brand colors and design to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
Once you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will have described info on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Start creating,” “Messages,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Monetize,” “Style,” and” Evaluate.” And at the very lower you’ll see the setups option.
Control panel is your major nerve center (screenshot over), Beginning writing is where you develop and release newsletters, Messages is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter editions, Audience is where you can see who your subscribers are (and damage them down into sections), Expand is where you have access 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 ads, Design is where you develop your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle every one of your admin stuff.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin composing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just starting out, and have a concept you intend to discuss, I advise just mosting likely to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking on “Begin creating”.
You can modify your template and designing later– concentrate on the content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor supplies a tidy and easy to use user interface for creating.
As soon as you begin writing, you can enhance headings, include web links, and style your content how you such as.
beehiiv provides you lots of options for various types of material like video clips, links, images, and much more.
The group at beehiiv is additionally continuously launching product feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a whole lot extra material features relying on when you read this.
Maximizing 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 adjust some setups.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, give it a summary, add your logo, switch on or off a welcome email to first time customers, and much more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify background shades, borders, spacing, font styles, image layouts, and more. I’m not going to undergo ever before solitary thing you can enhance with your email template since it’s a lot. Just check out the platform completely free and see it for yourself!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it a great publishing system for any type of newsletter maker.
Here are several of the crucial features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it incredibly very easy to create and send emails. I pointed out over several of the things you can do with your setups and e-mail style so I’ll save you some additional reading.
Things to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the much better email editors I have actually ever written in.
Site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you want) reside on a website. Think of it as a website for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and a location where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s virtually comparable to that.
All plans, including the totally free one, give you a website. However, the free plan locations your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a customized domain to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is very important. Besides, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can sign up for your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv web site or with embed forms.
If you currently have a web site, and want individuals to register for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed form. This is what I utilize on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three various alternatives– a complete size, a taken care of size, and a slim embed. I personally use the slim installed.
You can locate the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s additionally an alternative for attribution monitoring if you want to onward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– pretty neat.
However, there are a couple of features I desire beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I’m sure the group is servicing updates for these, yet I pointed out a couple of problems I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a solution for producing a referral program.
You can urge existing customers on your checklist to ahead your e-mails to pals and coworkers and if they get other individuals to sign up for your listing, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever form you want. I have actually seem lots of e-newsletter business provide rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your subscribers into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– giving you another opportunity for growing your e-mail list.
Nevertheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to an extra exceptional plan. I’ll look at all the plans later in this post.
Costs memberships
They claim all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real followers. Registration income is certainly a beast of its very own. If you’re trying to find a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” problems of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying subscribers. This can be extremely lucrative depending upon what your e-newsletter needs to offer. As an example, Trends.co is a popular costs e-newsletter that creates millions in revenue a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Information analytics
Among the important things I enjoy concerning beehiiv is just how clean and easy the analytics are. You get real-time date on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client count Beehiiv FAQs.
You obtain access to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye view on exactly how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that subscriber matter increase is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan provides you every little thing you require to start and grow your e-newsletter (approximately 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, customized domain name, polls, and accessibility to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) gives you whatever in the Grow plan with addition of top priority support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are quite charitable in my opinion.
For instance, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. Instead of some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 monthly for the exact same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit alternative for lots of users.
I’m uncertain how the system business economics work on this, yet beehiiv is definitely less costly (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Obviously, with every platform, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I have actually directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of option:
Easy to set up and start sending newsletters completely free.
Tidy and modern-day customer analytics.
Lots of flexibility with email layouts.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Develop costs alternatives to generate income from.
Surveys.
To be straightforward, I have not seen an additional newsletter system that has actually been able to package all of these features together so well.
Yet of course, I don’t intend to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to mention some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Right here are several of the cons I have actually located while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including personalized fonts.
I make use of Webflow as my web site building platform of selection (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not going to enter way too much detail why I love Webflow so much yet you can review my Webflow testimonial if you want to discover more.
Right now, there truly is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website besides utilizing an iframe embed. I personally don’t such as using iframe’s because they have a tendency to decrease my website a little bit. Every single time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last thing to fill on the web page. It’s extremely obvious when you’re on a sluggish web connection. Yet I can get around that.
The main gripe I have is that I can’t use a routine Webflow kind (which I like using). There are methods around this by using a tool like Zapier but that would certainly simply include added expenses that I do not require. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con yet I thought I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much exceed the disadvantages here. I’m likewise enthusiastic that Webflow will ultimately develop a much better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
In general, beehiiv is a wonderful solution for anybody wanting to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this newsletter platform far surpasses lots of 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 likewise fairly economical wherefore they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your listing is unheard of. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well right into the thousands each month.
Anyways, I don’t create testimonial messages usually. I just do when I really make use of the device myself and would recommend it to a pal.
I wish you found some clarity on whether beehiiv is a good system for you.