Over two years ago, I read one of my preferred email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked it and quickly began tearing up Beehiiv Free Trial.
I had not been sure why I really felt so psychological.
Being a full-time creator is tough. I’m often obtaining pitched various devices and services that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological due to the fact that I invested the last six months checking out different e-mail and newsletter systems to aid develop my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific choices for writing newsletters. However I could not discover one that made me give a certain “yes”.
The concern with numerous existing newsletter systems is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter system that lets me completely personalize my newsletter designs, makes it extremely easy to create and send e-mails, and provides me devices that assist me analyze metrics and get even more customers.
I think I’ve ultimately discovered the appropriate device.
Yet, I know 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 newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it easy to design, compose, send out, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by previous workers at the popular e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help makers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking lots of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m going to discuss my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to lastly choose it as my e-newsletter system of option.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I mistakenly came across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I’ve watched for a contemporary newsletter system for rather some time now. I’ve postponed hard when it came to finally releasing my newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie systems. After that, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up using beehiiv.
I’m sure numerous newsletter creators admire prominent newsletters with millions of subscribers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I appreciated a whole lot. They have excellent content, lots of customers, and a creative referral program that enables them to get back at much more clients.
So, I went on a search to figure out exactly how these huge newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more customers? How do they create an e-newsletter style that stays on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to address every one of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn the people that constructed this device truly understand newsletter development and growth.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were some of the first marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter system. One that’s focused on designer growth.
Because, any kind of designer recognizes, you need growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the appropriate newsletter stack (that ranges) frequently indicates using several various devices to assist attain one objective– one system for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can get costly.
So when I found out beehiiv did every one of these things in one platform, and it was totally free to begin using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material maker that desires a platform that allows them to send out personalized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or web content creator, you should seriously taking into consideration trying beehiiv. It’s totally complimentary to start and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your list.
If you actually wind up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s probably a good sign that individuals like reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a terrific platform made use of by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you get your very own internet site and make use of the system as your all-in-one solution for sending out e-mails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing clients to obtain the word out.
beehiiv also gives you an internet site comparable to Substack. However, if you have your very own site currently, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I utilize) to send your site clients right to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Performance to enable people to register for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to utilize different marketing channels to get your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a great Substack choice.
Just how to begin utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Register for a free plan
The very first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will certainly permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you accessibility to website hosting, a newsletter CMS, advancement modification, analytics, exterior embed forms, and extra. It’s a very charitable offering for those just starting (or for those looking for a new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Free Trial
After producing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you used?”, “do you have any kind of paying clients?”, and extra.
You’ll then develop a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your website link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally pick your brand name colors and design to make sure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your major control panel, 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 writing,” “Blog posts,” “Audience,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Style,” and” Evaluate.” And at the really bottom you’ll see the settings alternative.
Control panel is your main control center (screenshot above), Start creating is where you produce and publish e-newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter versions, Audience is where you can see who your customers are (and break them down right into sectors), Expand 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 ads, Design is where you design your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle all of your admin things.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply beginning, and have an idea you want to blog about, I suggest just mosting likely to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking “Begin composing”.
You can modify your template and styling later on– focus on the material first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and straightforward interface for writing.
As soon as you begin composing, you can optimize headings, add links, and style your web content how you such as.
beehiiv provides you tons of options for different types of material like video clips, web links, pictures, and more.
The group at beehiiv is additionally frequently releasing item feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a lot extra content features depending upon when you read this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to design your email template and change some settings.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a summary, include your logo, activate or off a welcome e-mail to first time clients, and much more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify history shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, image layouts, and a lot more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever solitary point you can optimize with your email template due to the fact that it’s a lot. Simply try out the system completely free and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of outstanding features that make it a wonderful publishing platform for any type of newsletter designer.
Here are some of the crucial features you can locate with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting platform. It makes it incredibly simple to compose and send out emails. I stated over a few of things you can do with your setups and email style so I’ll spare you some additional reading.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually contemporary and minimalistic feeling. It’s absolutely among the much better email editors I’ve ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you desire) survive an internet site. Think of it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and a location where people can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s virtually similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the complimentary one, give you a site. Nonetheless, the free plan areas your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a personalized domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is necessary. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv site or via embed forms.
If you currently have a web site, and desire people to register for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed type. This is what I utilize on this site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have three different alternatives– a complete size, a dealt with size, and a slim embed. I directly make use of the slim installed.
You can locate the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s also an alternative for acknowledgment tracking if you want to forward UTM criteria for tracking functions– rather neat.
However, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make sure the group is working with updates for these, however I mentioned a few worries I had in the advantages and disadvantages section listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is an option for creating a referral program.
You can motivate existing subscribers on your checklist to ahead your e-mails to good friends and coworkers and if they get other people to subscribe to your checklist, you can reward them. These incentives can be in whatever type you want. I’ve seem lots of newsletter firms provide benefits in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients right into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– offering you another avenue for expanding your e-mail list.
However, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll review all the plans later on in this write-up.
Premium memberships
They state all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 true fans. Subscription income is definitely a monster of its own. If you’re searching for a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” issues of your e-newsletter that are only sent to paying clients. This can be very financially rewarding depending upon what your newsletter has to offer. For instance, Trends.co is a popular costs e-newsletter that creates millions in income a year merely by having pay-only newsletter material.
Information analytics
One of the important things I like regarding beehiiv is just how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber matter Beehiiv Free Trial.
You get access to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is in fact doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that client matter increase is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan provides you whatever you need to begin and grow your newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain, surveys, and access to costs registrations. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) gives you whatever in the Grow plan with addition of priority support and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather generous in my viewpoint.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 monthly. Rather than some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 per month for the same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for several customers.
I’m not sure how the system economics work with this, yet beehiiv is certainly less expensive (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Here are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I have actually directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of selection:
Easy to set up and begin sending newsletters totally free.
Clean and modern subscriber analytics.
Great deals of adaptability with email designs.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Develop premium alternatives to monetize.
Polls.
To be truthful, I have not seen one more newsletter system that has actually had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
However obviously, I do not wish to be prejudiced so I’m going to point out some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Right here are several of the disadvantages I’ve discovered while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including custom-made typefaces.
I make use of Webflow as my site structure system of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much detail why I like Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow review if you wish to learn more.
Right now, there truly is no other way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow site other than utilizing an iframe embed. I directly don’t such as utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they often tend to reduce my site a bit. Every time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last thing to fill on the web page. It’s really obvious when you get on a slow-moving net connection. However I can navigate that.
The major complaint I have is that I can not make use of a normal Webflow form (which I like using). There are methods around this by using a tool like Zapier however that would certainly simply include added expenses that I do not require. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con however I thought I would state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far exceed the cons right here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will ultimately produce a far better means to integrate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Generally, beehiiv is a great remedy for anyone looking to dive into the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter system much outweighs several that are presently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you actually have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise fairly low-cost for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist is uncommon. If you were to have an e-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 write review blog posts usually. I only do when I actually make use of the tool myself and would suggest it to a close friend.
I hope you located some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent system for you.