Over two years ago, I was reading among my favored email e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked on it and instantaneously began wrecking Beehiiv Recommendations.
I had not been certain why I felt so emotional.
Being a full-time maker is tough. I’m often getting pitched different devices and services that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional due to the fact that I spent the last six months trying different email and e-newsletter systems to help construct my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some great options for creating e-newsletters. Yet I could not locate one that made me give a precise “yes”.
The issue with many existing newsletter systems is that they do not feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me fully personalize my newsletter styles, makes it very easy to create and send emails, and offers me devices that help me analyze metrics and get more subscribers.
I assume I have actually finally located the right tool.
Yet, I know beehiiv may not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it very easy to style, write, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Developed by former employees at the famous newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to aid makers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking lots of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this write-up, I’m mosting likely to describe my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly select it as my newsletter platform of choice.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern-day newsletter system for rather time now. I have actually put things off hard when it pertained to finally launching my e-newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few various other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And finally, I ended up making use of beehiiv.
I make sure many newsletter creators look up to popular e-newsletters with countless clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I appreciated a whole lot. They have excellent material, tons of subscribers, and a clever referral program that permits them to get even much more subscribers.
So, I went on a hunt to figure out exactly how these huge e-newsletters established their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get even more subscribers? How do they create an e-newsletter style that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to address every one of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that developed this device actually understand newsletter creation and development.” I questioned who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the first marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s focused on designer growth.
Because, any type of maker recognizes, you need development to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that ranges) typically suggests utilizing numerous different devices to aid achieve one objective– one system for your e-newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one system to set up recommendations. It can obtain costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was cost-free to start using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content developer that wants a platform that permits them to send custom e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to construct and scale their newsletters. beehiiv focuses on offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, startup, or content designer, you need to seriously thinking about trying beehiiv. It’s absolutely free to start and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you really end up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly a great sign that people love reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a great platform utilized by hundreds of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your own site and make use of the platform as your all-in-one service for sending out emails (while producing an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to obtain words out.
beehiiv likewise provides you a web site similar to Substack. But, if you have your very own site currently, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site clients directly to your beehiiv email listing. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to enable individuals to sign up for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the versatility to leverage different marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv an excellent Substack alternative.
How to begin making use of beehiiv email marketing software application.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Start trial” button on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you accessibility to internet site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advancement customization, analytics, outside embed forms, and extra. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those just starting (or for those trying to find a new system to move to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Recommendations
After producing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that produce a name and link for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your website link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll likewise pick your brand colors and design to see to it your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
As soon as you reach your major control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will have detailed information on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Begin writing,” “Posts,” “Target market,” “Grow,” “Generate income from,” “Design,” and” Assess.” And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the setups choice.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot over), Start composing is where you develop and publish newsletters, Posts is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Audience is where you can view who your subscribers are (and damage them down into segments), Expand 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 newsletter with advertisements, Style is where you develop your e-newsletter landing page and message template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can manage all of your admin stuff.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start creating, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just beginning, and have an idea you want to cover, I recommend simply going to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning composing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– focus on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and straightforward user interface for writing.
Once you start composing, you can optimize headings, add web links, and style your web content how you such as.
beehiiv gives you tons of alternatives for various types of web content like videos, web links, images, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is likewise frequently releasing item feature and updates so I’m 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 an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to make your e-mail template and change some setups.
Here, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, give it a description, add your logo, activate or off a welcome e-mail to very first time clients, and extra.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify history shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, picture styles, and extra. I’m not going to go through ever before single thing 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 amazing features that make it a terrific posting platform for any e-newsletter maker.
Below are several of the necessary features you can locate with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting platform. It makes it super simple to create and send e-mails. I discussed over some of the things you can do with your setups and email layout so I’ll save you some additional analysis.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s absolutely among the better email editors I have actually ever written in.
Internet site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive on a website. Think of it as a website for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your newsletter, and a location where individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s virtually similar to that.
All plans, including the complimentary one, offer you an internet site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a custom-made domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting clients is very important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can sign up for your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv site or with embed types.
If you already have a web site, and want individuals to sign up for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to utilize an embed type. This is what I make use of 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 forms, you have three various alternatives– a complete size, a taken care of size, and a slim installed. I personally use the slim embed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your setups.
There’s also an option for attribution monitoring if you want to onward UTM criteria for tracking functions– pretty neat.
However, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make sure the group is servicing updates for these, yet I stated a couple of problems I had in the pros and cons section below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter platform, is a service for producing a referral program.
You can urge existing customers on your listing to ahead your emails to good friends and colleagues and if they obtain other individuals to subscribe to your list, you can reward them. These incentives can be in whatever type you desire. I have actually appear lots of e-newsletter business offer benefits in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– providing you one more avenue for expanding your e-mail checklist.
Nonetheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a much more premium plan. I’ll review all the plans later in this write-up.
Premium registrations
They claim all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Subscription income is certainly a monster of its own. If you’re searching for a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” concerns of your newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be very financially rewarding depending upon what your newsletter has to use. For example, Trends.co is a prominent costs newsletter that generates millions in profits a year merely by having pay-only newsletter content.
Information analytics
Among the important things I love concerning beehiiv is exactly how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client matter Beehiiv Recommendations.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye sight on how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that client matter rise is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (totally free) Launch plan gives you whatever you require to begin and grow your newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, personalized domain, surveys, and access to costs memberships. 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 removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather generous in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 each month. As opposed to some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the same amount– making beehiiv a great Kit option for lots of users.
I’m unsure just how the device business economics deal with this, however beehiiv is definitely cheaper (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every system, it has its pros and cons. Here are several of the pros and cons I’ve personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of selection:
Easy to establish and begin sending newsletters free of charge.
Clean and modern-day subscriber analytics.
Great deals of versatility with e-mail designs.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Create premium options to monetize.
Polls.
To be sincere, I have not seen an additional newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package every one of these features together so well.
Yet of course, I do not want to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to state some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are several of the disadvantages I have actually discovered while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom fonts.
I use Webflow as my site building platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not going to enter way too much detail why I love Webflow a lot but you can review my Webflow evaluation if you want to learn more.
Now, there actually is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site apart from making use of an iframe embed. I directly don’t like using iframe’s since they have a tendency to reduce my internet site a bit. Every time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last point to load on the page. It’s extremely visible when you’re on a slow internet link. But I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can not use a routine Webflow form (which I enjoy utilizing). There are means around this by using a tool like Zapier however that would certainly just add added prices that I do not require. To be sincere, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con but I assumed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much surpass the disadvantages below. I’m additionally confident that Webflow will ultimately produce a much better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
On the whole, beehiiv is a great service for anybody seeking to study the globe of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this newsletter platform far surpasses several that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you really have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively affordable of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your listing is unusual. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not write evaluation posts commonly. I only do when I in fact make use of the tool myself and would suggest it to a good friend.
I wish you found some quality on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent system for you.