Over two years back, I was reading one of my favored email e-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 instantly began destroying Bullseye Beehiiv.
I wasn’t sure why I felt so emotional.
Being a permanent designer is difficult. I’m typically obtaining pitched different tools and solutions that do not appear to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional because I invested the last six months trying different email and newsletter platforms to assist construct my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some wonderful options for writing newsletters. But I couldn’t locate one that made me give a guaranteed “yes”.
The concern with several existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter platform that lets me completely customize my newsletter designs, makes it incredibly very easy to create and send out e-mails, and gives me tools that assist me assess metrics and obtain even more customers.
I think I have actually lastly discovered the best device.
However, I understand beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact right 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 very easy to design, create, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Developed by former employees at the popular e-newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist designers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to discuss my personal experience with beehiiv, the important things I like (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to ultimately select it as my newsletter platform of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months ago, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I’ve watched for a modern-day newsletter system for quite a long time currently. I’ve put things off hard when it pertained to lastly introducing my newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie systems. After that, Substack. And finally, I wound up using beehiiv.
I’m sure many newsletter makers look up to preferred newsletters with millions of clients– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I appreciated a great deal. They have great material, lots of customers, and a clever referral program that enables them to get even much more clients.
So, I took place a hunt to determine how these huge e-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 design that remains on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to address every one of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this device actually recognize newsletter creation and growth.” I questioned who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the very first marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I recognized this was going to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on designer development.
Due to the fact that, any designer knows, you need growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that scales) typically implies making use of numerous different tools to assist achieve one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to set up referrals. It can get expensive.
So when I learnt beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was totally free to start making use of, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content designer that desires a platform that enables them to send out custom e-newsletters with or without requiring to have an internet site.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or content developer, you must seriously thinking about trying beehiiv. It’s completely free to start and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you in fact end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly an excellent indication that people like reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is an excellent system used by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own internet site and utilize the platform as your all-in-one remedy for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv also offers you a website similar to Substack. But, if you have your very own website already, you can additionally make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site clients straight to your beehiiv email list. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable people to subscribe to your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the adaptability to utilize different marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack option.
Just how to start utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, offer you access to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, development customization, analytics, exterior embed types, and a lot more. It’s an extremely generous offering for those just starting out (or for those searching for a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding Bullseye Beehiiv
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your initial e-newsletter?”, “what other systems have you used?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and more.
You’ll then produce a name and link for your e-newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll also select your brand colors and design to make certain your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
When you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed information on how many sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Begin writing,” “Messages,” “Audience,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Style,” and” Examine.” And at the really bottom you’ll see the setups choice.
Dashboard is your main control center (screenshot over), Begin creating is where you produce and publish newsletters, Posts is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter editions, Audience is where you can watch who your customers are (and break them down into sectors), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run ads, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with ads, Design is where you make your newsletter landing page and post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of every one of your admin stuff.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re just starting, and have a concept you want to blog about, I advise just mosting likely to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking on “Start writing”.
You can modify your template and designing later– focus on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor supplies a tidy and easy to use user interface for writing.
When you start composing, you can enhance headings, add web links, and design your material just how you such as.
beehiiv provides you lots of options for various kinds of material like videos, web links, images, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is also constantly releasing product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a lot much more material features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
When you have a newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to create your email template and readjust some settings.
Right here, you can update the name of your newsletter, provide it a description, add your logo design, turn on or off a welcome email to very first time customers, and a lot more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify background colors, borders, spacing, font styles, photo layouts, and extra. I’m not going to experience ever before single point you can maximize with your e-mail template because it’s a great deal. Just check out the system completely free and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of impressive features that make it a wonderful publishing platform for any type of newsletter creator.
Below are several of the important features you can locate with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it extremely easy to write and send emails. I stated above a few of the important things you can do with your settings and email design so I’ll spare you some additional reading.
Things to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a really modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly among the much better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Web site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive on a site. Think about it as a web site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous issues of your newsletter, and an area where people can sign up for your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s practically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the cost-free one, provide you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan places your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a custom domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is very important. Besides, 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 through embed kinds.
If you already have a site, and desire people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed type. This is what I utilize on this web site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 different alternatives– a complete size, a fixed width, and a slim embed. I directly utilize the slim embed.
You can find the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise an alternative for attribution tracking if you want to onward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– rather neat.
However, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make certain the team is working with updates for these, yet I pointed out a couple of concerns I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is a solution for creating a referral program.
You can urge existing customers on your list to onward your e-mails to friends and associates and if they get other individuals to sign up for your list, you can compensate them. These rewards can be in whatever kind you want. I’ve seem numerous newsletter companies provide incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– offering you an additional method for expanding your email listing.
Nevertheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a more superior plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this post.
Premium subscriptions
They state all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 true followers. Subscription earnings is certainly a beast of its very own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” concerns of your newsletter that are only sent to paying clients. This can be really rewarding depending upon what your e-newsletter has to offer. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent costs newsletter that generates millions in profits a year merely by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Data analytics
One of the things I like concerning 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 prices and subscriber count Bullseye Beehiiv.
You get access to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that subscriber count rise is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (totally free) Launch plan provides you everything you need to get going and expand your newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, customized domain name, polls, and access to costs memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) gives you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of top priority assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather generous in my point of view.
As an example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 per month. Instead of some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would charge $679 monthly for the same amount– making beehiiv a great Kit option for lots of users.
I’m not sure how the system economics work with this, yet beehiiv is certainly more affordable (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Certainly, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are some of the pros and cons I have actually personally experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of choice:
Easy to establish and begin sending out newsletters totally free.
Clean and contemporary customer analytics.
Lots of flexibility with email styles.
Referral program feature.
Website hosting.
Create costs options to monetize.
Surveys.
To be truthful, I haven’t seen another e-newsletter system that has been able to package every one of these features together so well.
But certainly, I do not intend to be prejudiced so I’m going to mention some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the disadvantages I have actually located while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding customized typefaces.
I make use of Webflow as my internet site building platform of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much information why I love Webflow so much however you can review my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to learn more.
Today, there truly is no other method I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow website other than using an iframe embed. I directly don’t like making use of iframe’s since they tend to decrease my site a little bit. Every single time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last thing to fill on the web page. It’s really visible when you’re on a slow-moving web link. Yet I can navigate that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can’t make use of a regular Webflow type (which I like using). There are ways around this by using a tool like Zapier yet that would simply include extra prices that I do not require. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage but I believed I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much outweigh the disadvantages right here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will ultimately create a far better method to integrate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Overall, beehiiv is a terrific remedy for any person seeking to study the globe of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter platform far outweighs lots of that are currently 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 economical wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your checklist is unheard of. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t create review blog posts frequently. I just do when I really utilize the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a close friend.
I hope you found some clearness on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.