Over two years earlier, I read one of my preferred e-mail 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 started wrecking Can You Use Beehiiv For Free.
I had not been sure why I felt so psychological.
Being a permanent maker is tough. I’m frequently getting pitched different tools and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological since I invested the last six months experimenting with different e-mail and newsletter platforms to help build my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some terrific alternatives for creating newsletters. But I could not find one that made me offer a certain “yes”.
The problem with numerous existing newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter platform that lets me completely customize my newsletter layouts, makes it very simple to create and send out emails, and gives me devices that aid me evaluate metrics and get even more subscribers.
I believe I’ve finally located the ideal device.
Yet, I know beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it easy to design, create, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Developed by former employees at the famous e-newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist developers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this article, I’m going to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, things I love (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to ultimately go with it as my newsletter system of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a modern newsletter platform for quite time currently. I’ve hesitated hard when it concerned finally releasing my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie systems. Then, Substack. And lastly, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make certain many e-newsletter developers appreciate prominent newsletters with numerous customers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a whole lot. They have wonderful material, tons of customers, and a smart referral program that enables them to get even much more subscribers.
So, I went on a search to find out how these big e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get more customers? How do they produce a newsletter layout that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to respond to all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn the people that developed this tool really comprehend e-newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were several of the first marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on designer development.
Because, any maker recognizes, you require development to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And locating the appropriate e-newsletter pile (that scales) typically indicates using several different devices to aid accomplish one goal– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to set up recommendations. It can obtain costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did all of these points in one system, and it was cost-free to start making use of, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content designer that wants a system that enables them to send out personalized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
The most successful newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media business, startup, or material designer, you ought to seriously considering trying beehiiv. It’s absolutely cost-free to start and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your checklist.
If you actually end up having to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly a great indication that individuals love reading your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a wonderful platform used by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own web site and make use of the system as your all-in-one service for sending out emails (while producing an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv allows you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to get words out.
beehiiv also gives you an internet site similar to Substack. But, if you have your own web site already, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I utilize) to send your site customers straight to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable people to subscribe to your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to leverage different marketing networks to obtain your e-newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a great Substack option.
Exactly how to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software.
Enroll in a free plan
The first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will enable you to have up to 2,500 customers, give you accessibility to web site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advance customization, analytics, exterior embed kinds, and extra. It’s a really charitable offering for those simply starting out (or for those trying to find a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding Can You Use Beehiiv For Free
After creating an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any type of paying customers?”, and much more.
You’ll then develop a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally select your brand name design and colors to see to it your newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
As soon as you reach your main control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will have detailed info on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Start composing,” “Articles,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Monetize,” “Layout,” and” Analyze.” And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the setups option.
Dashboard is your primary control center (screenshot over), Begin creating is where you create and release e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Target market is where you can see who your subscribers are (and break them down 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 advertisements, Style is where you develop your newsletter landing page and message template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can manage every one of your admin stuff.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to begin creating, with little to no friction. If you’re just starting out, and have an idea you wish to write about, I suggest simply going to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking “Start creating”.
You can tweak your template and designing later– focus on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a clean and easy to use interface for writing.
Once you begin writing, you can enhance headings, include links, and style your web content how you such as.
beehiiv offers you lots of options for various sorts of web content like videos, web links, images, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is likewise continuously launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a lot a lot more material features relying on when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your e-mail template and change some settings.
Here, you can update the name of your newsletter, give it a description, add your logo, activate or off a welcome email to very first time subscribers, and much more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify history colors, boundaries, spacing, fonts, picture formats, and a lot more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever solitary thing you can maximize with your e-mail template since it’s a lot. Simply try out the platform free of charge and see it for yourself!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of impressive features that make it a great posting platform for any kind of newsletter designer.
Below are some of the crucial features you can locate with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform. It makes it very simple to write and send e-mails. I stated above some of things you can do with your settings and email style so I’ll spare you some added reading.
The thing to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s certainly one of the much better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive on a web site. Think about it as a site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and an area where individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s virtually comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the cost-free one, offer you a website. However, the free plan locations your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a personalized domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is very important. After all, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your newsletter right from your beehiiv website or with embed kinds.
If you currently have a site, and want people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to use an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this web site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have three different options– a complete size, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim installed.
You can discover the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise a choice for attribution tracking if you wish to forward UTM criteria for tracking purposes– rather cool.
However, there are a couple of features I desire beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make sure the team is working with updates for these, but I pointed out 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 newsletter system, is a solution for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing subscribers on your checklist to forward your emails to close friends and colleagues and if they get other people to sign up for your checklist, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually seem lots of newsletter companies provide incentives in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– giving you one more method for growing your email checklist.
Nevertheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a more exceptional plan. I’ll go over all the plans later on in this write-up.
Costs registrations
They say all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Subscription revenue is most definitely a beast of its very own. If you’re looking for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” issues of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying customers. This can be extremely profitable depending on what your newsletter needs to supply. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent costs newsletter that creates millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Information analytics
Among the things I enjoy about 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 client matter Can You Use Beehiiv For Free.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye sight on exactly how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that client count rise is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses four different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (totally free) Launch plan provides you everything you need to begin and grow your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom domain name, polls, and accessibility to premium memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you every little thing in the Grow plan with enhancement of concern support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly generous in my opinion.
As an example, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 per month. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 each month for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv a terrific Kit alternative for numerous customers.
I’m not sure how the system business economics service this, but beehiiv is certainly more affordable (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Obviously, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are some of the pros and cons I’ve directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of choice:
Easy to establish and start sending out newsletters completely free.
Clean and contemporary subscriber analytics.
Great deals of adaptability with e-mail styles.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Develop costs choices to generate income from.
Polls.
To be straightforward, I have not seen one more e-newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
Yet obviously, I do not intend to be prejudiced so I’m going to point out some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the cons I have actually located while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding customized font styles.
I use Webflow as my website building platform of selection (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much detail why I like Webflow a lot yet you can review my Webflow testimonial if you want to learn more.
Now, there really is no other means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site besides using an iframe embed. I directly don’t like making use of iframe’s since they have a tendency to decrease my site a little bit. Every time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last point to pack on the page. It’s extremely obvious when you’re on a slow-moving web link. Yet I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can’t make use of a regular Webflow type (which I love utilizing). There are methods around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier yet that would certainly simply include additional costs that I don’t need. To be honest, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con but I believed I would state it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far exceed the disadvantages here. I’m additionally confident that Webflow will eventually produce a much better method to integrate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Generally, beehiiv is a wonderful solution for any individual looking to study the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter platform far outweighs many that are presently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise fairly low-cost for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not create review posts frequently. I only do when I in fact use the device myself and would advise it to a buddy.
I wish you found some clarity on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.