Over two years earlier, I was reading one of my favored e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked on it and quickly started destroying Footnotes in Beehiiv.
I wasn’t sure why I felt so psychological.
Being a full-time creator is difficult. I’m often obtaining pitched different tools and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional since I spent the last 6 months trying different email and e-newsletter systems to assist build my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some great alternatives for composing e-newsletters. But I could not find one that made me give a definite “yes”.
The concern with many existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me fully tailor my newsletter designs, makes it incredibly easy to write and send out e-mails, and provides me devices that help me examine metrics and get even more clients.
I assume I have actually finally found the ideal device.
But, I understand beehiiv might not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it easy to design, create, send out, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former workers at the famous newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist makers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking lots of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this short article, I’m mosting likely to describe my personal experience with beehiiv, the important things I like (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to ultimately opt for it as my newsletter system of choice.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I have actually watched for a modern e-newsletter platform for fairly a long time currently. I have actually put things off hard when it came to finally introducing my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a couple of other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make sure numerous e-newsletter designers respect preferred newsletters with numerous clients– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a lot. They have excellent content, lots of clients, and a clever referral program that permits them to get back at a lot more subscribers.
So, I went on a quest to figure out just how these huge e-newsletters established their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more customers? How do they create a newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to address all of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that built this device actually comprehend e-newsletter development and growth.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s focused on maker growth.
Because, any kind of developer knows, you require growth to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the ideal e-newsletter pile (that ranges) usually suggests using several various tools to help accomplish one goal– one system for your e-newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one platform to set up recommendations. It can get pricey.
So when I found out beehiiv did every one of these points in one platform, and it was free to begin using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material developer that desires a platform that permits them to send out custom-made newsletters with or without needing to have a site.
The most successful newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media business, start-up, or content creator, you must seriously considering trying beehiiv. It’s completely cost-free to start and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you in fact wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a good indicator that people love reading your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is an excellent system utilized by countless independent authors. With Substack you get your very own internet site and utilize the system as your all-in-one remedy for sending out e-mails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, even more design flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to get the word out.
beehiiv likewise provides you a site similar to Substack. However, if you have your own site already, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your site subscribers right to your beehiiv email list. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to take advantage of different marketing networks to get your newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a great Substack choice.
Just how to start utilizing 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 the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, provide you accessibility to website hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, development modification, analytics, outside embed types, and a lot more. It’s an extremely generous offering for those just beginning (or for those searching for a new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding Footnotes in Beehiiv
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and more.
You’ll then create a name and link for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site link could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll also pick your brand colors and design to ensure your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
As soon as you reach your major dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have described info on how many sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Begin writing,” “Articles,” “Audience,” “Grow,” “Monetize,” “Design,” and” Assess.” And at the really lower you’ll see the setups choice.
Dashboard is your main control center (screenshot over), Begin composing is where you produce and publish newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can view who your customers are (and break them down right into segments), Grow 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 newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you design your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle all of your admin things.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin composing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply beginning, and have an idea you wish to write about, I suggest just going to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking on “Begin composing”.
You can tweak your template and designing later on– focus on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and straightforward user interface for writing.
As soon as you begin composing, you can maximize headings, include links, and style your web content how you such as.
beehiiv provides you tons of options for different sorts of web content like videos, links, images, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is also regularly releasing item feature and updates so I make sure there will be a lot much more content features depending on when you read this.
Optimizing your setups and templates
Once you have a newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to make your e-mail template and change some setups.
Below, you can update the name of your newsletter, give it a description, add your logo design, 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 design.
You can modify background colors, boundaries, spacing, font styles, photo formats, and extra. I’m not mosting likely to experience ever before solitary thing you can maximize with your email template because it’s a lot. Just check out the platform absolutely free and see it on your own!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it an excellent publishing system for any e-newsletter developer.
Right here are a few of the crucial features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing system. It makes it super simple to compose and send e-mails. I discussed above a few of the important things you can do with your settings and email layout so I’ll spare you some added reading.
Things to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the better e-mail editors I have actually ever before written in.
Site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a site. Think of it as a site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and an area where people can sign up for your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s practically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, provide you an internet site. Nevertheless, the free plan areas your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a personalized domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is essential. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv site or via embed types.
If you already have an internet site, and want individuals to register for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed form. This is what I utilize on this site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 different choices– a full size, a fixed size, and a slim embed. I personally make use of the slim installed.
You can locate the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise an option for attribution tracking if you want to forward UTM parameters for tracking functions– quite neat.
However, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I’m sure the team is servicing updates for these, yet I stated a couple of concerns I had in the advantages and disadvantages area listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is a service for developing a referral program.
You can encourage existing subscribers on your checklist to ahead your emails to close friends and associates and if they get other individuals to subscribe to your checklist, you can award them. These rewards can be in whatever form you want. I’ve seem numerous newsletter business provide rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your subscribers into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– giving you an additional method for growing your e-mail checklist.
Nevertheless, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll go over all the plans later on in this post.
Premium memberships
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership income is certainly 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 develop “costs” concerns of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying subscribers. This can be extremely profitable depending upon what your newsletter needs to provide. For example, Trends.co is a popular premium e-newsletter that generates millions in earnings a year just by having pay-only newsletter material.
Data analytics
Among things I enjoy regarding beehiiv is exactly how tidy and basic the analytics are. You get real-time day on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client count Footnotes in Beehiiv.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on just how your e-newsletter is in fact doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that customer count increase is definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan provides you every little thing you require to get started and grow your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, custom domain name, surveys, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of concern assistance and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are quite generous in my viewpoint.
As an example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. Rather than some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would charge $679 per month for the same amount– making beehiiv an excellent Kit option for several customers.
I’m not exactly sure just how the device economics service this, but beehiiv is most definitely less costly (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Of course, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of option:
Easy to set up and start sending out newsletters for free.
Tidy and modern-day customer analytics.
Great deals of adaptability with email designs.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Develop premium options to monetize.
Surveys.
To be sincere, I have not seen an additional newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
However obviously, I do not want to be biased so I’m going to state some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the cons I have actually discovered while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding personalized font styles.
I utilize Webflow as my web site structure system of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in excessive detail why I like Webflow a lot however you can review my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to discover more.
Now, there truly is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website besides utilizing an iframe embed. I personally don’t like utilizing iframe’s because they tend to decrease my site a bit. Every single time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last point to load on the web page. It’s very obvious when you get on a slow web link. However I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can’t use a routine Webflow kind (which I like using). There are means around this by using a tool like Zapier however that would simply add added costs that I don’t require. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage however I believed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much surpass the disadvantages below. I’m also enthusiastic that Webflow will ultimately create a far better means to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Overall, beehiiv is a fantastic solution for anyone seeking to study the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter system much surpasses numerous that are currently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally relatively economical for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is unheard of. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I do not create testimonial messages often. I only do when I really make use of the device myself and would certainly advise it to a friend.
I wish you located some clearness on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.