Over 2 years back, I was reading among my favorite email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked on it and quickly began destroying Is Beehiiv or Substack Better.
I wasn’t certain why I felt so emotional.
Being a full time maker is tough. I’m commonly getting pitched various tools and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional since I spent the last 6 months experimenting with various email and e-newsletter platforms to assist develop my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some excellent alternatives for creating newsletters. Yet I could not find one that made me provide a certain “yes”.
The problem with several existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter system that lets me completely tailor my e-newsletter layouts, makes it extremely very easy to create and send emails, and offers me tools that aid me examine metrics and obtain even more customers.
I believe I’ve ultimately located the best device.
Yet, I recognize beehiiv may not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it very easy to style, create, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by previous staff members at the renowned e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help creators launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking lots of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this post, I’m going to explain my individual experience with beehiiv, the important things I enjoy (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to ultimately go with it as my e-newsletter system of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I unintentionally came across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern-day e-newsletter system for rather some time now. I have actually procrastinated hard when it pertained to ultimately introducing my e-newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a couple of various other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And finally, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I make sure many newsletter creators admire preferred newsletters with countless clients– I know I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a great deal. They have great material, lots of subscribers, and a smart referral program that enables them to get back at much more subscribers.
So, I took place a search to determine exactly how these big e-newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more subscribers? How do they develop an e-newsletter design that remains on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to respond to all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that developed this tool really comprehend e-newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the first marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I recognized this was going to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s focused on designer development.
Due to the fact that, any creator knows, you require development to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And finding the right newsletter pile (that scales) often implies making use of numerous various devices to assist accomplish one objective– one system for your e-newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can obtain pricey.
So when I discovered beehiiv did all of these points in one system, and it was complimentary to begin utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material designer that wants a system that enables them to send out custom newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv focuses on providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, startup, or content developer, you must seriously thinking about trying beehiiv. It’s totally complimentary to begin and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 subscribers on your listing.
If you in fact end up having to pay for beehiiv it’s most likely an excellent sign that individuals enjoy reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is an excellent platform used by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own website and make use of the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv permits you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to obtain words out.
beehiiv likewise gives you a web site comparable to Substack. However, if you have your very own site currently, you can likewise use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your site subscribers straight to your beehiiv e-mail list. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Performance to enable individuals to sign up for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the adaptability to leverage different marketing channels to obtain your e-newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a terrific Substack option.
Just how to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software.
Sign up for a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, provide you access to website hosting, a newsletter CMS, breakthrough personalization, analytics, external embed forms, and more. It’s a really charitable offering for those simply starting out (or for those searching for a new system to move to).
Onboarding Is Beehiiv or Substack Better
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any kind of paying clients?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that develop a name and link for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your website link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll likewise select your brand colors and design to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed information on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Beginning writing,” “Messages,” “Target market,” “Grow,” “Monetize,” “Style,” and” Assess.” And at the really bottom you’ll see the settings alternative.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot over), Begin writing is where you develop and release e-newsletters, Posts is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Target market is where you can watch who your customers are (and break them down into sections), 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 ads, Style is where you make your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of every one of your admin stuff.
Creating your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to start composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply beginning, and have an idea you intend to write about, I recommend just mosting likely to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking on “Start composing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– concentrate on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a clean and straightforward interface for creating.
Once you start creating, you can maximize headings, include links, and style your web content how you like.
beehiiv gives you lots of choices for various sorts of content like videos, links, photos, and more.
The group at beehiiv is additionally frequently releasing item feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a whole lot extra content features depending upon when you read this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to develop your e-mail template and adjust some settings.
Right 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 first time clients, and much more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify history shades, borders, spacing, fonts, picture formats, and a lot more. I’m not going to experience ever single point you can enhance with your e-mail template since it’s a lot. Simply try out the platform totally free and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of fantastic features that make it a terrific posting system for any newsletter maker.
Below are a few of the important features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing platform. It makes it very simple to create and send e-mails. I discussed over a few of the things you can do with your setups and email layout so I’ll save you some extra analysis.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely among the better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you desire) survive on a website. Consider it as a website for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and a location where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, including the free one, give you a website. Nonetheless, the free plan areas your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to include a custom-made domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is very important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter straight from your beehiiv website or with embed kinds.
If you already have a web site, and want people to subscribe to your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to make use of an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this web site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 different choices– a full size, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I personally make use of the slim embed.
You can discover the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally an alternative for attribution monitoring if you intend to forward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– rather neat.
Nonetheless, 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 few issues I had in the benefits and drawbacks area below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a solution for producing a referral program.
You can urge existing subscribers on your list to onward your e-mails to close friends and coworkers and if they obtain other individuals to subscribe to your listing, you can reward them. These benefits can be in whatever type you want. I’ve seem lots of newsletter business offer incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your clients into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you one more avenue for expanding your email checklist.
However, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll review all the plans later in this short article.
Premium subscriptions
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true fans. Subscription income is most definitely a monster of its very own. If you’re looking for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” issues of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying clients. This can be really financially rewarding depending on what your e-newsletter needs to use. As an example, Trends.co is a preferred premium newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only newsletter material.
Information analytics
One of things I like concerning beehiiv is how clean and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer count Is Beehiiv or Substack Better.
You obtain access to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that customer count go up is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you everything you need to get started and grow your e-newsletter (as much as 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, customized domain name, polls, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you everything in the Grow plan with addition of priority assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my viewpoint.
For example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 each month. In contrast to some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 monthly for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv a great Kit alternative for many users.
I’m not sure just how the unit business economics service this, yet beehiiv is absolutely less costly (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Here are some of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of option:
Easy to establish and start sending e-newsletters free of charge.
Tidy and contemporary customer analytics.
Great deals of flexibility with email styles.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Create premium alternatives to monetize.
Polls.
To be sincere, I have not seen an additional e-newsletter system that has actually been able to package all of these features together so well.
Yet naturally, I do not wish to be biased so I’m going to state some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are several of the cons I have actually found while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding personalized fonts.
I make use of Webflow as my site structure platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much detail why I like Webflow so much however you can review my Webflow evaluation if you want to discover more.
Right now, there truly is no other way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site apart from using an iframe embed. I directly don’t like using iframe’s due to the fact that they have a tendency to decrease my web site a little bit. Every time a page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last point to load on the web page. It’s really visible when you’re on a slow-moving net link. But I can navigate that.
The main complaint I have is that I can not use a normal Webflow kind (which I love making use of). There are methods around this by using a tool like Zapier however that would certainly just add additional expenses that I do not require. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con but I believed I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far exceed the disadvantages right here. I’m likewise enthusiastic that Webflow will ultimately develop a far better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Generally, beehiiv is a wonderful service for anyone looking to dive into the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this newsletter platform 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 fairly cheap for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist 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 right into the thousands each month.
Anyways, I don’t write evaluation blog posts frequently. I only do when I actually utilize the device myself and would suggest it to a buddy.
I hope you discovered some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is a good platform for you.