Over two years ago, I was reading one of my favored email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the very first time. I clicked it and promptly started destroying Beehiiv 30 Day Free Trial.
I had not been certain why I felt so psychological.
Being a full time designer is tough. I’m usually obtaining pitched various devices and services that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was emotional because I spent the last six months experimenting with various e-mail and e-newsletter systems to help construct my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic options for creating e-newsletters. But I couldn’t locate one that made me give a guaranteed “yes”.
The problem with numerous existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter platform that lets me totally customize my newsletter styles, makes it super very easy to create and send out e-mails, and offers me devices that aid me analyze metrics and obtain more subscribers.
I think I have actually ultimately discovered the right device.
But, I know beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it very easy to design, write, send out, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former employees at the renowned e-newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist designers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this post, I’m mosting likely to discuss my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to lastly select it as my newsletter system of choice.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months ago, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I have actually watched for a modern e-newsletter system for fairly time now. I’ve hesitated hard when it involved finally launching my e-newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a couple of various other indie systems. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up utilizing beehiiv.
I’m sure numerous newsletter creators look up to popular newsletters with numerous subscribers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I appreciated a great deal. They have excellent material, tons of customers, and a clever referral program that permits them to get even much more subscribers.
So, I took place a quest to figure out 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 get even more subscribers? How do they create a newsletter design that remains on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to address all of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn the people that developed this device actually comprehend e-newsletter production and development.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the very first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I knew this was mosting likely to be a various e-newsletter platform. One that’s focused on maker development.
Due to the fact that, any kind of designer understands, you need growth to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the best e-newsletter stack (that ranges) frequently indicates utilizing multiple different tools to assist attain one goal– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to establish recommendations. It can get costly.
So when I discovered beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was free to start utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material maker that wants a system that enables them to send out custom e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
One of the most effective newsletters have the right devices to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, startup, or material creator, you ought to seriously considering trying out beehiiv. It’s absolutely cost-free to get started and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you actually end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a good indicator that people enjoy reading your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is an excellent system utilized by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you get your very own internet site and use the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending out e-mails (while creating an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to get the word out.
beehiiv additionally gives you a website similar to Substack. But, if you have your very own website currently, you can likewise use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I utilize) to send your web site clients straight to your beehiiv email list. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit individuals to sign up for your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to take advantage of various marketing channels to obtain your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv an excellent Substack option.
Exactly how to start utilizing beehiiv email marketing software application.
Register for a free plan
The first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will enable you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, provide you accessibility to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advancement personalization, analytics, exterior embed types, and extra. It’s a really charitable offering for those simply beginning (or for those trying to find a new system to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv 30 Day Free Trial
After developing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you made use of?”, “do you have any type of paying subscribers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that develop a name and URL 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 “Baking Cakes,” your internet site link could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll also select your brand colors and design to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
As soon as you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will have described info on how many sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Begin composing,” “Messages,” “Audience,” “Grow,” “Monetize,” “Design,” and” Examine.” And at the very lower you’ll see the settings option.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot over), Beginning creating is where you produce and release newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can see who your clients are (and damage them down into sectors), Expand is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and development tutorials) and boosts to run ads, 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 post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can manage all of your admin things.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin creating, with little to no friction. If you’re just beginning, and have a concept you intend to discuss, I suggest simply mosting likely to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking “Start creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– focus on the content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a clean and straightforward interface for composing.
As soon as you start writing, you can optimize headings, include links, and style your content just how you like.
beehiiv provides you lots of choices for various kinds of content like video clips, web links, images, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is additionally constantly launching item feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a great deal more material features depending on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your setups and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to develop your email template and readjust some setups.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, give it a summary, add your logo design, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time subscribers, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit history colors, boundaries, spacing, font styles, image styles, and more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever before solitary thing you can optimize with your email template since it’s a lot. Simply try out the platform completely free and see it on your own!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of impressive features that make it a wonderful publishing system for any newsletter creator.
Below are a few of the essential features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it incredibly easy to compose and send out e-mails. I pointed out above some of the important things you can do with your settings and e-mail layout so I’ll spare you some additional analysis.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely among the better e-mail editors I’ve ever written in.
Site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you desire) survive an internet site. Think of it as an internet site for your e-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’re familiar with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, provide you a web site. Nevertheless, the free plan areas your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a customized domain name to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is essential. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv website or through embed types.
If you already have a site, and want people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to utilize an embed type. This is what I use on this internet 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 various alternatives– a complete size, a repaired width, and a slim installed. I personally make use of the slim embed.
You can locate the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s also a choice for acknowledgment monitoring if you wish to onward UTM parameters for tracking objectives– pretty cool.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I wish beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I’m sure the group is working on updates for these, but I mentioned a few worries I had in the pros and cons area below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a service for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing subscribers on your checklist to ahead your emails to good friends and associates and if they get other people to subscribe to your checklist, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever form you want. I have actually seem numerous newsletter business give incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your clients into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– offering you another method for growing your email listing.
Nevertheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to an extra superior plan. I’ll look at all the plans later on in this post.
Costs registrations
They claim all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true fans. Membership revenue is certainly a monster of its own. If you’re seeking a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” problems of your newsletter that are only sent to paying customers. This can be very lucrative depending on what your e-newsletter has to offer. As an example, Trends.co is a preferred premium newsletter that produces millions in revenue a year just by having pay-only newsletter material.
Information analytics
Among the important things I love regarding beehiiv is exactly how clean and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer count Beehiiv 30 Day Free Trial.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on just how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that client matter rise is definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan gives you everything you require to get going and expand your e-newsletter (approximately 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, customized domain name, polls, and accessibility to premium registrations. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) gives you everything in the Grow plan with enhancement of top priority assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 per month. In contrast to some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would charge $679 each month for the same quantity– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit choice for several individuals.
I’m not exactly sure exactly how the device economics work with this, yet beehiiv is certainly less costly (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are a few of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of option:
Easy to set up and start sending out newsletters completely free.
Tidy and modern-day customer analytics.
Lots of flexibility with e-mail styles.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Develop costs options to monetize.
Surveys.
To be truthful, I haven’t seen another e-newsletter platform that has had the ability to package every one of these features with each other so well.
But naturally, I don’t intend to be biased so I’m mosting likely to state some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are some of the cons I have actually found while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including custom typefaces.
I utilize Webflow as my web site structure system of option (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter too much information why I love Webflow so much however you can review my Webflow evaluation if you wish to discover more.
Right now, there truly is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site besides making use of an iframe embed. I directly don’t such as using iframe’s since they often tend to slow down my web site a bit. Every time a page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last thing to pack on the web page. It’s really obvious when you get on a slow-moving web link. However I can get around that.
The main complaint I have is that I can not make use of a regular Webflow kind (which I like using). There are methods around this by using a device like Zapier but that would simply include added expenses that I don’t require. To be sincere, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage however I believed I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much outweigh the cons here. I’m also confident that Webflow will eventually create a much better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Generally, beehiiv is a fantastic remedy for anyone wanting to dive into the globe of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter platform far surpasses several that are currently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally fairly economical wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your listing is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I do not write testimonial articles frequently. I just do when I in fact make use of the device myself and would certainly recommend it to a friend.
I hope you found some quality on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent platform for you.