Over 2 years back, I read 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 it and instantaneously started destroying Beehiiv Custom CSS.
I had not been certain why I really felt so psychological.
Being a full time creator is tough. I’m often getting pitched various tools and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional due to the fact that I invested the last 6 months trying out various e-mail and e-newsletter platforms to aid construct my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some wonderful options for creating newsletters. Yet I couldn’t discover one that made me provide a guaranteed “yes”.
The issue with numerous existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter system that lets me fully tailor my newsletter designs, makes it very simple to write and send emails, and offers me devices that help me evaluate metrics and obtain more clients.
I think I’ve finally located the ideal tool.
But, I recognize beehiiv might not be for everyone. 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 platform that makes it very easy to design, write, send out, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by previous workers at the renowned e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist makers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking lots of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this write-up, I’m mosting likely to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, things I love (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to finally select it as my e-newsletter platform of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I have actually watched for a modern newsletter system for fairly a long time currently. I have actually procrastinated hard when it pertained to finally launching my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And finally, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I’m sure lots of newsletter developers appreciate popular e-newsletters with millions of customers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I admired a lot. They have great material, lots of customers, and a creative referral program that enables them to get even a lot more customers.
So, I took place a hunt to figure out how these big e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get even more customers? How do they develop a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to address all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn the people that developed this tool truly recognize e-newsletter development and development.” I questioned who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were several of the first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I understood this was going to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on creator development.
Due to the fact that, any creator knows, you need growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the appropriate newsletter stack (that ranges) frequently indicates utilizing multiple various tools to aid accomplish one goal– one platform for your newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to set up recommendations. It can get expensive.
So when I discovered beehiiv did every one of these points in one platform, and it was complimentary to start using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content designer that wants a system that enables them to send out personalized newsletters with or without requiring to have an internet site.
One of the most effective newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or content maker, you must seriously taking into consideration trying out beehiiv. It’s completely free to get going and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 subscribers on your checklist.
If you really end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly an excellent indication that people like reviewing 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 platform made use of by countless independent authors. With Substack you get your very own website and use the system as your all-in-one solution for sending emails (while producing an archive of previous concerns).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, even more design flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing customers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv likewise gives you a website comparable to Substack. But, if you have your very own website already, you can also use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your web site subscribers straight to your beehiiv e-mail list. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to allow people to register for your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the adaptability to leverage different marketing networks to get your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv an excellent Substack alternative.
Just how to begin making use of beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Register for a free plan
The initial step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 customers, give you accessibility to website hosting, a newsletter CMS, development personalization, analytics, exterior embed types, and extra. It’s a really charitable offering for those just starting (or for those searching for a new system to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Custom CSS
After creating an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what other systems have you used?”, “do you have any kind of paying subscribers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that develop a name and link for your newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your site URL may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll also choose your brand name design and colors to ensure your newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
When you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have outlined info on how many sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Beginning writing,” “Posts,” “Audience,” “Grow,” “Generate income from,” “Design,” and” Analyze.” And at the really bottom you’ll see the setups option.
Dashboard is your major nerve center (screenshot over), Start composing is where you create and publish newsletters, Messages is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can view who your subscribers are (and damage them down into sections), Grow is where you have accessibility 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 ads, Layout is where you design your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of all of your admin stuff.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to start creating, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply starting out, and have a concept you wish to cover, I suggest just going to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking “Start writing”.
You can modify your template and designing later– concentrate on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a clean and easy to use user interface for writing.
Once you start composing, you can optimize headings, add links, and design your web content exactly how you like.
beehiiv offers you lots of alternatives for different kinds of material like videos, links, pictures, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is likewise frequently launching item feature and updates so I make certain there will be a lot a lot more material features depending on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
Once you have a newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your e-mail template and change some settings.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, give it a description, add your logo design, turn on or off a welcome email to very first time clients, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify history shades, borders, spacing, font styles, photo layouts, and much more. I’m not mosting likely to go through ever single point you can optimize with your email template since it’s a whole lot. Just try out the platform completely free and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of fantastic features that make it a great publishing platform for any e-newsletter maker.
Right here are a few of the important features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing system. It makes it extremely simple to create and send emails. I stated over several of the things you can do with your setups and email design so I’ll spare you some added reading.
The important things to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly one of the better email editors I have actually ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive on a website. Think of it as a website for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and an area where people can register for your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, including the totally free one, give you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to include a personalized domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting clients is important. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can subscribe to your newsletter right from your beehiiv web site or with embed types.
If you currently have a website, and want people to subscribe to your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to utilize an embed kind. This is what I use on this internet site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 various alternatives– a full size, a fixed size, and a slim installed. I directly use the slim installed.
You can locate the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise an option for attribution monitoring if you want to onward UTM criteria for tracking purposes– rather neat.
However, there are a couple of features I desire beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I’m sure the group is servicing updates for these, however I discussed a few problems I had in the advantages and disadvantages area below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a remedy for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your list to forward your emails to pals and coworkers and if they obtain other people to sign up for your checklist, you can compensate them. These benefits can be in whatever form you want. I’ve appear numerous e-newsletter companies offer rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your customers into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– giving you one more method for growing your email listing.
Nevertheless, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a much more premium plan. I’ll look at all the plans later in this post.
Premium memberships
They state all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real followers. Membership earnings is certainly a beast of its own. If you’re looking for a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” concerns of your newsletter that are just sent to paying customers. This can be extremely lucrative depending upon what your e-newsletter needs to offer. For instance, Trends.co is a popular costs e-newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Data analytics
One of the things I like about beehiiv is exactly how clean and basic the analytics are. You get real-time day on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber matter Beehiiv Custom CSS.
You get access to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye sight on just how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that subscriber matter go up is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan gives you whatever you need to get started and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) provides you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, customized domain name, polls, and accessibility to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you everything in the Grow plan with enhancement of top priority support and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather generous in my point of view.
As an example, if you have 100,000 clients you will pay around $329 each month. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would charge $679 each month for the same quantity– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for many users.
I’m unsure just how the unit economics work with this, yet beehiiv is most definitely less expensive (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Certainly, with every platform, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are some of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of option:
Easy to establish and begin sending newsletters totally free.
Clean and modern-day customer analytics.
Lots of adaptability with email styles.
Referral program feature.
Website hosting.
Create costs alternatives to monetize.
Polls.
To be truthful, I have not seen another e-newsletter system that has actually had the ability to package every one of these features with each other so well.
Yet naturally, I do not want to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to mention some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the disadvantages I’ve located while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding customized font styles.
I make use of Webflow as my site structure platform of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in excessive detail why I enjoy Webflow so much yet you can read my Webflow testimonial if you wish to find out more.
Right now, there actually is no other means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow site besides making use of an iframe embed. I directly do not such as utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they tend to reduce my site a little bit. Every single time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last point to pack on the page. It’s very obvious when you’re on a slow-moving internet connection. However I can get around that.
The main gripe I have is that I can not make use of a routine Webflow type (which I love making use of). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would simply include added expenses that I do not require. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con however I thought I would state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far surpass the disadvantages below. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will eventually produce a far better means to integrate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Overall, beehiiv is an excellent solution for anyone aiming to study the world of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter system far exceeds lots of that are presently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are also fairly low-cost for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist is uncommon. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I do not create testimonial posts often. I just do when I in fact utilize the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a good friend.
I hope you discovered some clearness on whether beehiiv is a great platform for you.