Over two years earlier, I was reading among my preferred email e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked on it and instantaneously started tearing up Beehiiv Custom Domains.
I had not been certain why I really felt so emotional.
Being a permanent developer is difficult. I’m often obtaining pitched different devices and services that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional due to the fact that I spent the last 6 months checking out different e-mail and e-newsletter systems to help construct my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic choices for creating e-newsletters. But I couldn’t discover one that made me provide a guaranteed “yes”.
The problem with many existing newsletter systems is that they do not feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter system that lets me completely personalize my newsletter styles, makes it extremely easy to write and send out e-mails, and gives me tools that assist me evaluate metrics and get even more subscribers.
I assume I have actually finally discovered the right tool.
Yet, I recognize beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually ideal for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it very easy to layout, compose, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by previous staff members at the renowned e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist designers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this write-up, I’m going 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 go with it as my e-newsletter system of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern-day newsletter system for fairly some time now. I have actually hesitated hard when it concerned ultimately introducing my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a couple of various other indie systems. After that, Substack. And lastly, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I’m sure several newsletter designers respect preferred newsletters with millions of clients– I know I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I admired a great deal. They have fantastic web content, lots of clients, and a creative referral program that permits them to get even a lot more customers.
So, I went on a search to find out exactly how these large newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more clients? How do they develop an e-newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to respond to all of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that developed this tool truly understand newsletter production and growth.” I questioned who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the very first marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on maker growth.
Since, any type of creator recognizes, you need growth to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And locating the best newsletter stack (that scales) usually indicates utilizing numerous various devices to assist attain one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one platform to establish referrals. It can get pricey.
So when I learnt beehiiv did all of these points in one system, and it was totally free to begin using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content designer that desires a system that enables them to send personalized newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most successful newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or web content creator, you should seriously considering trying beehiiv. It’s completely free to get going and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you actually wind up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s probably a great indication that individuals love reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a fantastic platform made use of by hundreds of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own internet site and make use of the platform as your all-in-one remedy for sending emails (while producing an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all the things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to obtain words out.
beehiiv additionally offers you a site similar to Substack. However, if you have your own website currently, you can likewise use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your site subscribers right to your beehiiv email list. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a device like Performance to enable individuals to subscribe to your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to leverage different marketing channels to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack option.
Just how to start using beehiiv email marketing software.
Enroll in a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Start trial” switch on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 customers, give you access to web site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance modification, analytics, outside embed kinds, and much more. It’s a very generous offering for those simply beginning (or for those seeking a new system to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Custom Domains
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any type of paying subscribers?”, and extra.
You’ll then create a name and URL for your newsletter’s 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 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.
Navigating your dashboard
Once you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have described details on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Begin creating,” “Blog posts,” “Audience,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Design,” and” Assess.” And at the very bottom you’ll see the settings option.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot above), Beginning creating is where you develop and release e-newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter versions, Audience is where you can view who your subscribers are (and break them down right into sectors), Grow 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, Design is where you design your newsletter landing page and post template, Assess 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 easy to begin writing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just starting out, and have an idea you intend to blog about, I suggest simply going to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking “Start creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later– focus on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and straightforward interface for writing.
When you start composing, you can optimize headings, include web links, and design your material just how you such as.
beehiiv gives you lots of alternatives for various kinds of material like video clips, links, images, and much more.
The group at beehiiv is additionally constantly releasing product feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a whole lot much more content features depending on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to make your e-mail template and adjust some settings.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a description, add your logo design, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to first time clients, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify background colors, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, photo formats, and a lot more. I’m not going to go through ever solitary thing you can optimize with your e-mail template because it’s a great deal. Just check out the platform free of cost and see it for yourself!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of incredible features that make it a terrific publishing system for any type of newsletter maker.
Here are several of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it extremely simple to compose and send out emails. I pointed out above some of things you can do with your setups and email style so I’ll save you some extra reading.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the much better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Internet site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you desire) survive on a site. Think about it as a website for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and an area where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s virtually comparable to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, offer you a site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a personalized domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is essential. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv internet site or via embed types.
If you currently have a website, and desire people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to utilize an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three various options– a full width, 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 alternative for acknowledgment monitoring if you want to ahead UTM parameters for tracking functions– quite cool.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I’m sure the group is working on updates for these, yet I mentioned a couple of concerns I had in the benefits and drawbacks area below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter platform, is a remedy for producing a referral program.
You can urge existing subscribers on your checklist to ahead your e-mails to friends and coworkers and if they get other individuals to register for your list, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever kind you want. I’ve appear numerous newsletter companies provide benefits in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– giving you an additional avenue for expanding your email checklist.
Nonetheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to an extra exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later in this post.
Premium registrations
They say all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 real followers. Membership revenue is most definitely a beast of its own. If you’re trying to find a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” issues of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying customers. This can be very lucrative depending on what your e-newsletter has to use. For instance, Trends.co is a preferred premium e-newsletter that creates millions in income a year simply by having pay-only newsletter content.
Information analytics
One of the important things I enjoy regarding beehiiv is how tidy and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber matter Beehiiv Custom Domains.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on just how your newsletter is in fact doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that subscriber count increase is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan offers you everything you need to begin and grow your newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you every little thing in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, custom domain name, surveys, and accessibility to premium registrations. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you everything in the Grow plan with addition of concern support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly charitable in my point of view.
For instance, if you have 100,000 clients you will pay around $329 each month. Rather than some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would charge $679 monthly for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit alternative for numerous individuals.
I’m not exactly sure how the unit business economics work on this, but beehiiv is certainly cheaper (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Of course, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Below are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I have actually personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of choice:
Easy to establish and start sending out newsletters for free.
Clean and modern-day subscriber analytics.
Lots of versatility with email styles.
Referral program feature.
Web site hosting.
Create premium alternatives to monetize.
Surveys.
To be truthful, I have not seen another newsletter platform that has actually been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
Yet naturally, I don’t wish to be biased so I’m mosting likely to discuss some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the cons I have actually located while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom-made fonts.
I make use of Webflow as my site structure system of selection (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not going to enter excessive information why I enjoy Webflow so much however you can review my Webflow testimonial if you wish to discover more.
Today, there truly is no other way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website other than using an iframe embed. I personally do not like making use of iframe’s since they have a tendency to slow down my web site a little bit. Every single time a page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last thing to pack on the page. It’s really visible when you get on a slow net link. But I can navigate that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can’t make use of a routine Webflow type (which I enjoy utilizing). There are ways around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier but that would certainly simply add extra prices that I don’t need. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con yet I thought I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much outweigh the cons right here. I’m also confident that Webflow will eventually produce a better method to integrate with beehiiv.
Verdict
In general, beehiiv is a fantastic remedy for any person wanting to study the world of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The capability of this newsletter system much surpasses numerous that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you actually have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are also fairly economical for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is uncommon. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well right into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t compose evaluation blog posts typically. I only do when I really make use of the tool myself and would recommend it to a buddy.
I wish you found some clearness on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.