Over 2 years back, I was reading one of my favored e-mail e-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 began destroying Beehiiv Deck.
I had not been sure why I really felt so psychological.
Being a permanent developer is tough. I’m typically obtaining pitched various tools and services that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological since I invested the last 6 months trying out various e-mail and newsletter platforms to assist construct my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some wonderful choices for creating newsletters. Yet I couldn’t locate one that made me give a definite “yes”.
The issue with many existing e-newsletter systems is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter platform that lets me completely personalize my newsletter styles, makes it very very easy to write and send out emails, and offers me tools that aid me analyze metrics and get more clients.
I assume I’ve finally discovered the right tool.
Yet, I understand beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it simple to layout, create, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by former workers at the renowned newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help makers 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 mosting likely to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly choose it as my newsletter system of option.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months ago, I inadvertently stumbled across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I’ve watched for a modern-day e-newsletter platform for fairly some time currently. I have actually put things off hard when it involved lastly introducing my newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few various other indie systems. After that, Substack. And finally, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I make certain numerous newsletter developers respect preferred newsletters with countless customers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a lot. They have terrific web content, lots of customers, and a clever referral program that enables them to get back at much more customers.
So, I went on a search to find out how these large newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain more clients? How do they develop an e-newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to address all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn the people that built this device really recognize newsletter creation and development.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were several of the first marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on designer development.
Since, any kind of designer understands, you require development to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the ideal e-newsletter pile (that scales) commonly means utilizing numerous various devices to aid accomplish one goal– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to establish recommendations. It can obtain costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did every one of these points in one system, and it was cost-free to start using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material maker that desires a system that enables them to send out personalized newsletters with or without needing to have a site.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media business, start-up, or content developer, you should seriously taking into consideration trying beehiiv. It’s totally free to start and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your checklist.
If you actually end up having to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a great sign that people enjoy reviewing your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a terrific platform used by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you get your very own web site and make use of the system as your all-in-one service for sending out e-mails (while creating an archive of previous concerns).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to get the word out.
beehiiv likewise provides you a website comparable to Substack. But, if you have your own web site currently, you can also use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I use) to send your website subscribers straight to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to allow people to sign up for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to utilize various marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack option.
Just how to begin using beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you accessibility to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, breakthrough customization, analytics, external embed types, and more. It’s a very generous offering for those just starting out (or for those trying to find a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Deck
After creating an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your first e-newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying subscribers?”, and extra.
You’ll after that develop a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your site URL could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll also select your brand name colors and design to make sure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
As soon as you reach your major control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will have detailed info on the number of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning composing,” “Messages,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Layout,” and” Assess.” And at the very lower you’ll see the setups option.
Control panel is your primary control center (screenshot over), Start creating is where you create and publish e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter versions, Audience is where you can view who your subscribers are (and damage them down right into sectors), Expand is where you have access to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run ads, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your e-newsletter with advertisements, Style is where you make your newsletter landing page and post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of every one of your admin things.
Creating your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have a concept you intend to write about, I recommend simply going to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking on “Start composing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and easy to use user interface for composing.
As soon as you start composing, you can optimize headings, include web links, and style your content how you such as.
beehiiv offers you lots of options for various sorts of content like video clips, web links, images, and much more.
The group at beehiiv is likewise frequently launching item feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a whole lot a lot more material features depending upon when you read this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
When you have a newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to design your email template and adjust some settings.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a description, add your logo, turn on or off a welcome email to very first time subscribers, and more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit background shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, photo layouts, and more. I’m not going to undergo ever before solitary point you can optimize with your email template because it’s a whole lot. Just try the platform free of charge and see it for yourself!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of remarkable features that make it an excellent publishing platform for any newsletter maker.
Below are several of the crucial features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting system. It makes it very easy to write and send emails. I stated above several of the things you can do with your settings and email style so I’ll save you some extra reading.
The thing to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely among the better e-mail editors I’ve ever before written in.
Site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you want) survive on a site. Think about it as an internet site for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your newsletter, and an area where individuals can register for your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, including the free one, offer you a web site. However, the free plan places your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a custom domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is necessary. Besides, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter right from your beehiiv internet site or through embed forms.
If you currently have a website, and want people to register for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need 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 blog post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 different options– a complete width, a taken care of size, and a slim embed. I directly use the slim installed.
You can find the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your setups.
There’s also an alternative for acknowledgment tracking if you want to forward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– pretty cool.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I’m sure the team is dealing with updates for these, however I stated a couple of problems I had in the advantages and disadvantages section listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is a solution for developing a referral program.
You can encourage existing customers on your checklist to ahead your e-mails to good friends and coworkers and if they obtain other individuals to sign up for your checklist, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever type you want. I have actually seem many newsletter business provide benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your clients right into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– giving you one more method for expanding your email list.
Nonetheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a much more superior plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this write-up.
Premium registrations
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real followers. Registration profits is certainly a beast of its own. If you’re looking for a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” concerns of your newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be really financially rewarding depending on what your e-newsletter has to offer. As an example, Trends.co is a preferred premium newsletter that creates millions in earnings a year merely by having pay-only e-newsletter material.
Information analytics
Among the things I like concerning beehiiv is how clean and straightforward the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and client count Beehiiv Deck.
You obtain access to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye sight on how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that client count increase is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you everything you require to begin and grow your newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, personalized domain, surveys, and accessibility to premium memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you everything in the Grow plan with addition of top priority support and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my viewpoint.
As an example, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. As opposed to some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would charge $679 monthly for the same quantity– making beehiiv a terrific Kit option for many customers.
I’m unsure exactly how the unit business economics deal with this, yet beehiiv is certainly less expensive (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Naturally, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Here are a few of the pros and cons I’ve directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of option:
Easy to establish and begin sending out newsletters for free.
Clean and modern customer analytics.
Great deals of versatility with e-mail layouts.
Referral program feature.
Website hosting.
Develop premium choices to generate income from.
Polls.
To be straightforward, I have not seen an additional e-newsletter system that has had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
But naturally, I don’t wish to be prejudiced so I’m going to mention some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the cons I have actually found while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding personalized font styles.
I use Webflow as my internet site building platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter excessive detail why I like Webflow a lot yet you can read my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to learn more.
Now, there really is no other means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow website apart from utilizing an iframe embed. I directly don’t such as using iframe’s because they tend to slow down my site a little bit. Each time a page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last point to fill on the page. It’s extremely obvious when you get on a sluggish internet connection. However I can get around that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can’t utilize a regular Webflow type (which I enjoy making use of). There are means around this by using a device like Zapier yet that would simply add added prices that I do not need. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage however I believed I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far outweigh the disadvantages here. I’m additionally hopeful that Webflow will at some point produce a better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Generally, beehiiv is a terrific remedy for anyone looking to study the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system much surpasses lots of that are currently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally fairly cheap wherefore they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist is unheard of. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t compose review blog posts frequently. I just do when I really use the device myself and would certainly advise it to a good friend.
I wish you found some clarity on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.