Over 2 years earlier, I was reading one of my favorite email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked it and instantaneously began destroying Beehiiv For Email Marketing.
I had not been sure why I felt so psychological.
Being a full time maker is difficult. I’m often getting pitched different tools and services that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological because I spent the last 6 months trying out various email and newsletter platforms to aid construct my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some terrific choices for writing e-newsletters. But I couldn’t find one that made me give a precise “yes”.
The problem with lots of existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter platform that lets me completely tailor my newsletter styles, makes it super very easy to write and send out emails, and offers me tools that assist me evaluate metrics and get even more clients.
I believe I’ve finally located the appropriate tool.
Yet, I know beehiiv may 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 e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it simple to style, write, send, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by previous employees at the renowned e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help makers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking great deals of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this post, I’m mosting likely to discuss my personal experience with beehiiv, the important things I love (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to lastly go with it as my newsletter platform of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months earlier, I inadvertently came across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern-day e-newsletter system for quite time now. I’ve put things off hard when it concerned ultimately releasing my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie systems. After that, Substack. And finally, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make certain several newsletter developers appreciate prominent newsletters with numerous subscribers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a great deal. They have terrific content, tons of subscribers, and a smart referral program that allows them to get even much more subscribers.
So, I took place a search to figure out how these large newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain even more subscribers? How do they create a newsletter style that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to answer every one of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this device actually comprehend e-newsletter production and development.” I examined who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the very first marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my brain blew up.
I recognized this was going to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s focused on designer development.
Because, any kind of designer recognizes, you need development to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that scales) often means using numerous various tools to assist accomplish one objective– one system for your newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one platform to set up recommendations. It can obtain expensive.
So when I found out beehiiv did every one of these things in one platform, and it was totally free to start making use of, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content creator that desires a platform that permits them to send out custom newsletters with or without needing to have an internet site.
One of the most successful newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media firm, start-up, or content maker, you need to seriously considering experimenting with beehiiv. It’s entirely free to start and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 subscribers on your list.
If you actually wind up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s probably a good sign that people like reviewing your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a fantastic platform utilized by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own internet site and use the system as your all-in-one option for sending out e-mails (while developing an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, even more design flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing subscribers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv additionally provides you a website similar to Substack. However, if you have your own site currently, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I utilize) to send your website customers straight to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to allow individuals to subscribe to your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the adaptability to take advantage of various marketing channels to obtain your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv an excellent Substack choice.
How to start utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software.
Register for a free plan
The first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you access to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, breakthrough personalization, analytics, exterior embed kinds, and extra. It’s a very generous offering for those just starting (or for those trying to find a brand-new platform to move to).
Onboarding Beehiiv For Email Marketing
After producing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any paying subscribers?”, and extra.
You’ll after that develop a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your site link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally choose your brand name design and colors to make sure your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
When you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have described info on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning writing,” “Messages,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Design,” and” Analyze.” And at the very lower you’ll see the setups alternative.
Dashboard is your primary control center (screenshot above), Beginning creating is where you create and release newsletters, Messages is where you can see all of your previous newsletter versions, Target market is where you can view who your customers 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 ads, Layout is where you create your e-newsletter landing page and article template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of all of your admin stuff.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have an idea you wish to cover, I advise just mosting likely to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking “Start writing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– concentrate on the content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and straightforward user interface for writing.
Once you start composing, you can optimize headings, include web links, and design your content just how you like.
beehiiv provides you tons of alternatives for various kinds of web content like video clips, links, pictures, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is also constantly launching item feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a whole lot a lot more material features relying on when you read this.
Maximizing your setups and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your e-mail template and adjust some setups.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a summary, include your logo design, switch on 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 design.
You can modify history shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, image formats, and more. I’m not going to go through ever before solitary point you can maximize with your email template due to the fact that it’s a great deal. Just check out the system for free and see it on your own!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of remarkable features that make it a fantastic posting system for any kind of newsletter designer.
Right here are some of the important features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing system. It makes it incredibly very easy to write and send out emails. I pointed out above several of the important things you can do with your settings and email style so I’ll spare you some additional reading.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the better e-mail editors I’ve ever written in.
Internet site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive a site. Think of it as a website 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 know with Substack, it’s practically similar to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, offer you a site. However, the free plan areas your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to include a custom-made domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is very important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter directly from your beehiiv web site or through embed kinds.
If you already have an internet site, and desire people to subscribe to your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed type. This is what I make use of on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 various alternatives– a complete width, a taken care of size, and a slim installed. I personally use the slim installed.
You can discover the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally an alternative for attribution tracking if you wish to ahead UTM parameters for tracking purposes– quite neat.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make sure the group is servicing updates for these, but I mentioned a couple of concerns I had in the benefits and drawbacks area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is an option for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing subscribers on your listing to forward your emails to pals and coworkers and if they get other individuals to subscribe to your checklist, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever type you desire. I’ve appear many e-newsletter companies give incentives in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your clients into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– giving you one more method for growing your email list.
However, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a much more premium plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this post.
Premium memberships
They state all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real followers. Registration profits is definitely a beast of its very own. If you’re searching for a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” concerns of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying subscribers. This can be very financially rewarding relying on what your newsletter has to supply. For example, Trends.co is a popular costs e-newsletter that generates millions in earnings a year just by having pay-only newsletter material.
Information analytics
Among things I like regarding beehiiv is just how tidy and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer count Beehiiv For Email Marketing.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that customer count go up is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (totally free) Launch plan gives you everything you need to start and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom-made domain name, surveys, and access to costs memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you everything in the Grow plan with addition of concern assistance and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly charitable in my point of view.
For instance, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 monthly. Instead of some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 each month for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit option for several users.
I’m uncertain just how the device economics work with this, however beehiiv is absolutely cheaper (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Of course, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Right here are a few of the pros and cons I’ve personally 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 totally free.
Tidy and modern client analytics.
Lots of adaptability with e-mail layouts.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Create costs alternatives to generate income from.
Polls.
To be honest, I haven’t seen one more e-newsletter platform that has been able to package every one of these features together so well.
However certainly, I don’t intend to be biased so I’m mosting likely to state some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the disadvantages I’ve found while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom typefaces.
I make use of Webflow as my internet site structure platform of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much information why I like Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow review if you want to discover more.
Today, there truly is nothing else way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site besides using an iframe embed. I directly do not like using iframe’s because they often tend to reduce my website a bit. Every time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last point to pack on the web page. It’s very visible when you’re on a slow internet connection. However I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can not make use of a regular Webflow kind (which I love making use of). There are means around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier but that would certainly simply include added prices that I do not require. To be honest, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con but I believed I would state it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far exceed the cons right here. I’m additionally confident that Webflow will eventually produce a better means to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
In general, beehiiv is an excellent option for anyone wanting to dive into the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter system far surpasses numerous that are currently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you really have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally relatively affordable for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your checklist is unusual. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well right into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t compose evaluation blog posts usually. I just do when I really make use of the device myself and would suggest it to a friend.
I hope you found some quality on whether or not beehiiv is a great system for you.