Over 2 years earlier, I was reading among my preferred e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked on it and immediately started wrecking Beehiiv Gold Tier.
I wasn’t sure why I felt so psychological.
Being a permanent creator is difficult. I’m often obtaining pitched different tools and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional because I invested the last six months checking out different email and newsletter systems to aid develop my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some excellent choices for writing e-newsletters. Yet I could not find one that made me give a precise “yes”.
The issue with many existing newsletter systems is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter system that lets me completely customize my e-newsletter designs, makes it incredibly easy to write and send out emails, and gives me tools that assist me evaluate metrics and obtain more customers.
I believe I have actually lastly found the best tool.
But, I recognize beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really ideal for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it simple to style, compose, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by former staff members at the well-known e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist designers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking lots of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this post, I’m going to discuss my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to finally opt for it as my e-newsletter system of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve watched for a modern newsletter platform for rather time now. I have actually hesitated hard when it involved finally introducing my newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few various other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And lastly, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I’m sure several newsletter creators look up to popular e-newsletters with millions of clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a great deal. They have terrific web content, tons of subscribers, and a smart referral program that allows them to get even extra clients.
So, I took place a quest to identify exactly how these large newsletters established their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain more customers? How do they produce a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to respond to every one of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that built 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 founders were several of the very first marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I recognized this was going to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on developer growth.
Due to the fact that, any kind of maker knows, you require development to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the ideal newsletter stack (that scales) typically indicates utilizing several different tools to aid accomplish one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one platform to establish referrals. It can obtain expensive.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was cost-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 content creator that desires a system that allows them to send out customized newsletters with or without needing to have an internet site.
The most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to construct and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or material designer, you ought to seriously taking into consideration trying out beehiiv. It’s totally free to begin and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your list.
If you in fact wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a good sign that people love reading your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a terrific platform made use of by countless independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own internet site and utilize the system as your all-in-one solution for sending emails (while creating an archive of previous concerns).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of much better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to obtain the word out.
beehiiv additionally gives you a website similar to Substack. However, if you have your own internet site currently, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your web site customers directly to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to enable people to subscribe to your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to take advantage of various marketing channels to get your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack alternative.
Exactly how to begin using beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Register for a free plan
The very first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 customers, offer you access to website hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance customization, analytics, external embed types, and more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those just starting (or for those looking for a brand-new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Gold Tier
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any kind of paying subscribers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll then develop a name and link for your e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally pick your brand name colors and design to make sure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
As soon as you reach your major dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have detailed details on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Start creating,” “Articles,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Style,” and” Analyze.” And at the really lower you’ll see the setups choice.
Control panel is your primary control center (screenshot over), Start creating is where you produce and release newsletters, Messages is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter editions, Audience is where you can see who your customers are (and break them down into sections), Expand is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and development tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you create your e-newsletter landing page and article template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle every one of your admin stuff.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin creating, with little to no friction. If you’re simply beginning, and have a concept you wish to cover, I recommend simply going to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking on “Begin creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– focus on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and easy to use user interface for composing.
When you start writing, you can maximize headings, include links, and design your web content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv offers you lots of options for various kinds of material like videos, links, photos, and a lot more.
The group at beehiiv is likewise continuously releasing product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a lot a lot more content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your setups and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to make your email template and change some settings.
Below, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, give it a summary, add your logo, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to first time customers, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify background colors, boundaries, spacing, fonts, picture formats, and extra. I’m not mosting likely to experience ever single point you can optimize with your email template due to the fact that it’s a great deal. Just try the system completely free and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of remarkable features that make it a wonderful publishing system for any newsletter creator.
Below are some of the crucial features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting platform. It makes it extremely simple to write and send out emails. I stated over some of the important things you can do with your setups and e-mail layout so I’ll save you some added reading.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly one of the better email editors I have actually ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a web site. Consider it as a web site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your newsletter, and an area where individuals can sign up for your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s pretty much similar to that.
All plans, including the free one, provide you a website. However, the free plan places your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a custom domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is very important. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your newsletter right from your beehiiv web site or with embed forms.
If you currently have a web site, and desire people to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to make use of an embed kind. This is what I use on this website (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 3 different choices– a complete size, a repaired size, and a slim embed. I directly utilize the slim installed.
You can locate the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise a choice for acknowledgment monitoring if you wish to onward UTM criteria for tracking objectives– pretty neat.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I make sure the group is working with updates for these, but I discussed a couple of issues I had in the benefits and drawbacks section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a service for developing a referral program.
You can motivate existing subscribers on your listing to forward your e-mails to buddies and coworkers and if they get other people to sign up for your list, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you desire. I’ve seem numerous e-newsletter business offer rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your clients right into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– giving you another opportunity for growing your e-mail listing.
However, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a more superior plan. I’ll look at all the plans later in this write-up.
Premium memberships
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Membership income is certainly a beast of its very own. If you’re looking for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “premium” issues of your newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be extremely financially rewarding depending upon what your newsletter has to provide. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent costs newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year merely by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Information analytics
Among the important things I enjoy regarding beehiiv is exactly how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber count Beehiiv Gold Tier.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on how your newsletter is really doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that subscriber matter increase is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies four different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you everything you need to begin and expand your newsletter (approximately 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom domain, surveys, and access to costs registrations. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you everything in the Grow plan with addition of top priority assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my viewpoint.
For instance, if you have 100,000 clients you will pay around $329 monthly. Instead of some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the very same amount– making beehiiv a great Kit alternative for several customers.
I’m not exactly sure just how the system business economics service this, yet beehiiv is definitely less costly (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Of course, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of option:
Easy to set up and begin sending out newsletters free of charge.
Tidy and modern-day subscriber analytics.
Lots of adaptability with e-mail designs.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Create costs choices to generate income from.
Surveys.
To be sincere, I haven’t seen an additional e-newsletter platform that has actually been able to package every one of these features together so well.
However obviously, I do not wish to be biased so I’m going to discuss some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are some of the cons I have actually discovered while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including personalized typefaces.
I use Webflow as my web site building platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to enter excessive information why I enjoy Webflow so much yet you can read my Webflow evaluation if you want to learn more.
Right now, there actually is no other way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site aside from using an iframe embed. I personally do not like making use of iframe’s since they often tend to decrease my website a bit. Whenever a page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last point to fill on the web page. It’s very recognizable when you’re on a slow-moving net link. Yet I can get around that.
The major gripe I have is that I can not use a normal Webflow type (which I love utilizing). There are ways around this by using a device like Zapier yet that would simply add additional prices that I don’t require. To be honest, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con yet I believed I would mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much surpass the disadvantages right here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will at some point create a much better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Verdict
On the whole, beehiiv is a terrific remedy for anybody aiming to study the world of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter system far exceeds numerous that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively cheap of what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your list is unheard of. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I do not compose review blog posts frequently. I only do when I actually use the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a pal.
I hope you found some clearness on whether beehiiv is an excellent platform for you.