Over 2 years ago, I was reading among my favorite 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 on it and promptly began wrecking Beehiiv Headquarters.
I had not been certain why I felt so emotional.
Being a permanent designer is difficult. I’m commonly getting pitched various devices and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I guess I was psychological because I invested the last six months trying out various e-mail and e-newsletter platforms to aid develop my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some terrific options for writing e-newsletters. But I could not discover one that made me provide a definite “yes”.
The issue with numerous existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter platform that lets me fully customize my newsletter layouts, makes it extremely very easy to create and send out e-mails, and offers me devices that assist me analyze metrics and obtain even more customers.
I think I have actually ultimately found the right device.
Yet, I understand beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it easy to layout, compose, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former staff members at the famous newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to aid designers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this post, I’m going to describe my personal experience with beehiiv, the important things I love (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to finally select it as my e-newsletter platform of option.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months ago, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve watched for a contemporary newsletter platform for quite some time now. I have actually hesitated hard when it came to ultimately releasing my newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a couple of various other indie systems. After that, Substack. And finally, I ended up using beehiiv.
I’m sure many e-newsletter designers appreciate popular newsletters with millions of clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a lot. They have great web content, tons of clients, and a brilliant referral program that enables them to get even more subscribers.
So, I went on a quest to determine just how these large newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more subscribers? How do they produce an e-newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to answer all of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that developed this tool truly understand newsletter production and development.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were some of the first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a various e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on developer growth.
Since, any kind of creator knows, you require growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And locating the best newsletter pile (that scales) commonly suggests making use of several various tools to assist attain one objective– one system for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one platform to set up recommendations. It can obtain costly.
So when I found out beehiiv did every one of these things 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 content developer that desires a system that enables them to send custom-made e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
One of the most effective e-newsletters have the right devices to construct and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media business, startup, or material developer, you should seriously considering trying beehiiv. It’s completely cost-free to start and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you really end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a good sign that people enjoy reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a fantastic system used by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own web site and make use of the system as your all-in-one remedy for sending out e-mails (while creating an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to obtain the word out.
beehiiv likewise provides you a site comparable to Substack. But, if you have your own internet site currently, you can also make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your internet site customers directly to your beehiiv email list. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable individuals to subscribe to your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to utilize different marketing networks to get your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a great Substack alternative.
Just how to start utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software.
Enroll in a free plan
The first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 customers, provide you accessibility to website hosting, a newsletter CMS, advancement personalization, analytics, exterior embed forms, and a lot more. It’s an extremely generous offering for those simply starting (or for those searching for a new platform to move to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Headquarters
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your first e-newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you used?”, “do you have any paying subscribers?”, and more.
You’ll after that create a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll likewise pick your brand name design and colors to make certain your newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
When you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed info on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start creating,” “Blog posts,” “Audience,” “Grow,” “Generate income from,” “Style,” and” Evaluate.” And at the really lower you’ll see the settings choice.
Control panel is your main nerve center (screenshot over), Begin writing is where you develop and publish newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Target market is where you can see who your subscribers are (and damage them down into sections), Expand is where you have accessibility 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 newsletter with ads, Style is where you create your newsletter landing page and post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of every one of your admin things.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin writing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just starting out, and have an idea you intend to write about, I advise just going to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning writing”.
You can modify your template and designing later– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and user-friendly user interface for writing.
Once you begin writing, you can optimize headings, add web links, and design your content just how you such as.
beehiiv offers you lots of alternatives for various sorts of material like video clips, links, photos, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is also continuously releasing product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a great deal a lot more content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to create your e-mail template and change some setups.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, offer it a description, include your logo, activate or off a welcome email to first time customers, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify background shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, picture styles, and more. I’m not mosting likely to experience ever before solitary point you can enhance with your e-mail template because it’s a whole lot. Just try the system free of charge and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of amazing features that make it a great publishing platform for any kind of newsletter developer.
Right here are some of the vital features you can locate with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting platform. It makes it very simple to write and send out emails. I mentioned over some of things you can do with your settings and email design so I’ll save you some additional reading.
The thing to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s absolutely among the far better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Web site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) reside on a web site. Consider it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and a place where people can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, including the free one, offer you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan places your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a custom-made domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is necessary. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can subscribe to your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv site or with embed forms.
If you already have a website, and want people to subscribe to your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to use an embed type. This is what I utilize on this site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 different options– a full width, a fixed size, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim installed.
You can find the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally an alternative for attribution monitoring if you intend to onward UTM criteria for tracking purposes– quite neat.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I make certain the group is working on updates for these, but I pointed out a few issues I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is an option for developing a referral program.
You can urge existing subscribers on your listing to onward your emails to close friends and colleagues and if they get other individuals to register for your listing, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever form you want. I’ve seem many e-newsletter firms provide benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers right into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– providing you an additional method for expanding your email listing.
However, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a more superior plan. I’ll review all the plans later in this post.
Premium subscriptions
They claim all you need to make a living online is 1,000 real followers. Registration profits is absolutely a beast of its very own. If you’re seeking a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” concerns of your e-newsletter that are only sent to paying subscribers. This can be very profitable relying on what your e-newsletter has to supply. As an example, Trends.co is a preferred costs e-newsletter that generates millions in revenue a year merely by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
One of the things I love concerning beehiiv is just how clean and easy the analytics are. You get real-time date on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer count Beehiiv Headquarters.
You obtain access to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that subscriber matter go up is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan provides you everything you require to get started and expand your newsletter (approximately 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, customized domain, surveys, and accessibility to costs memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) gives you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of concern support and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather generous in my viewpoint.
For example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. As opposed to some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the same amount– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit option for lots of individuals.
I’m not exactly sure how the system economics work on this, yet beehiiv is definitely more affordable (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Obviously, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are some of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of selection:
Easy to establish and start sending newsletters for free.
Clean and modern subscriber analytics.
Great deals of versatility with e-mail styles.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Create costs alternatives to generate income from.
Surveys.
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen one more newsletter system that has been able to package every one of these features together so well.
But certainly, I do not intend to be biased so I’m going to discuss some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the disadvantages I have actually discovered while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including custom fonts.
I make use of Webflow as my website structure platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much information why I enjoy Webflow a lot however you can read my Webflow review if you would love to learn more.
Right now, there really is nothing else means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site aside from using an iframe embed. I directly don’t like making use of iframe’s because they tend to slow down my internet site a bit. Whenever a page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last point to pack on the web page. It’s very visible when you get on a slow web connection. However I can navigate that.
The main gripe I have is that I can’t make use of a normal Webflow kind (which I love making use of). There are ways around this by using a tool like Zapier however that would simply add added prices that I don’t need. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage but I assumed I would mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much surpass the disadvantages below. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will ultimately produce a much better means to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Overall, beehiiv is a wonderful remedy for anyone wanting to study the globe of email marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter system much exceeds lots of that are currently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are also fairly low-cost wherefore they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not create evaluation articles usually. I only do when I actually use the tool myself and would recommend it to a friend.
I wish you discovered some clearness on whether beehiiv is an excellent platform for you.