Over 2 years back, I read among my favored e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked on it and promptly started wrecking Beehiiv Jesse Pujji.
I wasn’t sure why I felt so psychological.
Being a full-time developer is difficult. I’m usually obtaining pitched various devices and solutions that do not seem to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional because I invested the last six months experimenting with different e-mail and newsletter systems to aid build my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some wonderful choices for creating newsletters. But I couldn’t discover one that made me give a certain “yes”.
The problem with numerous existing newsletter platforms is that they do not feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter system that lets me totally customize my newsletter styles, makes it very very easy to create and send out e-mails, and offers me devices that aid me assess metrics and get more subscribers.
I believe I’ve lastly discovered the ideal device.
Yet, I know beehiiv may not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it easy to design, compose, send, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by previous employees at the famous e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help creators launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this write-up, I’m going to discuss my individual experience with beehiiv, things I like (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to ultimately select it as my newsletter system of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I inadvertently came across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I have actually watched for a modern e-newsletter platform for fairly some time currently. I’ve put things off hard when it came to lastly releasing my newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a couple of various other indie systems. After that, Substack. And lastly, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make sure lots of newsletter developers look up to preferred e-newsletters with numerous customers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a great deal. They have fantastic web content, tons of subscribers, and a smart referral program that allows them to get back at more clients.
So, I took place a quest to find out how these huge newsletters established their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get even more clients? How do they produce an e-newsletter style that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to answer all of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that constructed this tool actually comprehend newsletter development and growth.” I examined who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my brain blew up.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s focused on developer growth.
Since, any type of developer understands, you need growth to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And locating the ideal e-newsletter stack (that scales) commonly indicates making use of several different tools to help accomplish one objective– one system for your newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to establish references. It can obtain expensive.
So when I figured out beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, 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 creator that desires a platform that enables them to send custom e-newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most successful e-newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media company, startup, or material creator, you ought to seriously taking into consideration trying out beehiiv. It’s entirely cost-free to begin and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your checklist.
If you really wind up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly an excellent sign that people enjoy reading your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is an excellent system made use of by hundreds 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 emails (while creating an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing customers to obtain words out.
beehiiv likewise offers you a web site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your own website already, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I use) to send your site clients directly to your beehiiv email list. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to allow individuals to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the flexibility to utilize various marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack option.
How to begin using 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 on the “Start trial” button on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 customers, provide you accessibility to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, breakthrough personalization, analytics, exterior embed forms, and much more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those simply beginning (or for those seeking a new system to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Jesse Pujji
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your first e-newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any kind of paying subscribers?”, and extra.
You’ll then produce a name and link for your e-newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally pick your brand name colors and design to ensure your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
Once you reach your main control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have described information on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Begin creating,” “Blog posts,” “Audience,” “Grow,” “Generate income from,” “Layout,” and” Assess.” And at the very lower you’ll see the setups choice.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot above), Start writing is where you produce and publish e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Audience is where you can watch who your subscribers are (and break them down 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 e-newsletter with ads, Style is where you design your newsletter landing page and message template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle all of your admin things.
Creating your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to begin writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have a concept you want to cover, I advise just going to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking “Beginning composing”.
You can tweak your template and styling later– focus on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and easy to use interface for writing.
Once you begin composing, you can maximize headings, add links, and design your content just how you such as.
beehiiv gives you tons of alternatives for different sorts of web content like video clips, links, photos, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is likewise constantly releasing product feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a great deal much more material features relying on when you’re reading this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to create your e-mail template and change some setups.
Right here, you can update the name of your newsletter, offer it a description, include your logo design, activate or off a welcome email to very first time clients, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit history shades, borders, spacing, typefaces, picture layouts, and more. I’m not going to undergo ever solitary point you can maximize with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a lot. Just try out the system completely free and see it on your own!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of remarkable features that make it a wonderful posting platform for any e-newsletter creator.
Here are several of the vital features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing platform. It makes it extremely very easy to create and send emails. I pointed out over several of things you can do with your setups and e-mail design so I’ll spare you some extra reading.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern and minimalistic feel. It’s most definitely one of the better e-mail editors I have actually ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you want) live on a site. Think about it as a website for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and a place where individuals can sign up for your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, provide you a web site. However, the free plan places your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a personalized domain to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is necessary. After all, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can sign up for your newsletter right from your beehiiv web site or with embed types.
If you currently have a website, and desire people to register for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this website (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 different alternatives– a complete width, a fixed size, and a slim embed. I personally make use of the slim embed.
You can discover the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally an option for acknowledgment monitoring if you intend to ahead UTM specifications for tracking purposes– pretty neat.
However, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make certain the team is dealing with updates for these, but I pointed out a few issues I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is an option for developing a referral program.
You can motivate existing subscribers on your listing to ahead your emails to good friends and associates and if they get other individuals to register for your checklist, you can reward them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you want. I’ve seem lots of e-newsletter firms provide rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your subscribers into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– offering you one more avenue for growing your e-mail checklist.
Nevertheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a much more premium plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this post.
Costs memberships
They claim all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 true fans. Subscription income is certainly a monster of its own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” issues of your e-newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be extremely financially rewarding relying on what your newsletter has to offer. For example, Trends.co is a prominent premium e-newsletter that creates millions in revenue a year just by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Data analytics
One of things I enjoy regarding beehiiv is just how tidy and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and client matter Beehiiv Jesse Pujji.
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 count go up 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 gives you everything you require to get going and grow your e-newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain, polls, and accessibility to premium memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of concern assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my point of view.
As an example, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would charge $679 monthly for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for many users.
I’m unsure exactly how the system economics deal with this, yet beehiiv is certainly less expensive (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are several of the pros and cons I have actually personally experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of selection:
Easy to establish and start sending out newsletters totally free.
Tidy and modern client analytics.
Lots of flexibility with e-mail layouts.
Referral program feature.
Web site hosting.
Create costs options to generate income from.
Polls.
To be sincere, I haven’t seen another newsletter platform that has been able to package all of these features together so well.
However certainly, I don’t want to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to mention some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are some of the disadvantages I have actually located while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom typefaces.
I utilize Webflow as my internet site structure platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter too much information why I like Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow testimonial if you want to learn more.
Right now, there actually is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website apart from using an iframe embed. I personally don’t like using iframe’s due to the fact that they often tend to reduce my internet site a little bit. Whenever a page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last thing to fill on the page. It’s extremely obvious when you’re on a slow-moving internet connection. But I can get around that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can’t make use of a regular Webflow type (which I enjoy utilizing). There are means around this by using a tool like Zapier yet that would certainly simply add additional expenses that I don’t require. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage but I thought I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far surpass the cons below. I’m also confident that Webflow will ultimately create a better method to integrate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
On the whole, beehiiv is a great remedy for anyone looking to study the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter system far exceeds many that are currently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively inexpensive for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t write testimonial articles typically. I only do when I in fact utilize the device myself and would suggest it to a pal.
I wish you located some clearness on whether beehiiv is an excellent platform for you.