Over 2 years earlier, I was reading among my favored email 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 began tearing up Beehiiv NEA.
I had not been certain why I felt so psychological.
Being a permanent maker is difficult. I’m frequently getting pitched various tools and services that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I guess I was psychological because I spent the last six months trying different e-mail and e-newsletter platforms to aid construct my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some great choices for creating newsletters. But I could not locate one that made me provide a guaranteed “yes”.
The concern with numerous existing newsletter systems is that they do not feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter platform that lets me totally tailor my e-newsletter styles, makes it super simple to write and send emails, and provides me tools that help me analyze metrics and obtain more clients.
I assume I’ve lastly located the right device.
But, I know beehiiv may not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact ideal 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, write, send out, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by previous workers at the renowned e-newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help creators launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this write-up, I’m mosting likely to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, the important things I like (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to ultimately go with it as my e-newsletter system of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I inadvertently stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve been on the lookout for a contemporary newsletter platform for fairly time now. I’ve put things off hard when it pertained to finally launching my e-newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a couple of other indie systems. Then, Substack. And lastly, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I make sure several newsletter developers respect preferred e-newsletters with millions of clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I appreciated a great deal. They have fantastic material, lots of subscribers, and a clever referral program that enables them to get even more customers.
So, I took place a hunt 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 get more clients? How do they produce an e-newsletter design that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to answer every one of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that built this device truly understand e-newsletter development and development.” I questioned who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the very first marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I knew this was going to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s focused on designer development.
Since, any type of maker recognizes, you require growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the ideal newsletter stack (that scales) often means making use of multiple different devices to assist achieve one goal– one system for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can obtain costly.
So when I discovered beehiiv did every one of these things in one system, and it was complimentary 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 wants a system that allows them to send out customized newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
One of the most effective e-newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or material designer, you should seriously thinking about trying out beehiiv. It’s completely free to get started and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 subscribers on your checklist.
If you actually wind up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a good sign that individuals love reviewing your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a wonderful system utilized by hundreds of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your own site and utilize the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending emails (while creating an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all the things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to obtain words out.
beehiiv likewise provides you a web site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own internet site already, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your website clients right to your beehiiv e-mail list. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable people to subscribe to your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to utilize various marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a terrific Substack choice.
How to begin utilizing beehiiv email marketing software.
Sign up for a free plan
The initial step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 customers, provide you accessibility to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, development customization, analytics, external embed types, and extra. It’s an extremely generous offering for those just starting out (or for those trying to find a new platform to move to).
Onboarding Beehiiv NEA
After producing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process 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 a lot more.
You’ll then produce a name and link for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your web site URL may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally choose your brand colors and design to make sure your newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
As soon as you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have detailed information on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning creating,” “Messages,” “Audience,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Design,” and” Evaluate.” And at the really lower you’ll see the setups choice.
Control panel is your primary nerve center (screenshot over), Start writing is where you develop and release newsletters, Posts is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter editions, Target market is where you can watch who your customers are (and damage them down right into sections), Expand is where you have access 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 advertisements, Style is where you design your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can manage every one of your admin things.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have a concept you want to cover, I advise just mosting likely to the “Create” section in the navbar and clicking “Beginning writing”.
You can tweak your template and styling later on– concentrate on the content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a tidy and straightforward user interface for composing.
Once you start creating, you can optimize headings, include links, and style your content just how you such as.
beehiiv offers you tons of alternatives for different types of material like video clips, web links, pictures, and more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally regularly launching item feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a lot extra content features depending upon when you read this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your e-mail template and readjust some setups.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, give it a description, add your logo, switch on or off a welcome email to very first time subscribers, and a lot more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify background shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, picture layouts, and more. I’m not going to undergo ever solitary point you can maximize with your email template since it’s a whole lot. Simply experiment with the system completely free and see it for yourself!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of incredible features that make it a terrific publishing system for any type of e-newsletter designer.
Here are a few of the important features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing system. It makes it super simple to create and send out e-mails. I stated over a few of the things you can do with your setups and e-mail layout so I’ll save you some additional analysis.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern and minimalistic feel. It’s most definitely among the much better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) live on a web site. Think of 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 people can sign up for your e-newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the complimentary one, provide you an internet site. However, the free plan locations your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to include a customized domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is important. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv website or through embed kinds.
If you already have a website, and desire people to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to use an embed type. This is what I make use of on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have three various alternatives– a full size, a repaired size, and a slim installed. I directly utilize the slim embed.
You can find the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise an alternative for attribution monitoring if you wish to forward UTM criteria for tracking purposes– pretty neat.
However, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I make certain the team is servicing updates for these, but I stated a few problems I had in the advantages and disadvantages area below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a service for producing a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your list to forward your e-mails to friends and colleagues and if they obtain other individuals to register for your checklist, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you desire. I have actually seem several newsletter firms provide rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients right into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– offering you one more opportunity for expanding your email checklist.
Nonetheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a much more superior plan. I’ll review all the plans later on in this article.
Premium memberships
They state all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 true followers. Subscription profits is certainly a monster of its very own. If you’re seeking a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “premium” problems of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying subscribers. This can be extremely financially rewarding depending upon what your newsletter needs to provide. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent premium e-newsletter that creates millions in profits a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
One of the things I love about beehiiv is just how tidy and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client matter Beehiiv NEA.
You get access to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye sight on how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that customer count go up is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (free) Launch plan gives you every little thing you require to get going and grow your newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) provides you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, personalized domain name, polls, and accessibility to premium memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of top priority support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly charitable in my point of view.
For example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the same amount– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit choice for lots of customers.
I’m uncertain just how the system economics deal with this, yet beehiiv is most definitely more affordable (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I have actually directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of choice:
Easy to establish and begin sending newsletters free of cost.
Clean and modern client analytics.
Great deals of adaptability with e-mail layouts.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Create costs options to monetize.
Surveys.
To be honest, I have not seen one more e-newsletter platform that has been able to package all of these features together so well.
But naturally, I don’t want to be biased so I’m going to state some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are some of the cons I have actually found while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including custom typefaces.
I use Webflow as my internet site structure platform of selection (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much detail why I like Webflow a lot yet you can read my Webflow review if you want to find out more.
Now, there truly is no other means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site apart from utilizing an iframe embed. I personally don’t like making use of iframe’s since they have a tendency to slow down my internet site a little bit. Each time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last thing to load on the page. It’s really obvious when you’re on a slow net connection. However I can navigate that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can not use a routine Webflow type (which I love making use of). There are means around this by using a device like Zapier however that would certainly simply include added expenses that I don’t need. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage yet I assumed I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much outweigh the cons below. I’m additionally hopeful that Webflow will eventually develop a much better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Overall, beehiiv is an excellent option for any individual aiming to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter system much outweighs numerous that are presently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you actually have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are also rather inexpensive of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is uncommon. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not write review messages frequently. I just do when I really make use of the tool myself and would certainly recommend it to a close friend.
I hope you located some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent system for you.