Over 2 years ago, I read one of my preferred email e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked on it and quickly started destroying Beehiiv or Ghost.
I wasn’t sure why I really felt so psychological.
Being a permanent developer is tough. I’m often obtaining pitched different tools and solutions that do not appear to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional because I invested the last 6 months trying different e-mail and e-newsletter platforms to help develop my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some great choices for composing e-newsletters. However I could not discover one that made me provide a certain “yes”.
The problem with lots of existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me totally tailor my e-newsletter styles, makes it extremely very easy to create and send e-mails, and provides me tools that aid me examine metrics and get more subscribers.
I believe I have actually finally found the appropriate tool.
But, I know beehiiv may not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really right 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 very easy to design, create, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Developed by former workers at the popular e-newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist makers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking great deals of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to explain my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to ultimately go with it as my newsletter system of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a modern e-newsletter platform for fairly a long time currently. I’ve procrastinated hard when it pertained to lastly releasing my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie systems. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up using beehiiv.
I’m sure numerous e-newsletter creators admire prominent e-newsletters with numerous clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a great deal. They have great web content, tons of customers, and a brilliant referral program that permits them to get back at much more clients.
So, I took place a quest to determine just how these huge newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain even more subscribers? How do they develop a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to address every one of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this tool truly recognize e-newsletter creation and development.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the initial marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on designer growth.
Due to the fact that, any designer recognizes, you require growth to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the ideal newsletter stack (that ranges) often suggests utilizing numerous various tools to assist attain one objective– one platform for your newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to set up references. It can get pricey.
So when I learnt beehiiv did all of these points in one system, and it was free to begin utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content designer that desires a platform that allows them to send personalized e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a web site.
The most successful newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or web content designer, you must seriously considering experimenting with beehiiv. It’s absolutely cost-free to begin and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 subscribers on your checklist.
If you in fact end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a great indicator that people love reading your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a terrific system made use of by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you get your very own web site and use the system as your all-in-one service for sending e-mails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, even more design flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to obtain the word out.
beehiiv likewise provides you a site similar to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own web site currently, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your site customers straight to your beehiiv email listing. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable people to sign up for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the flexibility to utilize different marketing channels to obtain your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack choice.
Just how to begin utilizing beehiiv email marketing software.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you access to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance customization, analytics, exterior embed kinds, and more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those simply starting out (or for those seeking a new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv or Ghost
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any paying clients?”, and more.
You’ll after that develop a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll also choose your brand design and colors to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
Once you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have described details on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning composing,” “Articles,” “Target market,” “Grow,” “Generate income from,” “Style,” and” Evaluate.” And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the settings option.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot over), Start writing is where you create and publish e-newsletters, Messages is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Target market is where you can watch who your subscribers are (and damage them down into segments), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your e-newsletter with advertisements, Layout is where you make your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle all of your admin things.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to start composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have a concept you intend to cover, I recommend simply going to the “Create” section in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning writing”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– focus on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and user-friendly interface for creating.
When you begin writing, you can maximize headings, add web links, and design your web content how you such as.
beehiiv provides you lots of alternatives for various sorts of material like videos, web links, images, and more.
The group at beehiiv is likewise continuously launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a great deal extra content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your email template and readjust some settings.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a summary, add your logo, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to first time customers, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify history colors, boundaries, spacing, fonts, photo formats, and more. I’m not going to experience ever before solitary thing you can maximize with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a great deal. Simply check out the platform free of charge and see it for yourself!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of impressive features that make it a wonderful posting system for any e-newsletter designer.
Below are a few of the essential features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing system. It makes it very simple to create and send emails. I mentioned over several of the things you can do with your setups and e-mail design so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feel. It’s most definitely among the better e-mail editors I’ve ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) reside on a site. Consider it as a website for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your newsletter, and an area where people can sign up for your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s practically comparable to that.
All plans, including the totally free one, provide you a web site. Nevertheless, the free plan places your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a custom domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is very important. After all, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter directly from your beehiiv site or via embed types.
If you already have a website, and want individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to make use of an embed form. This is what I use on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have 3 different choices– a complete width, a fixed size, and a slim installed. I directly make use of the slim embed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s also an alternative for attribution monitoring if you want to forward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– quite neat.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I’m sure the group is dealing with updates for these, however I pointed out a couple of problems I had in the pros and cons area below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a remedy for producing a referral program.
You can urge existing subscribers on your checklist to onward your e-mails to pals and coworkers 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 have actually seem numerous e-newsletter business provide rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– offering you an additional method for growing your e-mail listing.
However, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a more premium 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 real fans. Subscription earnings is most definitely a monster of its very own. If you’re looking for a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “premium” issues of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying customers. This can be really profitable depending on what your e-newsletter needs to provide. As an example, Trends.co is a preferred costs newsletter that creates millions in profits a year just by having pay-only newsletter material.
Information analytics
One of the important things I like about beehiiv is exactly how tidy and easy the analytics are. You get real-time date on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and client matter Beehiiv or Ghost.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on just how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that subscriber count rise is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (free) Launch plan gives you every little thing you need to get started and expand your newsletter (as much as 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, personalized domain name, polls, and accessibility to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of concern assistance and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are quite charitable in my viewpoint.
For instance, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 monthly. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 monthly for the same amount– making beehiiv a great Kit alternative for lots of customers.
I’m not exactly sure how the device economics service this, but beehiiv is certainly less expensive (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Naturally, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are some of the pros and cons I have actually directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of selection:
Easy to establish and begin sending out e-newsletters free of charge.
Tidy and modern customer analytics.
Lots of adaptability with e-mail designs.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Produce costs options to generate income from.
Surveys.
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen another e-newsletter platform that has been able to package all of these features together so well.
But certainly, I don’t wish to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to point out some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the cons I’ve found while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding personalized fonts.
I utilize 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 too much detail why I like Webflow a lot but you can review my Webflow review if you wish to discover more.
Right now, there truly is nothing else means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow website other than using an iframe embed. I personally don’t like using iframe’s since they tend to decrease my internet site a bit. Each time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last thing to load on the web page. It’s really visible when you get on a slow-moving web connection. However I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can not make use of a routine Webflow form (which I love utilizing). There are means around this by using a tool like Zapier however that would certainly just add additional expenses that I don’t need. To be sincere, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con however I believed I would mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far exceed the disadvantages right here. I’m likewise confident that Webflow will at some point produce a much better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
On the whole, beehiiv is a great service for any person aiming to study the globe of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter system much surpasses several that are presently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you actually have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally relatively inexpensive of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your listing is unusual. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t create review posts frequently. I only do when I actually utilize the tool myself and would advise it to a pal.
I hope you located some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is a great platform for you.