Over two years back, I read one of my preferred e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked it and promptly started wrecking Beehiiv Partner Program.
I had not been sure why I really felt so emotional.
Being a full-time creator is difficult. I’m commonly getting pitched various devices and solutions that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was emotional because I invested the last 6 months experimenting with different email and e-newsletter systems to aid develop my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific options for creating e-newsletters. But I couldn’t discover one that made me give a definite “yes”.
The issue with many existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter platform that lets me completely customize my newsletter designs, makes it incredibly very easy to compose and send out emails, and provides me tools that help me evaluate metrics and get even more subscribers.
I assume I’ve finally discovered the appropriate tool.
However, I understand beehiiv may not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it easy to style, write, send, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by former workers at the popular newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist makers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking lots of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to describe my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly select it as my e-newsletter system of option.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months earlier, I unintentionally came across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve been on the lookout for a contemporary newsletter system for fairly a long time currently. I have actually postponed hard when it came to finally launching my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few various other indie systems. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up utilizing beehiiv.
I make certain many e-newsletter creators appreciate prominent newsletters with millions of subscribers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a lot. They have wonderful content, lots of clients, and a clever referral program that allows them to get even more customers.
So, I went on a search to find out just how these big e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more customers? How do they produce a newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to answer every one of my concerns. I thought to myself, “damn the people that developed this device really recognize newsletter production and development.” I questioned who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the first marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I knew this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter system. One that’s focused on designer development.
Because, any developer understands, you need development to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the ideal newsletter pile (that ranges) typically suggests making use of numerous different tools to aid achieve one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to establish referrals. It can get expensive.
So when I found out beehiiv did every one of these points in one platform, and it was complimentary to begin using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material creator that desires a system that permits them to send custom e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right devices to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, start-up, or web content maker, you must seriously taking into consideration trying out beehiiv. It’s absolutely complimentary to begin and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you in fact end up having to pay for beehiiv it’s most likely a great indication that individuals enjoy reading your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a wonderful platform made use of by countless independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own website and make use of the system as your all-in-one option for sending emails (while producing an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv permits you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of much better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing subscribers to get words out.
beehiiv additionally offers you a site similar to Substack. But, if you have your very own website currently, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your site subscribers straight to your beehiiv email listing. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable individuals to register for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to leverage different marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack option.
How to begin utilizing beehiiv email marketing software application.
Sign up for a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 customers, give you accessibility to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance personalization, analytics, exterior embed forms, and much more. It’s a very charitable offering for those simply beginning (or for those searching for a new system to move to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Partner Program
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any type of paying clients?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that produce 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 e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your site link could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll likewise select your brand colors and design to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
When you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have outlined details on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start composing,” “Messages,” “Audience,” “Expand,” “Monetize,” “Style,” and” Examine.” And at the really lower you’ll see the setups choice.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot over), Start creating is where you produce and release e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter versions, Target market is where you can view who your customers are (and damage them down right 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 ads, Design is where you develop your e-newsletter landing page and article template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of all of your admin things.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to begin creating, with little to no friction. If you’re just starting, and have an idea you want to discuss, I recommend simply mosting likely to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking “Start writing”.
You can modify your template and styling later on– concentrate on the content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a clean and user-friendly user interface for writing.
As soon as you begin writing, you can optimize headings, add links, and design your web content how you such as.
beehiiv gives you lots of choices for different sorts of web content like videos, links, pictures, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally continuously launching product feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a whole lot a lot more content features relying on when you’re reading this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
When you have a newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to develop your email template and adjust some settings.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, provide it a description, include your logo, turn on or off a welcome email to first time clients, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can edit history colors, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, picture styles, and a lot more. I’m not going to go through ever before solitary thing you can maximize with your email template because it’s a lot. Simply try out the system absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of fantastic features that make it an excellent publishing platform for any e-newsletter designer.
Here are several of the crucial features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it incredibly simple to create and send out e-mails. I mentioned above some of the important things you can do with your setups and e-mail style so I’ll save you some additional analysis.
The thing to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern-day and minimalistic feel. It’s absolutely among the far better e-mail editors I’ve ever written in.
Internet site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) 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 issues of your e-newsletter, and an area where individuals can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s virtually comparable to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, give you a web site. However, the free plan areas your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a custom-made domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is essential. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter straight from your beehiiv internet site or via embed kinds.
If you already have an internet site, and want individuals to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to use an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this site (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 various choices– a complete width, a taken care of width, and a slim installed. I directly use the slim installed.
You can discover the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s also an option for acknowledgment tracking if you wish to forward UTM specifications for tracking objectives– pretty neat.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I’m sure the team is working with updates for these, yet I pointed out a couple of worries 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 newsletter platform, is an option for creating a referral program.
You can encourage existing customers on your listing to ahead your emails to friends and coworkers and if they obtain other individuals to subscribe to your checklist, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever type you desire. I have actually appear numerous newsletter firms offer benefits in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your clients into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– providing you an additional opportunity for expanding your e-mail list.
Nevertheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a much more superior plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this short article.
Costs memberships
They say all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real followers. Subscription earnings is certainly a monster of its very own. If you’re looking for a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “costs” issues of your e-newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be very profitable relying on what your e-newsletter needs to provide. For example, Trends.co is a preferred costs newsletter that produces millions in revenue a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Data analytics
One of the things I love concerning beehiiv is how tidy and easy the analytics are. You get real-time day on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client count Beehiiv Partner Program.
You obtain access to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on exactly how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that subscriber matter increase is definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan gives you every little thing you require to start and grow your newsletter (approximately 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom-made domain, surveys, and access to costs registrations. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority assistance and eliminating 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 each month. Instead of some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 monthly for the very same amount– making beehiiv a great Kit option for several users.
I’m uncertain how the system business economics service this, however beehiiv is absolutely less expensive (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Of course, with every system, it has its pros and cons. Right here are several of the pros and cons I’ve directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of selection:
Easy to set up and start sending out newsletters free of charge.
Clean and contemporary customer analytics.
Great deals of versatility with email styles.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Create costs options to monetize.
Polls.
To be honest, I have not seen one more e-newsletter system that has actually been able to package every one of these features together so well.
Yet obviously, I don’t wish to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to point out some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the disadvantages I have actually discovered while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including custom font styles.
I make use of Webflow as my website structure platform of selection (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to enter too much detail why I love Webflow so much however you can review my Webflow testimonial if you wish to discover more.
Right now, there actually is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site apart from utilizing an iframe embed. I directly don’t such as utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they tend to reduce my internet site a little bit. Every time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last thing to fill on the page. It’s extremely obvious when you get on a sluggish internet connection. However I can get around that.
The major gripe I have is that I can’t make use of a normal Webflow form (which I love utilizing). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would just include added prices that I do not require. To be honest, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage however I thought I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much exceed the cons right here. I’m additionally confident that Webflow will at some point develop a much better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
On the whole, beehiiv is a fantastic option for any individual looking to dive into the globe of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter platform much surpasses numerous that are currently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you really have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are also relatively inexpensive for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your checklist is uncommon. If you were to have a 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 compose evaluation messages usually. I only do when I actually utilize the device myself and would certainly suggest it to a good friend.
I hope you located some quality on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent system for you.