Over 2 years earlier, I was reading among my preferred email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the very first time. I clicked it and quickly began tearing up Beehiiv SEO.
I had not been sure why I felt so psychological.
Being a full time designer is difficult. I’m typically obtaining pitched various devices and solutions that do not seem to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional due to the fact that I invested the last six months trying different email and e-newsletter platforms to aid build my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some excellent alternatives for creating newsletters. Yet I could not locate one that made me provide a guaranteed “yes”.
The issue with many existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter system that lets me totally personalize my e-newsletter designs, makes it very simple to write and send out e-mails, and gives me devices that assist me evaluate metrics and get even more clients.
I think I have actually lastly located the right tool.
Yet, I recognize beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really ideal for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it easy to style, write, send, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by previous staff members at the popular e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist creators launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking great deals of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this short article, I’m mosting likely to discuss my individual experience with beehiiv, the important things I like (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly go with it as my e-newsletter system of choice.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I mistakenly came across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I have actually been on the lookout for a contemporary newsletter platform for fairly a long time currently. I’ve postponed hard when it pertained to finally launching my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And lastly, I ended up making use of beehiiv.
I’m sure many e-newsletter makers appreciate popular e-newsletters with numerous subscribers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I looked up to a lot. They have excellent material, lots of subscribers, and a smart referral program that enables them to get even much more customers.
So, I took place a hunt to figure out exactly how these large newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get even more clients? How do they produce a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to address all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn the people that constructed this device truly understand e-newsletter creation and development.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were some of the first marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I recognized this was going to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on maker growth.
Because, any maker understands, you require growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the right newsletter pile (that ranges) commonly implies using numerous various tools to assist accomplish one objective– one system for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one system to establish references. It can get pricey.
So when I found out beehiiv did every one of these things in one platform, and it was free to begin using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content designer that wants a system that permits them to send out custom-made e-newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv focuses on giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or material maker, you must seriously taking into consideration trying out beehiiv. It’s totally free to start and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your listing.
If you in fact wind up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s most likely an excellent indication that individuals enjoy reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there already a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a wonderful system utilized by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your very own internet site and utilize the platform as your all-in-one remedy for sending out e-mails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to get the word out.
beehiiv likewise gives you an internet site similar to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own web site already, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your web site subscribers directly to your beehiiv email checklist. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This provides you the flexibility to take advantage of various marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a terrific Substack alternative.
Just how to start utilizing beehiiv email marketing software program.
Enroll in a free plan
The very first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will enable you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, offer you access to website hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, breakthrough customization, analytics, outside embed types, and much more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those simply beginning (or for those trying to find a new platform to move to).
Onboarding Beehiiv SEO
After creating an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any type of paying clients?”, and more.
You’ll then create a name and link for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your web site URL may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally pick your brand colors and design to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your main control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed details on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start writing,” “Blog posts,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Monetize,” “Layout,” and” Analyze.” And at the very bottom you’ll see the settings option.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot above), Start writing is where you create 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 damage them down right into sections), Grow is where you have access 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, Design is where you design your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of all of your admin stuff.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to start writing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just starting, and have a concept you wish to discuss, I advise just going to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking “Begin composing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– focus on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and straightforward user interface for composing.
When you begin writing, you can enhance headings, add links, and design your material exactly how you like.
beehiiv provides you lots of alternatives for various sorts of material like video clips, web links, pictures, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally regularly launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a whole lot extra content features relying on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to create your e-mail template and adjust some setups.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a description, include your logo, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time subscribers, and a lot more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit background colors, boundaries, spacing, font styles, picture formats, and extra. I’m not going to undergo ever before solitary thing you can enhance with your e-mail template since it’s a great deal. Simply try the system free of charge and see it on your own!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of outstanding features that make it a terrific posting system for any kind of newsletter creator.
Here are a few of the essential features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform. It makes it incredibly simple to compose and send out e-mails. I stated above several of the things you can do with your setups and email layout so I’ll spare you some extra analysis.
Things to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a really modern-day and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely one of the better email editors I have actually ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive on a website. Think of it as a site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous issues of your newsletter, and a location where people can register for your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the totally free one, provide you a site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to include a custom domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is important. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can subscribe to your newsletter right from your beehiiv site or through embed types.
If you already have an internet site, and desire individuals to register for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed form. This is what I utilize on this web site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 various alternatives– a full size, a dealt with width, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim installed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s additionally an alternative for attribution tracking if you wish to forward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– rather neat.
However, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I’m sure the team is working with updates for these, however I discussed a few issues I had in the pros and cons section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a remedy for creating a referral program.
You can motivate existing subscribers on your list to forward your emails to pals and coworkers and if they obtain other individuals to sign up for your list, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually seem lots of newsletter companies offer incentives in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– providing you one more method for expanding your e-mail listing.
Nonetheless, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this article.
Costs memberships
They claim all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real fans. 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 newsletter that are only sent to paying subscribers. This can be very rewarding depending on what your e-newsletter has to supply. For instance, Trends.co is a popular premium e-newsletter that creates millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter web content.
Information analytics
Among things I love about beehiiv is just how clean and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on exactly how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer matter Beehiiv SEO.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on just how your newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that subscriber count go up is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you whatever you require to get started and expand your e-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, custom-made domain, polls, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you everything in the Grow plan with addition of top priority support and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly charitable in my point of view.
As an example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 per month. In contrast to some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 each month for the same quantity– making beehiiv an excellent Kit alternative for several customers.
I’m not sure how the unit economics service this, however beehiiv is definitely more affordable (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Naturally, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Below are a few of the pros and cons I’ve 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 begin sending out newsletters totally free.
Clean and contemporary subscriber analytics.
Great deals of versatility with email layouts.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Produce premium choices to generate income from.
Polls.
To be truthful, I haven’t seen another newsletter platform that has actually been able to package every one of these features with each other so well.
But of course, I do not wish to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to discuss some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are some of the cons I’ve located while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including custom font styles.
I make use of Webflow as my web site structure platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in too much information why I like Webflow a lot however you can read my Webflow review if you wish to learn more.
Today, there actually is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site aside from making use of an iframe embed. I personally do not like using iframe’s since they tend to reduce my internet site a little bit. Each time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last point to fill on the web page. It’s very visible when you’re on a sluggish web link. However I can navigate that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can not utilize a normal Webflow kind (which I like making use of). There are means around this by utilizing a device like Zapier but that would just include additional expenses that I do not require. To be truthful, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con however I assumed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far surpass the cons right here. I’m likewise hopeful that Webflow will at some point produce a better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
In general, beehiiv is a fantastic remedy for anyone seeking to dive into the globe of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter platform far outweighs lots of that are presently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you truly have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are also rather cheap for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your listing is uncommon. 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 each month.
Anyways, I don’t create testimonial articles usually. I only do when I really utilize the tool myself and would certainly recommend it to a buddy.
I wish you located some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is a good platform for you.