Over 2 years ago, I was reading one of my favorite 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 instantaneously began destroying Beehiiv Slack Community.
I had not been sure why I really felt so emotional.
Being a permanent designer is tough. I’m often obtaining pitched different devices and solutions that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional because I spent the last 6 months experimenting with different e-mail and newsletter platforms to assist construct my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some terrific alternatives for composing e-newsletters. But I could not locate one that made me provide a certain “yes”.
The issue with numerous existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me completely personalize my e-newsletter layouts, makes it incredibly very easy to create and send out e-mails, and gives me tools that assist me analyze metrics and obtain more clients.
I assume I’ve lastly located the ideal device.
However, I know beehiiv may not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it very easy to design, create, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by previous workers at the well-known e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help makers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this post, I’m mosting likely to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to ultimately choose it as my e-newsletter platform of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve watched for a modern-day e-newsletter system for fairly time now. I have actually procrastinated hard when it pertained to ultimately launching my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And lastly, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I make sure numerous e-newsletter makers appreciate popular e-newsletters with millions of subscribers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I admired a great deal. They have wonderful material, lots of customers, and a clever referral program that allows them to get even a lot more customers.
So, I went on a hunt to figure out just how these large newsletters established their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain even more clients? How do they produce an e-newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to answer every one of my questions. I believed to myself, “damn the people that constructed this device truly recognize newsletter production and development.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I recognized this was going to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s focused on creator development.
Due to the fact that, any maker knows, you require growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the right newsletter stack (that scales) commonly suggests utilizing several various tools to aid attain one objective– one system for your e-newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one system to set up referrals. It can get expensive.
So when I learnt beehiiv did every one of these points in one system, and it was totally free 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 material maker that wants a platform that enables them to send personalized newsletters with or without needing to have an internet site.
The most successful e-newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or content creator, you should seriously considering experimenting with beehiiv. It’s totally cost-free to get going and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you actually wind up having to pay for beehiiv it’s most likely an excellent indication that individuals enjoy reviewing your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there already a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is an excellent platform used by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own web site and use the platform as your all-in-one option for sending out e-mails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv enables you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing customers to obtain words out.
beehiiv likewise offers you a web site similar to Substack. However, if you have your own internet site currently, you can also use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your web site subscribers straight to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to enable individuals to sign up for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to utilize different marketing channels to obtain your e-newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack alternative.
How to begin utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Enroll in a free plan
The very first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 customers, offer you access to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advancement personalization, analytics, outside embed forms, and much more. It’s a very generous offering for those just starting out (or for those looking for a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Slack Community
After creating an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process 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 clients?”, and much more.
You’ll after that produce a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your internet site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll also choose your brand name colors and design to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
When you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have described info on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Beginning creating,” “Messages,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Style,” and” Assess.” And at the very lower you’ll see the settings choice.
Dashboard is your primary nerve center (screenshot above), Begin creating is where you develop and release newsletters, Posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can view who your customers are (and damage them down right into sectors), Expand 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 ads, Style is where you design your e-newsletter landing page and post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can manage all of your admin stuff.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting out, and have an idea you want to write about, I recommend simply mosting likely to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking “Start composing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– concentrate on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and easy to use user interface for writing.
When you start composing, you can optimize headings, include web links, and style your content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv offers you lots of alternatives for different kinds of material like video clips, links, photos, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is likewise constantly launching product feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a lot extra content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to develop your e-mail template and readjust some settings.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, offer it a summary, add your logo design, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to first time customers, and much more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit background colors, borders, spacing, fonts, picture formats, and more. I’m not going to undergo ever before solitary point you can maximize with your e-mail template since it’s a lot. Just check out the platform for free and see it for yourself!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it a terrific posting system for any e-newsletter developer.
Right here are several of the crucial features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it super simple to write and send e-mails. I discussed over several of the important things you can do with your settings and email design so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
The thing to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely one of the better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Internet site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) live on a website. Think about it as a site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and a location where individuals can register for your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the totally free one, provide you an internet site. Nonetheless, the free plan areas your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to include a personalized domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is necessary. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter right from your beehiiv site or through embed types.
If you already have a site, and desire individuals to register for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed form. 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 three different choices– a full size, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I directly make use of the slim embed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s additionally an alternative for acknowledgment monitoring if you wish to forward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– pretty neat.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I’m sure the group is working on updates for these, but I stated a couple of problems I had in the advantages and disadvantages section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a remedy for creating a referral program.
You can urge existing clients on your checklist to onward your emails to close friends and colleagues and if they obtain other people to subscribe to your list, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually appear numerous e-newsletter business give benefits in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your clients right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– offering you another avenue for growing your e-mail checklist.
However, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a more superior plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this write-up.
Premium memberships
They claim all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true fans. Registration income is absolutely a beast of its own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” concerns of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying customers. This can be very lucrative depending on what your e-newsletter has to supply. For instance, Trends.co is a preferred costs newsletter that produces millions in income a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
Among the things I love about beehiiv is exactly how clean and basic the analytics are. You get real-time day on just how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer matter Beehiiv Slack Community.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that customer matter increase is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan offers you every little thing you need to begin and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you whatever in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, customized domain, surveys, and accessibility to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of priority support and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather generous in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 per month for the same amount– making beehiiv a terrific Kit alternative for many users.
I’m not sure exactly how the system economics work on this, but beehiiv is certainly less expensive (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Below are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I have actually directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of option:
Easy to set up and start sending out e-newsletters for free.
Clean and modern subscriber analytics.
Lots of adaptability with email layouts.
Referral program feature.
Site hosting.
Produce premium alternatives to generate income from.
Polls.
To be truthful, I haven’t seen another e-newsletter platform that has been able to package every one of these features together so well.
Yet of course, I don’t wish to be prejudiced so I’m going to discuss some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are some of the disadvantages I’ve discovered while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding personalized fonts.
I make use of Webflow as my web site building platform of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in excessive information why I love Webflow a lot yet you can read my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to discover more.
Today, there truly is no other way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site apart from using an iframe embed. I directly don’t like utilizing iframe’s since they often tend to decrease my internet site a bit. Each time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last thing to fill on the web page. It’s really recognizable when you’re on a slow web link. Yet I can navigate that.
The major gripe I have is that I can’t make use of a routine Webflow kind (which I like making use of). There are methods around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier but that would simply add extra costs that I do not need. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con yet I believed I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far surpass the disadvantages here. I’m additionally hopeful that Webflow will at some point produce a far better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Overall, beehiiv is a great service for anybody seeking to dive into the world of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter platform far surpasses many that are presently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you actually have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively low-cost wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your checklist is unheard of. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not write testimonial messages frequently. I only do when I in fact utilize the tool myself and would recommend it to a buddy.
I hope you discovered some clearness on whether beehiiv is an excellent system for you.