Over 2 years ago, I read among my preferred e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked it and instantaneously began tearing up Beehiiv Updates.
I had not been sure why I really felt so psychological.
Being a full time developer is tough. I’m commonly getting 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 various email and newsletter systems to aid construct my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some fantastic choices for composing e-newsletters. However I could not discover one that made me provide a definite “yes”.
The problem with many existing newsletter systems is that they do not feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter system that lets me totally personalize my newsletter layouts, makes it incredibly simple to compose and send out e-mails, and offers me tools that help me examine metrics and obtain more clients.
I assume I’ve finally found the best device.
However, I understand 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 system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it easy to design, compose, send out, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by previous employees at the famous newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help creators launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking lots of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this write-up, I’m going to clarify my personal experience with beehiiv, the important things I enjoy (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to ultimately opt for it as my newsletter system of choice.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve been on the lookout for a contemporary e-newsletter platform for rather a long time currently. I’ve hesitated hard when it involved lastly launching my newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie systems. Then, Substack. And lastly, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I make certain numerous newsletter makers admire prominent newsletters with millions of subscribers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a lot. They have wonderful material, tons of clients, and a brilliant referral program that permits them to get back at extra customers.
So, I went on a quest to identify how these big newsletters set up their logistics. What system 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 create an e-newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to respond to all of my questions. I believed to myself, “damn the people that built this tool truly understand newsletter creation and development.” I examined who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were a few of the first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I recognized this was going to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on designer development.
Due to the fact that, any kind of creator understands, you need development to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And locating the ideal e-newsletter pile (that scales) typically implies utilizing several different devices to aid attain one goal– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to establish referrals. It can get pricey.
So when I figured out beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was totally free to start utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content developer that desires a system that permits them to send custom e-newsletters with or without needing to have an internet site.
One of the most successful newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv focuses on providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or web content creator, you must seriously considering trying out beehiiv. It’s entirely complimentary to get started and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 subscribers on your list.
If you actually end up having to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly an excellent sign that people love reading 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 terrific system utilized by countless independent authors. With Substack you get your very own internet site and make use of the system as your all-in-one remedy 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 things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing customers to obtain the word out.
beehiiv additionally provides you a site similar to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own internet site already, you can likewise utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your web site clients right to your beehiiv email listing. On the same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to permit individuals to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the flexibility to take advantage of different marketing channels to obtain your newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv an excellent Substack option.
How to begin making use of beehiiv email marketing software application.
Register for a free plan
The primary step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 customers, give you accessibility to website hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, breakthrough personalization, analytics, external embed forms, and a lot more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those simply beginning (or for those searching for a new system to move to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Updates
After creating an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you made use of?”, “do you have any paying subscribers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that develop a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site URL may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll also choose your brand name colors and design to see to it your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have described info on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning creating,” “Articles,” “Target market,” “Grow,” “Monetize,” “Design,” and” Analyze.” And at the really bottom you’ll see the settings choice.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot over), Beginning composing is where you develop and release e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see all of your previous newsletter versions, Target market is where you can view who your clients are (and break them down right into sections), Expand is where you have accessibility 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, Layout is where you develop your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of all of your admin things.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to start creating, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just beginning, and have an idea you want to write about, I advise simply mosting likely to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking “Begin writing”.
You can modify your template and styling later– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor supplies a clean and user-friendly user interface for composing.
When you start creating, you can maximize headings, include links, and style your material how you like.
beehiiv gives you lots of options for different sorts of web content like video clips, web links, pictures, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally constantly launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be 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 make your email template and adjust some settings.
Here, you can update the name of your newsletter, offer it a description, add your logo design, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to first time customers, and a lot more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit history shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, image styles, and a lot more. I’m not going to undergo ever single thing you can optimize with your e-mail template because it’s a great deal. Simply check out the platform completely free and see it for yourself!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of impressive features that make it an excellent publishing system for any newsletter designer.
Right here are some of the essential features you can locate with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing system. It makes it very simple to write and send emails. I mentioned over several of the important things you can do with your setups and e-mail layout so I’ll save you some extra reading.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually contemporary and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the much better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Internet site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you want) survive a web site. Think about it as a web site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and a location where individuals can register for your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, give you a web site. Nevertheless, the free plan locations your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to include a custom domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is very important. After all, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter straight from your beehiiv web site or via embed kinds.
If you currently have an internet site, and desire people to register for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to use an embed kind. This is what I use on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have 3 various alternatives– a full size, a dealt with size, and a slim embed. I personally use the slim installed.
You can find the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise an option for acknowledgment tracking if you intend to onward UTM specifications for tracking functions– quite neat.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I desire beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I’m sure the team is dealing with updates for these, however I pointed out a couple of issues I had in the pros and cons section below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is an option for creating a referral program.
You can motivate existing customers on your checklist to forward your e-mails to good friends and colleagues and if they get other people to subscribe to your listing, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually seem many newsletter companies give incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your clients right into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– offering you another avenue for growing your e-mail list.
Nonetheless, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a more exceptional plan. I’ll review all the plans later on in this write-up.
Costs subscriptions
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real followers. Registration earnings is absolutely 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 to paying subscribers. This can be extremely profitable relying on what your newsletter needs to supply. For example, Trends.co is a popular costs e-newsletter that creates millions in income a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter material.
Data analytics
Among the important things I love about beehiiv is exactly how clean and simple the analytics are. You get real-time day on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber count Beehiiv Updates.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that subscriber count go up is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan offers you whatever you need to begin and grow your newsletter (approximately 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain, polls, and access to costs registrations. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) gives you everything in the Grow plan with addition of top priority assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly charitable in my opinion.
For instance, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 per month. Instead of some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 per month for the exact same amount– making beehiiv a terrific Kit alternative for lots of individuals.
I’m not sure exactly how the system business economics work with this, however beehiiv is absolutely less costly (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Naturally, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are some of the pros and cons I’ve personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of option:
Easy to set up and begin sending out newsletters free of cost.
Clean and modern customer analytics.
Great deals of flexibility with email styles.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Create premium choices to monetize.
Polls.
To be truthful, I haven’t seen one more e-newsletter system that has been able to package all of these features together so well.
However obviously, I don’t want to be biased so I’m mosting likely to point out some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are several of the cons I have actually discovered while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom fonts.
I utilize Webflow as my internet site structure system of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much detail why I like Webflow a lot but you can review my Webflow testimonial if you ‘d like to learn more.
Now, there really is nothing else method I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site apart from making use of an iframe embed. I directly do not like making use of iframe’s because they often tend to decrease my web site a bit. Every single time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last thing to load on the page. It’s really recognizable when you get on a sluggish web connection. But I can get around that.
The major gripe I have is that I can not make use of a routine Webflow kind (which I enjoy utilizing). There are ways around this by using a device like Zapier however that would certainly just include extra costs that I don’t require. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con yet I thought I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far exceed the cons right here. I’m also confident that Webflow will ultimately create a better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
On the whole, beehiiv is a great solution for anyone aiming to study the globe of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter platform far outweighs several that are currently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you actually have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are also relatively cheap for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is unheard of. 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 articles often. I only do when I in fact utilize the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a friend.
I hope you located some quality on whether or not beehiiv is a great platform for you.