Over two years earlier, I read among my favored email e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo design for the very first time. I clicked it and instantaneously started wrecking Beehiiv Website Builder.
I wasn’t certain why I felt so emotional.
Being a full-time creator is tough. I’m frequently getting pitched different devices and solutions that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I guess I was emotional due to the fact that I spent the last 6 months checking out various e-mail and newsletter platforms to aid build my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some excellent options for creating e-newsletters. Yet I could not locate one that made me give a definite “yes”.
The issue with several existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me completely customize my newsletter layouts, makes it incredibly easy to create and send out e-mails, and provides me tools that aid me examine metrics and obtain more customers.
I assume I’ve lastly discovered the right tool.
Yet, I know beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it very easy to design, compose, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by previous staff members at the famous newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist designers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this short article, I’m going to explain my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to finally choose it as my newsletter platform of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I’ve watched for a modern newsletter system for fairly a long time now. I’ve procrastinated hard when it concerned ultimately launching my e-newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie systems. After that, Substack. And lastly, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I make certain many e-newsletter designers admire preferred e-newsletters with numerous subscribers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a whole lot. They have great web content, lots of subscribers, and a clever referral program that allows them to get even a lot more clients.
So, I went on a hunt to figure out just how these huge e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more clients? How do they produce a newsletter style that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to respond to every one of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn the people that developed this device actually recognize e-newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were a few of the very first marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I understood this was going to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s focused on maker development.
Because, any type of maker understands, you need growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the best newsletter stack (that scales) typically implies utilizing numerous different devices to assist attain one objective– one system for your newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one platform to establish references. It can obtain pricey.
So when I figured out beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was totally free to begin utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material designer that wants a platform that permits them to send customized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
The most successful newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their newsletters. beehiiv focuses on providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, startup, or content designer, you need to seriously taking into consideration experimenting with beehiiv. It’s completely free to get going and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your checklist.
If you actually end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a great indicator that people love reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a wonderful platform used by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you get your very own site and utilize the system as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv allows you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to get the word out.
beehiiv also provides you a web site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your own web site already, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your site clients directly to your beehiiv email listing. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit individuals to subscribe to your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to utilize different marketing networks to get your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv an excellent Substack option.
Exactly how to begin using beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Enroll in a free plan
The first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will enable you to have up to 2,500 customers, give you accessibility to site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, development personalization, analytics, exterior embed forms, and extra. It’s a very generous offering for those just starting (or for those trying to find a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding Beehiiv Website Builder
After creating an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any paying clients?”, and extra.
You’ll then produce a name and link for your e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your website URL could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll also select your brand design and colors to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
As soon as you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
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,” “Blog posts,” “Audience,” “Expand,” “Monetize,” “Layout,” and” Assess.” And at the very lower you’ll see the settings option.
Control panel is your major control center (screenshot above), Start writing is where you develop and publish newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter editions, Target market is where you can watch who your clients are (and damage them down right into segments), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run ads, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you make your e-newsletter landing page and article template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of all of your admin stuff.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start creating, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting out, and have a concept you intend to write about, I suggest simply mosting likely to the “Create” section in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning writing”.
You can modify your template and designing later on– focus on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a clean and straightforward interface for writing.
When you begin composing, you can maximize headings, add links, and style your web content how you such as.
beehiiv offers you lots of options for various sorts of content like videos, links, pictures, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is also frequently releasing item feature and updates so I make sure there will be a whole lot a lot more material features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to make your e-mail template and change some settings.
Here, you can update the name of your newsletter, provide it a summary, add your logo design, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time clients, and more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify background colors, boundaries, spacing, fonts, image styles, and much more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever single point you can optimize with your e-mail template since it’s a whole lot. Just try out the platform free of cost and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of impressive features that make it a terrific publishing system for any newsletter designer.
Here are several of the essential features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing platform. It makes it very easy to write and send e-mails. I pointed out above some of the things you can do with your settings and e-mail style so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the far better email editors I’ve ever written in.
Internet site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you want) live on an internet site. Consider it as a website for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and a location where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the complimentary one, offer you a web site. However, the free plan places your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a personalized domain to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is necessary. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter directly from your beehiiv site or through embed kinds.
If you currently have a web site, and want individuals to register for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to utilize an embed form. This is what I use on this internet site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have three different options– a full width, a repaired width, and a slim installed. I directly utilize the slim installed.
You can discover the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally an alternative for acknowledgment tracking if you intend to ahead UTM specifications for tracking purposes– rather cool.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I make sure the group is working on updates for these, yet I pointed out a couple of worries I had in the pros and cons area below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is a service for creating a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your listing to ahead your e-mails to pals and colleagues and if they obtain other individuals to sign up for your checklist, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever form you want. I’ve appear many newsletter firms give benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you an additional opportunity for growing your email listing.
However, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a more exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later in this post.
Costs subscriptions
They claim all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real followers. Membership revenue is definitely a monster of its very own. If you’re looking for a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “costs” problems of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying subscribers. This can be really profitable depending on what your newsletter needs to use. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent premium e-newsletter that produces millions in revenue a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter material.
Information analytics
Among the things I love concerning beehiiv is exactly how tidy and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber matter Beehiiv Website Builder.
You get access to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that subscriber matter rise is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (free) Launch plan provides you everything you require to begin and grow your newsletter (as much as 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) provides you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom domain name, surveys, and accessibility to costs memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you every little thing in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly generous in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 monthly. In contrast to some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 each month for the same amount– making beehiiv a great Kit choice for many users.
I’m uncertain exactly how the unit business economics deal with this, however beehiiv is most definitely cheaper (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Obviously, with every system, it has its pros and cons. Below are some of the pros and cons I have actually personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of choice:
Easy to establish and start sending out e-newsletters for free.
Clean and contemporary subscriber analytics.
Great deals of flexibility with e-mail designs.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Create premium alternatives to generate income from.
Surveys.
To be truthful, I haven’t seen an additional newsletter system that has actually been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
Yet obviously, I do not want to be biased so I’m going to point out some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are several of the cons I have actually located while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom-made font styles.
I make use of Webflow as my site building platform of selection (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much detail why I enjoy Webflow so much however you can read my Webflow review if you wish to learn more.
Today, there really is nothing else means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site besides using an iframe embed. I personally don’t like making use of iframe’s because they often tend to reduce my site a little bit. Whenever a page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last point to fill on the page. It’s extremely visible when you’re on a slow web connection. Yet I can navigate that.
The main gripe I have is that I can’t utilize a normal Webflow form (which I like making use of). There are methods around this by using a device like Zapier yet that would simply add additional costs that I do not need. To be sincere, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con but I thought I would mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much exceed the cons here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will at some point develop a much better method to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
In general, beehiiv is a wonderful remedy for any person looking to dive into the globe of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system far outweighs several that are currently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you actually have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise rather economical for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is unusual. 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 monthly.
Anyways, I do not compose evaluation posts usually. I only do when I in fact use the tool myself and would certainly advise it to a pal.
I wish you found some quality on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent platform for you.