Over 2 years earlier, I was reading among my favorite e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked on it and immediately began tearing up Garbage Day Beehiiv.
I had not been certain why I really felt so psychological.
Being a permanent developer is tough. I’m frequently getting pitched different tools and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional because I invested the last 6 months trying various email and e-newsletter platforms to help develop my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some wonderful choices for creating e-newsletters. But I couldn’t locate one that made me give a definite “yes”.
The problem with many existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me fully personalize my newsletter layouts, makes it very easy to create and send out emails, and gives me devices that help me analyze metrics and obtain even more clients.
I assume I’ve finally discovered the right tool.
Yet, I recognize beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it simple to layout, write, send out, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by previous workers at the popular newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist designers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking great deals of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this short article, I’m mosting likely to describe my personal experience with beehiiv, things I enjoy (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to finally go with it as my newsletter platform of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I inadvertently came across beehiiv. The funny story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a modern e-newsletter platform for quite time now. I’ve hesitated hard when it concerned ultimately releasing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a couple of various other indie systems. After that, Substack. And lastly, I ended up utilizing beehiiv.
I make sure many newsletter designers appreciate preferred newsletters with millions of customers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I admired a lot. They have terrific material, tons of subscribers, and a brilliant referral program that enables them to get even much more subscribers.
So, I went on a hunt to identify just how these huge e-newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get more clients? How do they create an e-newsletter design that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to answer all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that built this device really recognize newsletter development and growth.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were some of the very first marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I recognized this was going to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on developer development.
Because, any designer knows, you require growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the right e-newsletter pile (that scales) usually suggests utilizing numerous various devices to help achieve one objective– one system for your newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to set up recommendations. It can get expensive.
So when I learnt beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was complimentary to begin making use of, 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 platform that allows them to send out custom-made e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
One of the most effective newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media business, startup, or material developer, you must seriously taking into consideration experimenting with beehiiv. It’s totally complimentary to get going and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 subscribers on your list.
If you really end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely an excellent indicator that people love reading your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a great platform utilized by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your very own website and make use of the platform as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous concerns).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all the things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to get words out.
beehiiv likewise gives you a web site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own site already, you can additionally make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your web site subscribers directly to your beehiiv email list. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a device like Performance to allow individuals to sign up for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the versatility to leverage various marketing channels to obtain your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack alternative.
Just how to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Sign up for a free plan
The very first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you accessibility to site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advancement customization, analytics, external embed forms, and extra. It’s a really charitable offering for those simply starting (or for those seeking a new system to migrate to).
Onboarding Garbage Day Beehiiv
After creating an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what other systems have you utilized?”, “do you have any type of paying clients?”, and more.
You’ll then produce a name and link for your newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your site link 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 dashboard
Once you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will have described info on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning creating,” “Articles,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Layout,” and” Evaluate.” And at the very lower you’ll see the settings option.
Dashboard is your major control center (screenshot over), Beginning composing is where you create and publish newsletters, Posts is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter versions, Target market is where you can watch who your subscribers are (and break 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 e-newsletter with ads, Layout is where you make your e-newsletter landing page and message template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle every one of your admin stuff.
Creating your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin writing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply beginning, and have an idea you want to cover, I advise simply going to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking on “Begin composing”.
You can tweak your template and styling later on– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor supplies a tidy and user-friendly user interface for writing.
As soon as you start creating, you can enhance headings, include web links, and design your web content just how you such as.
beehiiv gives you lots of alternatives for different kinds of content like videos, web links, photos, and more.
The team at beehiiv is also frequently releasing product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a lot much more content features depending on when you read this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to design your e-mail template and change some setups.
Here, you can update the name of your newsletter, offer it a description, include your logo design, activate or off a welcome email to very first time subscribers, and more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit history shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, image formats, and extra. I’m not going to experience ever single point you can enhance with your e-mail template because it’s a lot. Just experiment with the system free of cost and see it on your own!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it an excellent publishing system for any kind of e-newsletter designer.
Below are some of the important features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing system. It makes it extremely very easy to write and send out emails. I pointed out over some of things you can do with your settings and e-mail style so I’ll save you some added reading.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern-day and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely among the better email editors I’ve ever written in.
Site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you want) live on a site. Consider it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and a place where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, including the free one, offer you an internet site. However, the free plan places your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a customized domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is essential. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your newsletter straight from your beehiiv site or via embed forms.
If you already have a web site, and desire individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed type. This is what I utilize on this web site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 various choices– a complete width, a repaired size, and a slim installed. I directly make use of the slim installed.
You can locate the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise an alternative for attribution monitoring if you intend to ahead UTM specifications for tracking purposes– rather cool.
Nonetheless, there are a few features I want beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make certain the team is working with updates for these, however I pointed out a couple of concerns I had in the advantages and disadvantages section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter platform, is an option for developing a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your list to ahead your emails to friends and associates and if they obtain other individuals to subscribe to your checklist, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever form you want. I have actually appear lots of e-newsletter business give rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you another avenue for expanding your e-mail listing.
Nevertheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a more superior plan. I’ll look at all the plans later in this post.
Premium registrations
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership income is certainly a monster of its very own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” problems of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying clients. This can be really rewarding depending upon what your newsletter has to provide. For example, Trends.co is a prominent costs newsletter that produces millions in profits a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter material.
Information analytics
Among the things I love about beehiiv is how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client count Garbage Day Beehiiv.
You get access to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye sight on how your e-newsletter is in fact doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that client matter increase is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (totally free) Launch plan offers you every little thing you need to get going and expand your e-newsletter (approximately 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you everything 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) provides you everything in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather charitable in my opinion.
As an example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. Instead of some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit alternative for several individuals.
I’m uncertain exactly how the unit economics deal with this, however beehiiv is absolutely cheaper (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Of course, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are some of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of option:
Easy to establish and begin sending e-newsletters free of cost.
Tidy and modern customer analytics.
Great deals of flexibility with e-mail styles.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Develop premium options to monetize.
Polls.
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen an additional newsletter system that has had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
Yet of course, I don’t want to be biased so I’m going to state some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the disadvantages I have actually found while utilizing beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including custom typefaces.
I make use of Webflow as my web site building system of selection (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much detail why I enjoy Webflow so much but you can review my Webflow review if you ‘d like to learn more.
Today, there truly is nothing else method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site aside from making use of an iframe embed. I directly don’t like utilizing iframe’s since they often tend to slow down my web site a little bit. Whenever a web page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last thing to pack on the page. It’s very visible when you’re on a sluggish net link. Yet I can get around that.
The main complaint I have is that I can not utilize a normal Webflow form (which I like using). There are means around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier yet that would certainly just add additional expenses that I do not require. To be sincere, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage however I assumed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much surpass the disadvantages here. I’m additionally enthusiastic that Webflow will eventually develop a better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Overall, beehiiv is an excellent remedy for anyone wanting to dive into the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system much outweighs many that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you really have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise fairly cheap of what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is unheard of. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well right into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t compose review posts often. I just do when I actually use the tool myself and would advise it to a close friend.
I wish you located some quality on whether or not beehiiv is a good system for you.