Over 2 years back, I read one of my preferred email e-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 promptly began destroying GrowLetter Beehiiv.
I had not been sure why I really felt so psychological.
Being a full-time maker is difficult. I’m frequently getting pitched various tools and solutions that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological because I invested the last 6 months trying various email and newsletter systems to aid build my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some terrific options for creating newsletters. However I couldn’t find one that made me offer a guaranteed “yes”.
The problem with several existing newsletter systems is that they do not feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter system that lets me fully tailor my e-newsletter styles, makes it super easy to write and send emails, and gives me devices that help me evaluate metrics and obtain even more clients.
I assume I have actually ultimately found the ideal device.
Yet, I understand beehiiv might not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact ideal for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it simple to design, compose, send out, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Developed by previous staff members at the well-known e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help developers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this write-up, I’m going to explain my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to ultimately select it as my newsletter platform of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve watched for a modern e-newsletter platform for fairly a long time currently. I have actually hesitated hard when it involved finally launching my e-newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a couple of other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up making use of beehiiv.
I make certain lots of e-newsletter designers respect preferred e-newsletters with numerous customers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a whole lot. They have excellent material, lots of clients, and a brilliant referral program that enables them to get even much more customers.
So, I went on a quest to identify 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 more customers? How do they produce a newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to address all of my questions. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that built this tool really understand e-newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were several of the initial marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my brain blew up.
I recognized this was going to be a various newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on maker development.
Since, any type of designer recognizes, you require development to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that ranges) commonly indicates using multiple different devices to aid attain one goal– 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 found out beehiiv did all of these things in one system, 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 content designer that wants a system that permits them to send custom-made e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
The most effective newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media business, startup, or web content developer, you ought to seriously thinking about trying beehiiv. It’s entirely cost-free to get going and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you in fact wind up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a great indicator that individuals love reviewing your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a wonderful platform utilized by countless independent authors. With Substack you obtain your own internet site and use the system as your all-in-one service for sending emails (while producing an archive of previous concerns).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing subscribers to obtain words out.
beehiiv additionally gives you a site comparable to Substack. However, if you have your own website currently, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I utilize) to send your internet site customers right to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit people to register for your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the versatility to take advantage of various marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack choice.
Just how to start utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Register for a free plan
The first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Start trial” switch on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 customers, provide you accessibility to web site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advancement modification, analytics, external embed types, and extra. It’s a very charitable offering for those simply starting (or for those trying to find a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding GrowLetter Beehiiv
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any paying clients?”, and more.
You’ll after that 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 “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll additionally choose your brand name design and colors to see to it your newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
As soon as you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed details on the number of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Begin creating,” “Messages,” “Target market,” “Grow,” “Generate income from,” “Design,” and” Assess.” And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the settings option.
Control panel is your primary nerve center (screenshot over), Beginning creating is where you create and publish newsletters, Posts is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Target market is where you can watch who your customers are (and break them down right into sections), Grow is where you have access to a referral program (and development tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your e-newsletter with ads, Design is where you design your e-newsletter landing page and article template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can manage all of your admin things.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply beginning, and have an idea you wish to cover, I suggest just going to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking “Begin creating”.
You can modify your template and styling later– focus on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and easy to use user interface for composing.
Once you begin writing, you can enhance headings, include links, and design your web content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv gives you tons of options for various kinds of web content like videos, web links, pictures, and much more.
The group at beehiiv is likewise continuously releasing product feature and updates so I make sure there will be a great deal extra material features depending on when you read this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to make your e-mail template and adjust some settings.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, give it a description, add your logo design, activate or off a welcome email to first time clients, and much more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify history shades, borders, spacing, fonts, photo formats, and a lot more. I’m not mosting likely to go through ever before single thing you can enhance with your e-mail template since it’s a lot. Simply try the system absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of impressive features that make it an excellent publishing system for any e-newsletter designer.
Right here are several of the essential features you can locate with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing system. It makes it extremely very easy to compose and send out emails. I pointed out over a few of the important things you can do with your settings and e-mail style so I’ll save you some added reading.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s certainly among the much better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you desire) survive an internet site. Think of it as a web site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and an area where individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s practically comparable to that.
All plans, including the totally free one, provide you an internet site. Nonetheless, the free plan places your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a custom domain to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is important. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your newsletter straight from your beehiiv internet site or with embed forms.
If you already have a site, and desire individuals to sign up for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to utilize an embed type. This is what I use on this internet 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 three various alternatives– a complete width, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I directly utilize the slim installed.
You can find the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise an alternative for acknowledgment monitoring if you want to forward UTM parameters for tracking objectives– pretty cool.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make sure the group is servicing updates for these, yet I mentioned a couple of problems I had in the pros and cons area below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a solution for creating a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your listing to onward your emails to pals and colleagues and if they get other people to register for your checklist, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever form you want. I have actually appear several e-newsletter business give rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your clients right into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– giving you an additional avenue for growing your e-mail listing.
Nevertheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this write-up.
Premium registrations
They say all you need to make a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership revenue is absolutely a beast of its own. If you’re trying to find a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” concerns of your newsletter that are only sent to paying customers. This can be extremely profitable depending on what your newsletter has to use. For instance, Trends.co is a preferred costs e-newsletter that creates millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
Among things I love regarding beehiiv is just how tidy and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on exactly how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber count GrowLetter Beehiiv.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on just how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that client count go up is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses four different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (free) Launch plan provides you every little thing you need to get going and grow your newsletter (approximately 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) provides you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, personalized domain name, 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 enhancement of priority assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are quite charitable in my point of view.
As an example, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 monthly for the exact same amount– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit choice for numerous customers.
I’m uncertain how the system business economics work on this, yet beehiiv is certainly less costly (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Of course, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Here are some of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of choice:
Easy to set up and begin sending e-newsletters free of cost.
Tidy and modern-day subscriber analytics.
Great deals of adaptability with e-mail designs.
Referral program feature.
Website hosting.
Create costs alternatives to monetize.
Polls.
To be sincere, I have not seen another e-newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
However naturally, I don’t wish to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to state some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are several of the cons I’ve located while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding customized font styles.
I make use of Webflow as my web site structure system of selection (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter way too much detail why I enjoy Webflow so much however you can review my Webflow evaluation if you want to find out more.
Now, there truly is nothing else way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site aside from using an iframe embed. I personally don’t like using iframe’s due to the fact that they often tend to decrease my web site a little bit. Each time a page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last thing to pack on the web page. It’s very noticeable when you’re on a sluggish net link. But I can get around that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can not make use of a regular Webflow kind (which I love utilizing). There are means around this by using a tool like Zapier yet that would simply add added costs that I don’t need. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con yet I thought I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much surpass the cons below. I’m also confident that Webflow will eventually produce a better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Generally, beehiiv is a great solution for any individual wanting to study the world of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system much exceeds several that are presently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise fairly inexpensive wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is unheard of. 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 monthly.
Anyways, I don’t compose testimonial blog posts commonly. I only do when I really use the tool myself and would advise it to a buddy.
I wish you located some clearness on whether beehiiv is an excellent system for you.