Over two years earlier, I was reading one of my favored e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked it and instantly began destroying Is Beehiiv GDPR Compliant.
I had not been certain why I really felt so emotional.
Being a full-time designer is difficult. I’m usually obtaining pitched different devices and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional because I spent the last six months trying various e-mail and newsletter platforms to assist build my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some excellent options for creating newsletters. But I could not locate one that made me give a precise “yes”.
The issue with many existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter platform that lets me totally customize my newsletter layouts, makes it extremely easy to write and send out emails, and offers me tools that assist me evaluate metrics and get more customers.
I assume I’ve ultimately located the appropriate tool.
However, I recognize beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it simple to design, create, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Developed by previous workers at the renowned newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help creators launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this post, I’m going to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, things I like (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to lastly choose it as my e-newsletter system of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I inadvertently came across beehiiv. The funny story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a modern newsletter system for quite time now. I have actually postponed hard when it concerned finally releasing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few various other indie systems. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make sure lots of newsletter creators appreciate prominent e-newsletters with countless subscribers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I respected a lot. They have terrific web content, lots of customers, and a creative referral program that permits them to get even more subscribers.
So, I went on a search to identify how these huge 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 obtain even more subscribers? How do they create an e-newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to answer all of my questions. I believed to myself, “damn the people that constructed this device actually recognize e-newsletter development and growth.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the very first marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on creator development.
Due to the fact that, any type of designer understands, you need development to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And locating the ideal e-newsletter stack (that scales) usually suggests utilizing several various tools to help accomplish one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one system to set up recommendations. It can get pricey.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was complimentary to begin utilizing, 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 system that enables them to send personalized newsletters with or without requiring to have a web site.
One of the most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, startup, or web content developer, you ought to seriously thinking about trying out beehiiv. It’s entirely complimentary to get started and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your listing.
If you really end up having to spend for beehiiv it’s probably a good indicator that individuals love reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a wonderful platform made use of by countless independent writers. With Substack you obtain your very own website and use the system as your all-in-one option for sending out emails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv allows you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of much better analytics, even more design flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to obtain the word out.
beehiiv also gives you a site comparable to Substack. However, if you have your own site currently, you can additionally make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your web site customers straight to your beehiiv email list. On the same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit individuals to register for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the versatility to leverage various marketing channels to get your newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack alternative.
Exactly how to begin using beehiiv email marketing software application.
Sign up for a free plan
The initial step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Start trial” button on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, offer you accessibility to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advancement customization, analytics, exterior embed kinds, and much more. It’s a very generous offering for those just starting out (or for those searching for a brand-new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding Is Beehiiv GDPR Compliant
After developing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what other systems have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and extra.
You’ll after that produce a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll also choose your brand name colors and design to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
Once you reach your major dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed info on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Start writing,” “Messages,” “Target market,” “Grow,” “Generate income from,” “Style,” and” Evaluate.” And at the very bottom you’ll see the settings choice.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot over), Start creating is where you create and release e-newsletters, Messages is where you can see all of your previous newsletter versions, Audience is where you can watch who your customers are (and damage them down into segments), Grow is where you have access 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 advertisements, Design is where you design your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle all of your admin things.
Creating your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have an idea you want to discuss, I suggest simply going to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking “Start writing”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– focus on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and straightforward interface for creating.
As soon as you begin creating, you can enhance headings, include links, and design your web content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv provides you tons of options for different sorts of web content like video clips, links, images, and much more.
The group at beehiiv is also continuously releasing item feature and updates so I make sure there will be a lot more content features depending on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your setups and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to make your email template and readjust some setups.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a summary, add your logo, switch on or off a welcome email to very first time customers, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify history colors, borders, spacing, font styles, image styles, and a lot more. I’m not going to undergo ever before solitary thing you can optimize with your e-mail template since it’s a whole lot. Just try out the platform for free and see it for yourself!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of amazing features that make it a terrific publishing system for any kind of newsletter maker.
Right here are several of the necessary features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing platform. It makes it super simple to write and send out emails. I pointed out above several of things you can do with your setups and e-mail style so I’ll spare you some additional analysis.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s absolutely one of the better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Internet site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) live on a web site. Think about it as a web site for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and an area where people can sign up for your newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the totally free one, provide you an internet site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a personalized domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is very important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your newsletter straight from your beehiiv site or through embed kinds.
If you currently have an internet site, and desire individuals to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to make use of an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this internet 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 options– a complete size, a fixed width, and a slim embed. I directly utilize the slim embed.
You can find the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your setups.
There’s additionally a choice for attribution tracking if you wish to onward UTM parameters for tracking objectives– quite cool.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I make certain the team is dealing with updates for these, however I discussed a couple of issues I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a service for developing a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your list to onward your e-mails to close friends and associates and if they obtain other people to sign up for your list, you can compensate them. These rewards can be in whatever kind you want. I have actually seem numerous newsletter companies give rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your customers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– offering you one more opportunity for expanding your e-mail checklist.
Nonetheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to an extra premium plan. I’ll look at all the plans later on in this write-up.
Costs subscriptions
They state all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Subscription profits is certainly a beast of its own. If you’re looking for a system to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” problems of your e-newsletter that are just sent out to paying customers. This can be very rewarding depending upon what your newsletter has to supply. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent costs e-newsletter that generates millions in revenue a year just by having pay-only newsletter content.
Data analytics
One of things I love concerning beehiiv is just how clean and simple the analytics are. You get real-time date on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and client count Is Beehiiv GDPR Compliant.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that customer count go up is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (totally free) Launch plan provides you everything you require to get started and grow your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) offers you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, customized domain name, polls, and accessibility to costs registrations. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers 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 point of view.
For example, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. Instead of some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would charge $679 per month for the same quantity– making beehiiv a terrific Kit option for lots of individuals.
I’m not exactly sure exactly how the unit business economics work on this, yet beehiiv is most definitely more affordable (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Naturally, with every system, it has its pros and cons. Right here are some of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually personally experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of selection:
Easy to set up and begin sending out e-newsletters for free.
Clean and contemporary subscriber analytics.
Great deals of flexibility with email layouts.
Referral program feature.
Website hosting.
Create costs alternatives to monetize.
Surveys.
To be sincere, I haven’t seen another e-newsletter platform that has had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
But obviously, I do not wish to be biased so I’m mosting likely to state some cons.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the disadvantages I have actually found while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding customized fonts.
I make use of Webflow as my website building platform of selection (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in too much information why I love Webflow a lot yet you can review my Webflow review if you would love to learn more.
Now, there actually is no other way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow website besides utilizing an iframe embed. I personally do not such as making use of iframe’s because they often tend to slow down my web site a little bit. Whenever a page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last point to pack on the web page. It’s extremely visible when you’re on a slow-moving net link. Yet I can navigate that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can not use a routine Webflow kind (which I love using). There are ways around this by using a device like Zapier however that would just add additional expenses that I do not need. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage but I believed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far surpass the cons here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will ultimately produce a far better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Generally, beehiiv is a great solution for anyone seeking to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system far surpasses several that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally fairly inexpensive wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist 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 into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t compose evaluation posts commonly. I just do when I in fact make use of the tool myself and would recommend it to a buddy.
I wish you located some quality on whether or not beehiiv is a good platform for you.