Over 2 years ago, I was reading among my preferred email 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 promptly began destroying Jacob Wolf Beehiiv.
I wasn’t certain why I really felt so emotional.
Being a full-time developer is difficult. I’m often obtaining pitched various tools and solutions that do not appear to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological due to the fact that I spent the last six months trying out different email and e-newsletter systems to aid construct my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some excellent choices for writing e-newsletters. Yet I could not find one that made me provide a certain “yes”.
The concern with numerous existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter system that lets me fully personalize my newsletter styles, makes it incredibly very easy to compose and send e-mails, and gives me devices that aid me analyze metrics and obtain even more customers.
I think I have actually lastly located the ideal tool.
However, I recognize beehiiv might not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it simple to layout, write, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by previous staff members at the popular newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help makers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this write-up, I’m mosting likely to discuss my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to ultimately select it as my e-newsletter platform of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve watched for a modern newsletter system for quite some time now. I’ve hesitated hard when it pertained to finally releasing my e-newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie systems. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I’m sure lots of e-newsletter makers respect prominent e-newsletters with countless clients– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I respected a whole lot. They have wonderful material, tons of clients, and a brilliant referral program that permits them to get back at extra customers.
So, I took place a quest to figure out exactly how these huge e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get more subscribers? How do they develop a newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to answer every one of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn the people that built this tool actually understand newsletter development and growth.” I questioned who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I knew this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on developer development.
Since, any kind of maker knows, you need development to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And discovering the best newsletter stack (that scales) usually indicates utilizing multiple various devices to assist achieve one goal– one system for your newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one platform to set up referrals. It can get expensive.
So when I discovered beehiiv did all of these things in one system, and it was free to begin making use of, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content developer that desires a system that enables them to send custom e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
One of the most successful newsletters have the right devices to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media business, start-up, or content creator, you should seriously thinking about checking out beehiiv. It’s absolutely complimentary to get started and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your list.
If you really end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s probably an excellent indicator that individuals enjoy reading your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is an excellent system utilized by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you get your own web site and use the system as your all-in-one option for sending emails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to get words out.
beehiiv also gives you a web site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your own site already, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your web site clients directly to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to permit individuals to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the adaptability to leverage various marketing channels to get your newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a terrific Substack choice.
Exactly how to start utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Register for a free plan
The initial step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Start trial” switch on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, give you accessibility to internet site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, breakthrough customization, analytics, external embed types, and extra. It’s a very generous offering for those simply starting (or for those trying to find a brand-new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding Jacob Wolf Beehiiv
After producing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what other systems have you used?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that create a name and URL for your newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your newsletter will survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your website link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally pick your brand colors and design to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
Once you reach your main control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will have described info on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Beginning composing,” “Messages,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Monetize,” “Layout,” and” Examine.” And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the setups option.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot over), Begin writing is where you create and release newsletters, Posts is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Target market is where you can see who your customers are (and damage them down into segments), Expand 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 ads, Style is where you make your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle every one of your admin things.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply beginning, and have a concept you wish to cover, I advise just mosting likely to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking “Beginning composing”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later on– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor supplies a tidy and straightforward interface for writing.
When you start composing, you can optimize headings, add links, and style your material just how you like.
beehiiv offers you lots of options for various sorts of content like videos, links, images, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is likewise regularly releasing product feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a lot much more content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your e-mail template and readjust some settings.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, give it a description, add your logo design, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to first time customers, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify background shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, photo layouts, and extra. I’m not going to experience ever solitary point you can enhance with your email template since it’s a whole lot. Simply try out the platform absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of impressive features that make it a great posting platform for any type of e-newsletter creator.
Below are several of the crucial features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting system. It makes it very easy to write and send e-mails. I stated over a few of the important things you can do with your setups and e-mail layout 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 really contemporary and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the better e-mail editors I’ve ever written in.
Website hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) survive on a website. Think about it as a site for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and an area where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s practically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, provide you a website. Nonetheless, the free plan places your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a customized domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting clients is very important. After all, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv web site or through embed types.
If you currently have a website, and desire individuals to register for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed type. This is what I make use of on this site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three various alternatives– a full width, a taken care of width, and a slim installed. I directly make use of the slim installed.
You can locate the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise an alternative for attribution monitoring if you want to ahead UTM specifications for tracking functions– pretty neat.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I want beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make sure the team is working with updates for these, however I discussed a few concerns I had in the benefits and drawbacks area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is an option for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing subscribers on your listing to onward your e-mails to close friends and coworkers and if they get other people to sign up for your listing, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever form you want. I have actually appear lots of e-newsletter firms offer incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– giving you an additional avenue for expanding your email listing.
However, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a much more premium plan. I’ll review all the plans later on in this write-up.
Premium memberships
They say all you need to make a living online is 1,000 real followers. Registration profits is absolutely a monster of its very own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “costs” issues of your e-newsletter that are only sent out to paying customers. This can be very financially rewarding depending on what your newsletter has to use. For example, Trends.co is a popular costs e-newsletter that generates millions in profits a year just by having pay-only newsletter content.
Information analytics
Among things I like regarding beehiiv is just how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on exactly how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client matter Jacob Wolf Beehiiv.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that subscriber count rise is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan provides you every little thing you need to get started and grow your e-newsletter (as much as 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom-made domain, surveys, and access to costs registrations. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you every little thing in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority assistance and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather generous in my viewpoint.
For example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. In contrast to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the same quantity– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit alternative for many individuals.
I’m not sure how the device economics work with this, but beehiiv is most definitely less expensive (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Of course, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are some of the pros and cons I have actually directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of option:
Easy to set up and begin sending out e-newsletters free of cost.
Clean and modern subscriber analytics.
Lots of versatility with email layouts.
Referral program feature.
Website hosting.
Produce costs options to generate income from.
Surveys.
To be sincere, I have not seen an additional e-newsletter system that has actually been able to package all of these features together so well.
But of course, I do not want to be biased so I’m mosting likely to mention some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Here are some of the disadvantages I have actually found while making use of beehiiv:.
Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding custom font styles.
I utilize Webflow as my website building system 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 enjoy Webflow a lot however you can read my Webflow evaluation if you want to learn more.
Now, there truly is no other means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website besides using an iframe embed. I personally do not like utilizing iframe’s because they tend to slow down my web site a bit. Every single time a page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last point to pack on the page. It’s really recognizable when you’re on a slow-moving web link. Yet I can get around that.
The major gripe I have is that I can not use a routine Webflow kind (which I like utilizing). There are ways around this by using a tool like Zapier yet that would simply include extra prices that I don’t require. To be sincere, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con but I believed I would state it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much surpass the disadvantages below. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will at some point develop a much better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
On the whole, beehiiv is a great remedy for any individual looking to study the globe of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this newsletter platform much surpasses many that are currently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally rather low-cost wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well right into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t compose review messages usually. I just do when I in fact make use of the tool myself and would recommend it to a close friend.
I hope you found some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is a great system for you.