Over 2 years ago, I was reading one of my favorite email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo design for the very first time. I clicked on it and quickly began destroying What Excites You The Most About Working at Beehiiv.
I had not been sure why I felt so psychological.
Being a full time designer is tough. I’m typically getting pitched different devices and services that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological since I invested the last 6 months experimenting with different email and newsletter platforms to help build my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some fantastic alternatives for composing newsletters. Yet I couldn’t locate one that made me provide a definite “yes”.
The concern with numerous existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter system that lets me totally personalize my e-newsletter designs, makes it incredibly easy to compose and send out e-mails, and offers me tools that aid me evaluate metrics and obtain even more customers.
I assume I’ve ultimately located the ideal tool.
However, I recognize beehiiv might not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it very easy to layout, write, send out, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former workers at the popular newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to aid creators launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m going to explain my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to ultimately opt for it as my e-newsletter platform of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I have actually watched for a modern-day newsletter platform for fairly some time now. I’ve procrastinated hard when it concerned finally introducing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a few various other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up using beehiiv.
I’m sure numerous e-newsletter designers respect popular e-newsletters with millions of subscribers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a great deal. They have terrific web content, lots of subscribers, and a creative referral program that allows them to get back at much more clients.
So, I took place a search to determine exactly how these big newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they make use of? 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 first time, it seemed to address every one of my concerns. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that developed this device really understand newsletter production and development.” I questioned who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were a few of the first marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I understood this was going to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s focused on designer growth.
Because, any kind of creator knows, you require growth to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that scales) typically implies using multiple different devices to aid attain one objective– one system for your newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can get pricey.
So when I figured out beehiiv did every one of these points in one platform, and it was totally 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 creator that wants a system that enables them to send custom-made e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
One of the most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or material designer, you need to seriously thinking about checking out beehiiv. It’s absolutely free to get started 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 most likely an excellent sign that individuals love reviewing your stuff.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a wonderful platform used by countless independent writers. With Substack you get your own website and make use of the system as your all-in-one remedy for sending out emails (while developing an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to development. beehiiv allows you do to all the things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing customers to obtain words out.
beehiiv also offers you an internet site similar to Substack. But, if you have your very own web site currently, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your website subscribers right to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to enable people to sign up for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to leverage various marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv an excellent Substack choice.
Exactly how to begin utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Enroll in a free plan
The primary step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Start trial” switch on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will certainly permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you accessibility to web site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advance modification, analytics, exterior embed types, and a lot more. It’s a really generous offering for those simply beginning (or for those looking for a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding What Excites You The Most About Working at Beehiiv
After creating an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your initial e-newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any kind of paying clients?”, and a lot more.
You’ll then develop a name and link for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your site link could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll likewise select your brand design and colors to see to it your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
Once you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have described information on the number of sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Beginning composing,” “Posts,” “Audience,” “Grow,” “Generate income from,” “Style,” and” Assess.” And at the really lower you’ll see the setups choice.
Control panel is your primary control center (screenshot over), Begin writing is where you create and publish e-newsletters, Messages 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 sectors), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and development 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 develop your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can manage all of your admin stuff.
Composing 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 write about, I recommend just mosting likely to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later on– concentrate on the content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a clean and easy to use interface for composing.
When you begin writing, you can enhance headings, add links, and style your material how you like.
beehiiv provides you tons of options for various kinds of material like video clips, web links, images, and more.
The group at beehiiv is additionally regularly launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a great deal much more content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
Once you have a newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your e-mail template and readjust some setups.
Right here, you can update the name of your newsletter, give it a description, include your logo design, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to first time subscribers, and extra.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit background colors, boundaries, spacing, font styles, image formats, and much more. I’m not going to go through ever before single point you can optimize with your email template since it’s a lot. Simply experiment with the platform absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it a wonderful posting system for any type of newsletter creator.
Below are some of the vital features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing system. It makes it very simple to create and send emails. I pointed out over several of the important 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 e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s most definitely among the much better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a web site. Think of it as a website for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and a location where individuals can register for your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, give you an internet site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a custom domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is essential. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv web site or through embed types.
If you already have a web site, and desire individuals to register for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to make use of an embed kind. This is what I use on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 different alternatives– a full size, a dealt with size, and a slim embed. I personally use the slim embed.
You can discover the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your setups.
There’s additionally an option for attribution monitoring if you want to onward UTM criteria for tracking purposes– rather cool.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I wish beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I make certain the group is servicing updates for these, but I stated a couple of issues I had in the advantages and disadvantages section listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter platform, is a remedy for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing customers on your listing to ahead your emails to buddies and colleagues and if they obtain other people to subscribe to your listing, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever form you want. I have actually seem lots of newsletter firms provide benefits in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your customers right into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– giving you another method for expanding your email listing.
However, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a more superior plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this write-up.
Costs memberships
They claim all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership profits is absolutely a monster of its own. If you’re trying to find a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” problems of your newsletter that are just sent to paying subscribers. This can be very rewarding depending upon what your newsletter has to supply. For instance, Trends.co is a prominent costs e-newsletter that creates millions in revenue a year simply by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Information analytics
Among the important things I love concerning beehiiv is how tidy and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on just how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber count What Excites You The Most About Working at Beehiiv.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on just how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that subscriber matter increase is definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan offers you whatever you need to get going and grow your newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain, surveys, and accessibility to premium subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) provides you whatever in the Grow plan with addition of top priority support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly generous in my viewpoint.
As an example, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. As opposed to some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 per month for the very same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit alternative for numerous customers.
I’m not exactly sure how the device business economics work on this, however beehiiv is certainly more affordable (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Of course, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Right here are several of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of option:
Easy to establish and start sending out e-newsletters completely free.
Clean and contemporary subscriber analytics.
Lots of flexibility with email designs.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Produce premium alternatives to monetize.
Surveys.
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen another newsletter system that has actually had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
But naturally, I do not wish to be prejudiced so I’m going to state some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the disadvantages I’ve located while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around including personalized font styles.
I utilize Webflow as my internet site building platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much information why I love Webflow a lot yet you can read my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to learn more.
Today, there truly is nothing else means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site aside from utilizing an iframe embed. I personally do not such as utilizing iframe’s since they often tend to decrease my site a bit. Every time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last point to load on the page. It’s really recognizable when you get on a slow-moving internet link. However I can get around that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can’t utilize a normal Webflow form (which I love utilizing). There are ways around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier yet that would just include extra expenses that I don’t need. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage yet I believed I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much outweigh the disadvantages here. I’m additionally enthusiastic that Webflow will at some point create a far better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Generally, beehiiv is a fantastic service for anyone aiming to study the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this newsletter platform far surpasses lots of that are currently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you truly have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are also rather cheap wherefore they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your list is unheard of. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not write evaluation posts usually. I only do when I in fact make use of the device myself and would certainly recommend it to a pal.
I wish you discovered some clearness on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.