Over two years earlier, I read among my favorite email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the very first time. I clicked on it and instantly began destroying Working at Beehiiv.
I wasn’t certain why I felt so emotional.
Being a permanent designer is difficult. I’m typically obtaining pitched various tools and solutions that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological due to the fact that I spent the last 6 months trying different email and newsletter systems to aid construct my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic options for composing newsletters. But I couldn’t discover one that made me offer a definite “yes”.
The concern with many existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me completely personalize my newsletter styles, makes it extremely very easy to compose and send out e-mails, and provides me tools that assist me examine metrics and obtain more clients.
I think I have actually lastly located the ideal device.
However, I understand beehiiv may not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really ideal for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it simple to layout, write, send out, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by previous workers at the famous newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to help makers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this write-up, I’m mosting likely to describe my personal experience with beehiiv, things I love (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to finally select it as my e-newsletter system of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I inadvertently came across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I’ve watched for a modern-day newsletter system for rather time now. I have actually postponed hard when it pertained to finally introducing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And lastly, I ended up utilizing beehiiv.
I make certain numerous e-newsletter makers appreciate popular newsletters with millions of clients– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I appreciated a whole lot. They have fantastic material, lots of subscribers, and a smart referral program that enables them to get even more clients.
So, I took place a hunt to determine just how these huge e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get even more clients? How do they create a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to respond to every one of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that constructed this tool truly comprehend newsletter development 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 initial marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my mind took off.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s focused on creator development.
Because, any creator recognizes, you require growth to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the ideal newsletter stack (that ranges) usually suggests making use of numerous various tools to help achieve one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to establish references. It can get pricey.
So when I learnt beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was complimentary to start making use of, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material developer that desires a platform that permits them to send customized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
The most effective newsletters have the right devices to construct and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv targets at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or content developer, you must seriously considering checking out beehiiv. It’s entirely complimentary to begin and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your checklist.
If you in fact wind up having to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly an excellent indication that individuals like reading your things.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a great platform made use of by hundreds of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your own website and use the system as your all-in-one option for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing subscribers to get the word out.
beehiiv likewise offers you a web site similar to Substack. However, if you have your own website currently, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your internet site customers directly to your beehiiv email checklist. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to permit people to subscribe to your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This provides you the versatility to leverage various marketing channels to get your newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv an excellent Substack alternative.
How to start making use of beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Register for a free plan
The initial step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, offer you access to website hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, breakthrough customization, analytics, exterior embed forms, and much more. It’s a really charitable offering for those simply beginning (or for those searching for a new system to move to).
Onboarding Working at Beehiiv
After creating an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any type of paying customers?”, and more.
You’ll then develop a name and URL for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your site link could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally pick your brand design and colors to make sure your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have detailed details on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Begin composing,” “Posts,” “Target market,” “Expand,” “Generate income from,” “Layout,” and” Analyze.” And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the setups option.
Control panel is your main control center (screenshot above), Start writing is where you produce and release e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter versions, Target market is where you can view who your subscribers 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 advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your e-newsletter with ads, Style is where you create your e-newsletter landing page and article template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of all of your admin things.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin creating, with little to no friction. If you’re simply beginning, and have a concept you wish to cover, I suggest just mosting likely to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking “Begin composing”.
You can fine-tune your template and designing later on– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and easy to use interface for creating.
As soon as you start creating, you can maximize headings, add web links, and style your content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv provides you tons of choices for different types of web content like video clips, web links, images, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally continuously releasing item feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a lot much more material features depending on when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to develop your email template and adjust some setups.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, offer it a summary, include your logo design, switch on or off a welcome email to first time clients, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify history colors, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, photo styles, and more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever single thing you can optimize with your e-mail template because it’s a great deal. Simply experiment with the platform absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of incredible features that make it a terrific posting system for any kind of e-newsletter developer.
Right here are a few of the vital features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing system. It makes it super easy to write and send emails. I stated over several of the things you can do with your setups and e-mail layout so I’ll save you some added analysis.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a really modern and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely among the better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Web site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive on a web site. Consider it as a web site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your e-newsletter, and a location where individuals can register for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s practically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, offer you a site. However, the free plan places your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to include a personalized domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is very important. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv website or with embed types.
If you currently have an internet site, and want people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed type. This is what I utilize on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have three different alternatives– a full size, a taken care of size, and a slim installed. I personally make use of the slim installed.
You can discover the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally a choice for attribution monitoring if you wish to ahead UTM parameters for tracking objectives– quite cool.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of features I desire beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I’m sure the team is servicing updates for these, yet I discussed a couple of concerns I had in the pros and cons section below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a remedy for developing a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your list to onward your e-mails to friends and coworkers and if they obtain other individuals to subscribe to your list, you can compensate them. These rewards can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually seem numerous e-newsletter firms offer rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you another opportunity for growing your e-mail list.
Nonetheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to an extra exceptional plan. I’ll look at all the plans later on in this write-up.
Costs memberships
They state all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Membership profits is most definitely a monster of its own. If you’re searching for a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “premium” concerns of your newsletter that are just sent out to paying subscribers. This can be very financially rewarding depending upon what your e-newsletter needs to use. For example, Trends.co is a prominent premium e-newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter material.
Data analytics
One of the important things I enjoy concerning beehiiv is exactly how clean and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client matter Working at Beehiiv.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your newsletter is in fact doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that client matter rise is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you whatever you need to get going and expand your newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 49/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain, polls, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 109/month) offers you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of concern support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather generous in my opinion.
For instance, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would charge $679 each month for the exact same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for numerous individuals.
I’m not exactly sure exactly how the device economics deal with this, yet beehiiv is definitely cheaper (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Of course, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are a few of the pros and cons I have actually personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of option:
Easy to set up and begin sending out e-newsletters absolutely free.
Clean and contemporary subscriber analytics.
Lots of versatility with e-mail styles.
Referral program feature.
Internet site hosting.
Create premium options to generate income from.
Polls.
To be sincere, I haven’t seen an additional newsletter system that has actually had the ability to package every one of these features together so well.
But certainly, I do not intend to be biased so I’m going to discuss some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are several of the cons I have actually discovered while using beehiiv:.
Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv.
Limitations around adding personalized typefaces.
I make use of Webflow as my website structure system of selection (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not going to enter excessive information why I enjoy Webflow so much yet you can read my Webflow review if you would love to learn more.
Now, there actually is no other way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site aside from utilizing an iframe embed. I directly do not such as making use of iframe’s because they tend to reduce my site a little bit. Each time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last thing to load on the page. It’s very obvious when you get on a sluggish web link. However I can navigate that.
The main complaint I have is that I can’t use a normal Webflow type (which I like making use of). There are means around this by using a device like Zapier but that would certainly simply include extra costs that I don’t require. To be truthful, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con however I assumed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much exceed the cons here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will at some point develop a far better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Overall, beehiiv is a great remedy for anybody seeking to study the world of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter platform much surpasses lots of that are presently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you truly have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally relatively cheap of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your listing is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t compose testimonial articles usually. I just do when I in fact make use of the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a pal.
I hope you discovered some quality on whether or not beehiiv is a good system for you.