I was reading among my favored email e-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 instantly began tearing up. Beehiiv Nicholas Agardy…
Being a permanent designer is tough. I’m frequently getting pitched various devices and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I guess I was psychological since I invested the last 6 months checking out different email and e-newsletter systems to aid construct my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some great choices for creating newsletters. Yet I couldn’t locate one that made me provide a definite “yes”.
The problem with many existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me completely customize my newsletter designs, makes it incredibly easy to write and send emails, and provides me tools that help me examine metrics and get more subscribers.
I believe I have actually lastly found the appropriate tool.
However, I know beehiiv may not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it simple to style, compose, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by former workers at the well-known e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to aid designers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking lots of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this short article, I’m going to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, the important things I like (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to finally go with it as my newsletter platform of option.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months ago, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve watched for a contemporary e-newsletter system for rather a long time currently. I’ve postponed hard when it involved finally introducing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie systems. Then, Substack. And lastly, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make sure several e-newsletter creators respect prominent e-newsletters with millions of customers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a whole lot. They have wonderful content, tons of customers, and a clever referral program that permits them to get even extra clients.
So, I took place a search to figure out just how these big e-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 customers? How do they produce an e-newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to respond to all of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this device really comprehend newsletter creation and growth.” I examined who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on creator development.
Due to the fact that, any designer understands, you need development to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the ideal newsletter pile (that ranges) often means utilizing several various devices to assist achieve one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can get pricey.
So when I discovered beehiiv did every one of these points in one system, and it was cost-free to start making use of, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a wonderful platform used by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own website and use the platform as your all-in-one remedy for sending emails (while developing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all the 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 also provides you an internet site comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your own website already, you can also utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your web site subscribers directly to your beehiiv email listing. On the same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Revue to allow individuals to register for your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the adaptability to take advantage of various marketing channels to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack alternative.
How to start using beehiiv email marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content designer that desires a platform that allows them to send personalized e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a web site.
The most successful e-newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at offering you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, start-up, or content developer, you ought to seriously taking into consideration trying beehiiv. It’s entirely cost-free to get started and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your listing.
If you really wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a good sign that people like reviewing your things.
Enroll in a free plan
The primary step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” switch on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you accessibility to web site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advancement customization, analytics, external embed forms, and more. It’s a very charitable offering for those just starting (or for those trying to find a new platform to move to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and more.
You’ll after that produce a name and URL for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your internet site link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally pick your brand colors and design to make sure your newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
Once you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have outlined details on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Beginning writing”, “Blog posts”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Design” and” Assess”. And at the very bottom you’ll see the settings choice.
Control panel is your main nerve center (screenshot above), Beginning creating is where you develop and release newsletters, Posts is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter editions, Audience is where you can see who your clients are (and damage them down right into sections), 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 e-newsletter with ads, Style is where you make your e-newsletter landing page and article template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle every one of your admin stuff.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin creating, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have an idea you wish to discuss, I advise just mosting likely to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking on “Start writing”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– focus on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a clean and easy to use user interface for composing.
Once you begin creating, you can enhance headings, include links, and style your web content how you such as.
beehiiv gives you tons of alternatives for various types of material like videos, links, pictures, and more.
The team at beehiiv is likewise constantly releasing product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a great deal much more content features depending on when you read this.
Optimizing your setups and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to make your email template and change some setups.
Right here, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a description, add your logo, activate or off a welcome e-mail to very first time clients, and much more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit background colors, boundaries, spacing, fonts, photo styles, and more. I’m not going to go through ever before solitary thing you can maximize with your email template because it’s a lot. Simply try out the platform totally free and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of outstanding features that make it a great publishing platform for any e-newsletter designer.
Right here are several of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Nicholas Agardy
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing system. It makes it very simple to create and send out e-mails. I discussed above some of the things you can do with your settings and e-mail layout so I’ll spare you some extra analysis.
The thing to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s absolutely one of the far better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) survive on a website. Think about it as an internet site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous problems of your newsletter, and a location where individuals can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s practically comparable to that.
All plans, including the free one, offer you a web site. Nevertheless, the free plan areas your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a personalized domain name to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is important. After all, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter right from your beehiiv web site or via embed types.
If you already have a web site, and desire people to register for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed type. This is what I utilize on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have 3 different choices– a full width, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I directly use the slim installed.
You can locate the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your setups.
There’s additionally a choice for acknowledgment monitoring if you intend to forward UTM parameters for tracking objectives– rather cool.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I wish beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make certain the team is servicing updates for these, however I discussed a few concerns 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 remedy for creating a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your listing to ahead your emails to friends and coworkers and if they get other individuals to register for your list, you can reward them. These benefits can be in whatever type you want. I have actually seem many newsletter companies offer incentives in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– providing you another opportunity for growing your email list.
However, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to update to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this write-up.
Premium memberships
They say all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true fans. Membership profits is most definitely a monster of its very own. If you’re trying to find a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” problems of your e-newsletter that are only sent to paying clients. This can be extremely lucrative depending upon what your newsletter has to supply. For instance, Trends.co is a prominent premium newsletter that creates millions in profits a year just by having pay-only newsletter content.
Information analytics
One of things I enjoy about beehiiv is exactly how clean and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on exactly how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer matter.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on just how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that client matter increase is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan provides you everything you require to get going and grow your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, personalized domain name, surveys, and accessibility to premium memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of priority support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly charitable in my point of view.
For example, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. In contrast to some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 each month for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit alternative for lots of users.
I’m unsure exactly how the system economics work with this, however beehiiv is absolutely less expensive (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Obviously, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are several 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 selection:
- Easy to establish and start sending out e-newsletters completely free
- Clean and modern subscriber analytics
- Lots of adaptability with e-mail designs.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Nicholas Agardy
- Website hosting
- Create costs choices to generate income from
- Surveys
To be sincere, I have not seen another newsletter system that has actually been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
However obviously, I do not intend to be biased so I’m going to mention some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the disadvantages I have actually found while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom-made typefaces
I use Webflow as my site building system of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much detail why I like Webflow so much yet you can read my Webflow evaluation if you want to learn more.
Now, there really is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow website other than making use of an iframe embed. I personally don’t such as making use of iframe’s due to the fact that they often tend to reduce my internet site a little bit. Every single time a page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last point to load on the web page. It’s very visible when you’re on a slow-moving internet connection. However I can navigate that.
The major complaint I have is that I can not use a normal Webflow form (which I enjoy making use of). There are means around this by utilizing a device like Zapier but that would simply add added prices that I do not need. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con yet I assumed I would certainly state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far exceed the cons here. I’m likewise confident that Webflow will at some point develop a better means to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
In general, beehiiv is an excellent remedy for any person aiming to study the globe of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The performance of this newsletter system much surpasses many that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you truly have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally relatively low-cost for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your checklist is unprecedented. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t write testimonial posts typically. I just do when I actually make use of the device myself and would certainly advise it to a friend.
I wish you discovered some quality on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.