I read among 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 instantaneously began destroying. Beehiiv Omid G…
Being a full-time maker is difficult. I’m typically obtaining pitched various tools and services that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional because I spent the last six months experimenting with various e-mail and e-newsletter platforms to aid construct my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some fantastic options for creating e-newsletters. But I couldn’t discover one that made me give a precise “yes”.
The issue with many existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me fully personalize my newsletter layouts, makes it super easy to create and send e-mails, and provides me tools that help me analyze metrics and get even more clients.
I believe I have actually ultimately discovered the ideal device.
But, I know beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it easy to design, compose, send, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by former staff members at the well-known newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to aid developers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this post, I’m mosting likely to describe 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 lastly choose 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 been on the lookout for a contemporary e-newsletter platform for fairly a long time currently. I’ve hesitated hard when it pertained to lastly releasing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And lastly, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make certain numerous newsletter designers respect prominent newsletters with countless customers– I know I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I appreciated a great deal. They have terrific web content, lots of customers, and a smart referral program that enables them to get even more customers.
So, I took place a search to figure out how these big e-newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more clients? How do they develop a newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to respond to all of my questions. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that built this tool truly comprehend e-newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my brain blew up.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s focused on maker growth.
Due to the fact that, any kind of developer understands, you need growth to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And finding the appropriate e-newsletter pile (that ranges) commonly suggests using numerous various tools to assist accomplish one goal– one system for your newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to set up references. It can get expensive.
So when I figured out beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was totally free to start utilizing, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a great platform made use of by countless independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own internet site and make use of the system as your all-in-one remedy for sending emails (while producing an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing customers to get words out.
beehiiv also offers you a site similar to Substack. But, if you have your very own site currently, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your web site subscribers directly to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a device like Revue to permit individuals to register for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the versatility to leverage various marketing networks to get your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack alternative.
How to start using beehiiv email marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content maker that desires a system that permits them to send out custom-made newsletters with or without needing to have a site.
One of the most successful newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, start-up, or content maker, you need to seriously thinking about experimenting with beehiiv. It’s entirely free to get going and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you actually end up having to pay for beehiiv it’s most likely an excellent indication that people love reading your stuff.
Enroll in a free plan
The initial step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, give you accessibility to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance customization, analytics, outside embed forms, and extra. It’s a really generous offering for those simply beginning (or for those searching for a brand-new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and more.
You’ll then develop a name and link for your newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally pick your brand design and colors to see to it your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
Once you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have described information on the amount of sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Beginning composing”, “Messages”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Design” and” Examine”. And at the really lower you’ll see the setups alternative.
Dashboard is your major nerve center (screenshot above), Beginning creating is where you develop and publish newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can see who your clients are (and break them down right into sectors), Grow is where you have access to a referral program (and growth 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 make your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle all of your admin things.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin composing, with little to no friction. If you’re just starting out, and have a concept you intend to blog about, I advise simply mosting likely to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking “Begin composing”.
You can tweak your template and designing later– focus on the material first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and easy to use interface for creating.
Once you start creating, you can enhance headings, include links, and style your web content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv provides you tons of options for different kinds of material like videos, links, photos, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is likewise constantly launching product feature and updates so I make certain there will be a whole lot extra material features depending on when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to develop your e-mail template and adjust some setups.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, offer it a summary, add your logo, switch on or off a welcome email to first time customers, and much more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can edit history shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, image layouts, and much more. I’m not going to experience ever solitary thing you can enhance with your email template because it’s a great deal. Just experiment with the platform free of cost and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of outstanding features that make it a great publishing system for any e-newsletter maker.
Below are several of the essential features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Omid G
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it extremely easy to create and send out e-mails. I discussed over some of things you can do with your setups and e-mail style so I’ll spare you some extra reading.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely among the far better e-mail editors I have actually ever written in.
Site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you desire) live on a site. Consider it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your newsletter, and an area where individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the totally free one, give you a site. However, the free plan places your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a personalized domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv web site or via embed types.
If you currently have an internet site, and desire people to sign up for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three different choices– a complete size, a taken care of width, and a slim installed. I directly make use of the slim installed.
You can discover the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your setups.
There’s also an alternative for acknowledgment tracking if you intend to onward UTM criteria for tracking purposes– rather cool.
Nonetheless, 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 mentioned a couple of issues I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a remedy for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your checklist to forward your e-mails to pals and colleagues and if they obtain other individuals to subscribe to your checklist, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever type you want. I have actually seem several e-newsletter companies offer rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– offering you one more avenue for growing your email list.
Nevertheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to an extra premium plan. I’ll look at all the plans later in this post.
Costs subscriptions
They claim all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 true fans. Registration revenue is definitely a monster of its own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” concerns of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying clients. This can be extremely rewarding depending on what your e-newsletter needs to provide. For example, Trends.co is a preferred premium newsletter that creates millions in profits a year merely by having pay-only e-newsletter material.
Data analytics
One of things I enjoy about beehiiv is just how clean and basic the analytics are. You get real-time date on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber matter.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye sight on exactly how your newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that client count rise is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan gives you every little thing you need to get started and expand your newsletter (approximately 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) gives you whatever in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, personalized domain name, polls, and accessibility to premium subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives 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 opinion.
As an example, if you have 100,000 clients you will pay around $329 per month. Instead of some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 per month for the very same amount– making beehiiv an excellent Kit choice for several customers.
I’m unsure just how the device economics work with this, but beehiiv is most definitely more affordable (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Certainly, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are a few of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of choice:
- Easy to set up and start sending out newsletters free of charge
- Clean and contemporary subscriber analytics
- Great deals of versatility with email designs.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Omid G
- Internet site hosting
- Develop premium choices to monetize
- Polls
To be sincere, I haven’t seen an additional e-newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
But naturally, I don’t want to be prejudiced so I’m going to state some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are some of the disadvantages I have actually located while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including personalized font styles
I use Webflow as my website structure platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter too much information why I like Webflow a lot but you can review my Webflow review if you wish to learn more.
Today, there actually is no other means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow site apart from making use of an iframe embed. I directly do not like utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they tend to slow down my site a little bit. Every single time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last thing to load on the page. It’s very obvious when you get on a sluggish net link. But I can navigate that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can’t make use of a regular Webflow type (which I love making use of). There are methods around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier however that would simply include additional prices that I don’t require. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage but I believed I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far outweigh the cons here. I’m also confident that Webflow will at some point develop a better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Overall, beehiiv is a terrific remedy for any person aiming to dive into the globe of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter system much exceeds many that are currently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you actually have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise fairly low-cost wherefore they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers 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 into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t compose testimonial articles frequently. I just do when I really make use of the tool myself and would suggest it to a friend.
I hope you located some clarity on whether beehiiv is a great platform for you.