I read one of 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. Beehiiv Series A…
Being a permanent creator is tough. I’m commonly obtaining pitched different devices and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological due to the fact that I invested the last six months checking out various email and e-newsletter systems to help build my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some great options for creating e-newsletters. Yet I couldn’t discover one that made me give a certain “yes”.
The problem with lots of existing newsletter platforms is that they do not feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter system that lets me fully customize my newsletter designs, makes it super simple to write and send emails, and gives me devices that help me evaluate metrics and obtain more customers.
I assume I’ve ultimately located the right device.
However, I know beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it simple to design, create, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by previous employees at the renowned e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help designers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking lots of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this article, I’m going to explain my personal experience with beehiiv, the important things I like (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to ultimately opt for it as my newsletter system of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months ago, I inadvertently stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve watched for a modern newsletter system for rather some time currently. I’ve hesitated hard when it came to finally launching my e-newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a few various other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And finally, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make certain many e-newsletter developers look up to preferred e-newsletters with millions of subscribers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a lot. They have wonderful content, tons of clients, and a smart referral program that permits them to get back at extra customers.
So, I took place a quest to determine just how these large newsletters established their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain even more clients? How do they create an e-newsletter layout that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to address all of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this device truly understand newsletter production and growth.” I questioned who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my brain blew up.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s focused on developer development.
Because, any type of creator knows, you need development to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that scales) frequently means using multiple different devices to help attain one goal– one system for your e-newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can get costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did every one of these things in one system, and it was cost-free to begin making use of, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a great platform made use of by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your very own web site and use the platform as your all-in-one option for sending emails (while developing an archive of previous concerns).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to development. beehiiv permits you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, even more design flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing customers to get words out.
beehiiv also provides you a web site similar to Substack. However, if you have your own website already, you can likewise utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your web site clients right to your beehiiv e-mail list. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to permit individuals to sign up for your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the adaptability to take advantage of different marketing channels to get your e-newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a great Substack option.
Exactly how to start utilizing beehiiv email marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content maker that wants a system that enables them to send custom e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
The most successful newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, startup, or web content creator, you must seriously taking into consideration trying beehiiv. It’s totally cost-free to get started and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your list.
If you in fact end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a great indication that people enjoy reviewing your things.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, provide you accessibility to web site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advancement modification, analytics, exterior embed types, and a lot more. It’s an extremely generous offering for those simply starting out (or for those looking for a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your initial e-newsletter?”, “what other systems have you used?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that develop a name and URL for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your website link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll also pick your brand colors and design to make sure your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
Once you reach your major control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have described details on the number of sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Start creating”, “Messages”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Style” and” Examine”. And at the really bottom you’ll see the setups option.
Control panel is your main control center (screenshot above), Beginning composing is where you produce and release newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Audience is where you can view who your clients are (and damage them down into sections), 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 advertisements, Design is where you create your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of all of your admin things.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to start composing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just starting out, and have a concept you wish to cover, I suggest simply mosting likely to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking on “Begin composing”.
You can tweak your template and styling later– focus on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and straightforward interface for composing.
When you start creating, you can maximize headings, include web links, and design your content how you like.
beehiiv gives you tons of choices for various sorts of web content like video clips, links, images, and much more.
The group at beehiiv is likewise continuously launching product feature and updates so I make sure there will be a great deal extra content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to develop your e-mail template and change some setups.
Here, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a description, include your logo, switch on or off a welcome email to first time customers, and extra.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can edit background colors, boundaries, spacing, fonts, photo formats, and much more. I’m not going to experience ever single thing you can enhance with your email template since it’s a whole lot. Just try the system totally free and see it on your own!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of incredible features that make it a wonderful publishing system for any e-newsletter designer.
Right here are a few of the necessary features you can locate with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Series A
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it very very easy to compose and send e-mails. I mentioned above some of things you can do with your setups and email style so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly among the much better email editors I’ve ever written in.
Internet site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you want) reside on an internet site. Consider it as a web site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous problems of your newsletter, and a place where people can sign up for your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, including the free one, offer you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to include a custom domain name to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining customers is necessary. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your newsletter straight from your beehiiv internet site or via embed kinds.
If you already have a site, and want individuals to sign up for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed kind. This is what I use on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three various choices– a complete width, a dealt with size, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim installed.
You can find the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s also a choice for acknowledgment tracking if you intend to onward UTM specifications for tracking purposes– rather cool.
However, there are a few features I want beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I make sure the team is dealing with updates for these, but I stated a couple of issues I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a remedy for developing a referral program.
You can motivate existing customers on your list to onward your e-mails to buddies and associates and if they get other individuals to register for your listing, you can compensate them. These benefits can be in whatever type you want. I’ve seem many e-newsletter business provide rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your clients into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– offering you one more opportunity for growing your e-mail list.
Nonetheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to an extra superior plan. I’ll look at all the plans later in this post.
Costs subscriptions
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 real fans. Subscription earnings is absolutely a beast of its own. If you’re trying to find a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” issues of your e-newsletter that are just sent to paying customers. This can be really financially rewarding relying on what your e-newsletter needs to use. For example, Trends.co is a prominent costs e-newsletter that produces millions in revenue a year just by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Information analytics
One of things I enjoy about beehiiv is how tidy and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber matter.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on just how your e-newsletter is in fact doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that subscriber count increase is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan provides you everything you need to get started and expand your newsletter (as much as 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, custom-made domain, polls, and accessibility to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you everything in the Grow plan with enhancement of concern support and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather charitable in my viewpoint.
For example, if you have 100,000 clients you will pay around $329 monthly. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 monthly for the same amount– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit option for lots of users.
I’m not exactly sure how the unit economics work on this, however beehiiv is absolutely less expensive (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Naturally, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are some of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of option:
- Easy to set up and start sending newsletters free of charge
- Tidy and modern-day client analytics
- Great deals of adaptability with e-mail styles.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Series A
- Website hosting
- Create premium choices to generate income from
- Polls
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen one more e-newsletter system that has actually been able to package every one of these features with each other so well.
But certainly, I don’t want to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to discuss some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the disadvantages I’ve discovered while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including custom fonts
I utilize Webflow as my website structure platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to enter too much information why I love Webflow so much but you can review my Webflow testimonial if you would love to discover more.
Right now, there really is nothing else way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow site besides utilizing an iframe embed. I personally don’t such as utilizing iframe’s since they often tend to slow down my website a bit. Each time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last thing to load on the web page. It’s really recognizable when you’re on a slow web link. However I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can’t use a routine Webflow type (which I love using). There are ways around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier however that would simply include added costs that I don’t require. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage but I assumed I would state it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far outweigh the disadvantages below. I’m likewise enthusiastic that Webflow will ultimately develop a much better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
On the whole, beehiiv is an excellent remedy for any individual seeking to study the world of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter system much outweighs lots of that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise fairly low-cost for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your listing is unusual. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well right into the thousands each month.
Anyways, I don’t create review messages commonly. I just do when I actually use the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a friend.
I wish you located some clarity on whether beehiiv is a good platform for you.