I read among my favored email e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked on it and immediately started tearing up. Beehiiv Acceptable Use Policy…
Being a full time designer is tough. I’m usually getting pitched various devices and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional since I spent the last 6 months checking out different e-mail and 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 provide a guaranteed “yes”.
The issue with many existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter platform that lets me fully customize my e-newsletter styles, makes it super very easy to create and send emails, and offers me devices that help me assess metrics and get more clients.
I assume I have actually lastly discovered the best device.
However, I understand beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it very easy to layout, write, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by former employees at the famous newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to aid creators launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this write-up, I’m mosting likely to discuss my individual experience with beehiiv, things I like (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to ultimately choose it as my e-newsletter system of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I’ve watched for a modern e-newsletter system for fairly some time currently. I have actually procrastinated hard when it came to finally introducing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie systems. After that, Substack. And finally, I ended up utilizing beehiiv.
I make sure several e-newsletter developers look up to prominent e-newsletters with millions of clients– I know I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I appreciated a whole lot. They have terrific material, tons of clients, and a smart referral program that permits them to get even a lot more clients.
So, I went on a quest to determine just how these large e-newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more customers? How do they create a newsletter style that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to address all of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that built this tool truly comprehend newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the first marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my brain blew up.
I understood this was going to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on developer growth.
Since, any developer understands, you require development to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the right e-newsletter stack (that scales) usually indicates using numerous various devices to assist attain one goal– one platform for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one platform to set up referrals. It can get pricey.
So when I discovered beehiiv did every one of these things in one system, and it was totally free to begin using, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
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 system utilized by countless independent writers. With Substack you get your very own web site and utilize the system as your all-in-one solution for sending e-mails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv allows you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing clients to obtain words out.
beehiiv also provides you a website comparable to Substack. But, if you have your very own site currently, you can additionally make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your website subscribers straight to your beehiiv email list. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to allow people to sign up for your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the versatility to utilize various marketing channels to get your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack alternative.
Exactly how to begin using beehiiv email marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content creator that desires a system that allows them to send out custom newsletters with or without needing to have an internet site.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or web content designer, you should seriously taking into consideration checking out beehiiv. It’s absolutely free to begin and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 subscribers on your list.
If you actually end up having to pay for beehiiv it’s most likely an excellent sign that people enjoy reading your stuff.
Enroll in a free plan
The first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 customers, provide you accessibility to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, development personalization, analytics, exterior embed kinds, and more. It’s a really generous offering for those simply starting (or for those trying to find a new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that develop a name and link for your newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site link could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll also choose your brand name colors and design to make sure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
Once you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have described information on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start creating”, “Posts”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Generate income from”, “Style” and” Analyze”. And at the extremely bottom you’ll see the settings alternative.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot above), Beginning creating is where you develop and publish e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can watch who your customers are (and break them down right into segments), Expand is where you have access 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, Style is where you create your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle every one of your admin things.
Composing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin writing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply starting out, and have a concept you want to blog about, I recommend simply mosting likely to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking “Beginning writing”.
You can tweak your template and styling later– concentrate on the material first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and user-friendly user interface for creating.
As soon as you begin writing, you can enhance headings, add links, and design your content how you such as.
beehiiv gives you tons of options for different kinds of web content like videos, links, pictures, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally regularly releasing item feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a whole lot a lot more material features relying 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 design your e-mail template and readjust some setups.
Here, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, provide it a summary, include your logo design, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time subscribers, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify background shades, boundaries, spacing, fonts, photo styles, and much more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever before single point you can enhance with your e-mail template since it’s a lot. Just experiment with the system completely free and see it for yourself!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of incredible features that make it a fantastic publishing system for any type of e-newsletter developer.
Below are several of the vital features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Acceptable Use Policy
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter publishing platform. It makes it extremely simple to create and send emails. I mentioned over some of the things you can do with your settings and e-mail layout so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
Things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern and minimalistic feel. It’s most definitely among the much better e-mail editors I have actually ever before written in.
Internet site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you want) reside on a web site. Consider it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and a location where individuals can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s basically comparable to that.
All plans, including the free one, give you a website. However, the free plan areas your internet site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a custom domain name to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is necessary. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv web site or through embed types.
If you already have an internet site, and want individuals to subscribe to your e-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 man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three various options– a full width, a taken care of size, and a slim installed. I personally utilize the slim embed.
You can discover the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s also an option for acknowledgment tracking if you want to forward UTM parameters for tracking objectives– quite cool.
However, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I’m sure the team is servicing updates for these, but I pointed out a few problems I had in the pros and cons area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a solution for creating a referral program.
You can motivate existing subscribers on your list to ahead your emails to good friends and colleagues and if they obtain other people to register for your listing, you can reward them. These benefits can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually appear numerous e-newsletter firms provide benefits in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients right into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– offering you another method for growing your email checklist.
Nonetheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to an extra exceptional plan. I’ll review all the plans later in this post.
Premium registrations
They say all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 true fans. Registration earnings is certainly a beast of its very own. If you’re trying to find a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” issues of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying subscribers. This can be really profitable relying on what your newsletter needs to use. For instance, Trends.co is a popular costs newsletter that creates millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Data analytics
Among things I love concerning beehiiv is how clean and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber count.
You obtain access to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye sight on just how your newsletter is in fact doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that customer matter go up is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you every little thing you need to get going and expand your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom domain, surveys, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you every little thing in the Grow plan with enhancement of concern support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather charitable in my opinion.
For instance, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 monthly. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the same amount– making beehiiv an excellent Kit option for many customers.
I’m not exactly sure just how the device business economics work on this, but beehiiv is definitely less expensive (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Of course, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Right here are some of the pros and cons I’ve directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of option:
- Easy to set up and start sending e-newsletters absolutely free
- Clean and modern subscriber analytics
- Great deals of flexibility with email designs.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Acceptable Use Policy
- Web site hosting
- Create premium options to monetize
- Polls
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen one more newsletter system that has actually had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
However obviously, I don’t wish to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to point out some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Right here are several of the cons I’ve found while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including personalized typefaces
I utilize Webflow as my internet site building platform of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not going to go in too much information why I like Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow review if you wish to discover more.
Today, there truly is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site besides using an iframe embed. I personally don’t such as using iframe’s due to the fact that they have a tendency to decrease my site a bit. Each time a page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last point to fill on the page. It’s really obvious when you get on a sluggish web connection. But I can navigate that.
The major complaint I have is that I can’t utilize a regular Webflow form (which I like making use of). There are methods around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier yet that would certainly just include extra expenses that I don’t require. To be straightforward, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage yet I thought I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far outweigh the disadvantages right here. I’m likewise confident that Webflow will eventually develop a much better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Overall, beehiiv is a fantastic service for any person looking to dive into the globe of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system far outweighs lots of that are currently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are also relatively low-cost for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your list is uncommon. 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 per month.
Anyways, I don’t compose review messages commonly. I just do when I in fact utilize the tool myself and would suggest it to a close friend.
I hope you discovered some quality on whether or not beehiiv is a good platform for you.