I was reading one of 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 quickly began wrecking. Beehiiv Affiliate Leaderboard…
Being a full time designer is difficult. I’m typically getting pitched various tools and solutions that do not seem to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional because I invested the last six months checking out different email and e-newsletter platforms to help develop my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some fantastic alternatives for composing e-newsletters. But I couldn’t discover one that made me provide a definite “yes”.
The issue with numerous existing newsletter platforms is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me completely tailor my e-newsletter layouts, makes it very very easy to create and send out emails, and provides me devices that assist me assess metrics and obtain more clients.
I assume I’ve finally discovered the ideal tool.
Yet, I recognize beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it very easy to style, write, send out, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Developed by previous workers at the well-known newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist makers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this post, I’m mosting likely to explain my individual experience with beehiiv, things I love (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to ultimately choose it as my e-newsletter platform of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I mistakenly came across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I have actually watched for a modern-day e-newsletter platform for quite a long time now. I’ve procrastinated hard when it came to lastly launching my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a couple of various other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make certain several newsletter makers respect preferred e-newsletters with countless subscribers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I respected a lot. They have fantastic material, lots of clients, and a clever referral program that allows them to get even much more subscribers.
So, I took place a quest to identify exactly how these huge newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more subscribers? How do they produce a newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to answer every one of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that developed this device truly understand newsletter creation and development.” I questioned who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were a few of the initial marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on creator growth.
Due to the fact that, any kind of creator recognizes, you need development to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And locating the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that ranges) typically suggests utilizing numerous different tools to aid achieve one goal– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to set up recommendations. It can get pricey.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these points in one system, and it was cost-free to start using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a terrific platform made use of by countless independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own website and utilize the system as your all-in-one option for sending emails (while developing an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to development. beehiiv permits you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, even more design flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing customers to obtain words out.
beehiiv likewise gives you a website similar to Substack. Yet, if you have your own internet site currently, you can additionally use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I use) to send your site customers straight to your beehiiv e-mail checklist. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to allow people to register for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the flexibility to leverage different marketing networks to get your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack choice.
Just how to begin using beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content maker that wants a system that enables them to send custom-made e-newsletters with or without needing to have an internet site.
The most effective newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, start-up, or material developer, you should seriously taking into consideration checking out beehiiv. It’s entirely cost-free to start and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your list.
If you actually wind up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a good indicator that people enjoy reading 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 web site.
The free plan will certainly permit you to have up to 2,500 customers, give you accessibility to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, breakthrough customization, analytics, external embed forms, and extra. It’s a really generous offering for those just beginning (or for those seeking a brand-new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your very first e-newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you made use of?”, “do you have any type of paying clients?”, and extra.
You’ll after that create a name and link for your newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site URL could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding process, you’ll likewise choose your brand name design and colors to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
When you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will have outlined details on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Begin creating”, “Posts”, “Audience”, “Grow”, “Generate income from”, “Layout” and” Assess”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the settings option.
Dashboard is your main control center (screenshot over), Begin writing is where you produce and release newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Audience is where you can view who your subscribers are (and damage them down into sections), Grow is where you have accessibility 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 newsletter with ads, Design is where you design your newsletter landing page and blog post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of every one of your admin stuff.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin composing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply beginning, and have a concept you want to blog about, I suggest simply going to the “Create” section in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning writing”.
You can modify your template and designing later on– concentrate on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and straightforward user interface for creating.
As soon as you begin writing, you can maximize headings, include web links, and design your material just how you such as.
beehiiv gives you lots of choices for different kinds of material like video clips, web links, photos, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is likewise constantly launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a whole lot a lot more material features relying on when you read this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
When you have a newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to make your e-mail template and change some settings.
Here, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a summary, include your logo, activate or off a welcome email to first time subscribers, and more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify history shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, image formats, and a lot more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever before solitary point you can enhance with your email template since it’s a lot. Just try out the system free of charge and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of amazing features that make it a great publishing system for any newsletter creator.
Right here are a few of the crucial features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Affiliate Leaderboard
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it extremely simple to create and send out e-mails. I pointed out over a few of the important things you can do with your setups and e-mail style so I’ll spare you some additional reading.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s definitely one of the far better e-mail editors I have actually ever before written in.
Internet site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv e-newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a site. Consider it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and a place where individuals can register for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the cost-free one, give you a site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your 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 customers is very important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can sign up for your newsletter directly from your beehiiv web site or via embed forms.
If you already have a website, and desire individuals to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed type. This is what I use on this internet site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this article if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 different choices– a complete width, a taken care of size, and a slim installed. I directly utilize the slim embed.
You can discover the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Kinds” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise an option for acknowledgment monitoring if you intend to ahead UTM parameters for tracking functions– quite cool.
However, there are a couple of features I wish beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make sure the group is working with updates for these, but I stated a couple of problems I had in the benefits and drawbacks section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a remedy for developing a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your listing to onward your emails to friends and coworkers and if they obtain other people to sign up for your list, you can compensate them. These incentives can be in whatever type you want. I have actually appear many newsletter business give rewards in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your clients right into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– providing you another method for expanding your e-mail listing.
However, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to an extra exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later in this post.
Costs memberships
They say all you need to make a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership profits is certainly a monster of its own. If you’re looking for a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” issues of your newsletter that are just sent to paying customers. This can be very rewarding depending upon what your newsletter needs to supply. As an example, Trends.co is a preferred costs e-newsletter that generates millions in income a year just by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Data analytics
Among the important things I like about beehiiv is how tidy and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client count.
You get access to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your newsletter is really doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that customer count go up is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan provides you whatever you require to get going and expand your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom-made domain name, surveys, and accessibility to premium registrations. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of concern support and removing the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly generous in my viewpoint.
For example, if you have 100,000 clients you will pay around $329 monthly. Instead of some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 per month for the exact same amount– making beehiiv an excellent Kit option for lots of individuals.
I’m not exactly sure just how the device economics work on this, however beehiiv is definitely cheaper (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Naturally, with every platform, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are several of the benefits and drawbacks I’ve directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of option:
- Easy to set up and begin sending newsletters free of cost
- Clean and modern subscriber analytics
- Lots of flexibility with e-mail layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Affiliate Leaderboard
- Web site hosting
- Develop premium choices to monetize
- Polls
To be truthful, I haven’t seen an additional e-newsletter system that has actually had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
However obviously, I do not want to be biased so I’m going to discuss some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the cons I have actually found while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including customized font styles
I use Webflow as my web site structure system of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not going to enter too much detail why I love Webflow a lot yet you can review my Webflow evaluation if you want to find out more.
Today, there truly is no other means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site apart from utilizing an iframe embed. I directly don’t like utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they have a tendency to decrease my web site a bit. Every single time a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last point to load on the page. It’s extremely recognizable when you’re on a slow-moving net connection. Yet I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can’t make use of a regular Webflow form (which I enjoy utilizing). There are methods around this by using a tool like Zapier but that would just include extra prices that I don’t require. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage but I assumed I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far outweigh the disadvantages right here. I’m likewise hopeful that Webflow will eventually develop a better means to integrate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
On the whole, beehiiv is a terrific service for anybody aiming to study the globe of email marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system much outweighs several that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you actually have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally fairly economical wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is uncommon. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I do not compose testimonial blog posts frequently. I only do when I actually use the tool myself and would certainly advise it to a buddy.
I wish you found some clearness on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.