I was reading one of my favorite e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked it and instantaneously began wrecking. Beehiiv Ashley Graham…
Being a permanent designer is difficult. I’m typically obtaining pitched various tools and solutions that do not seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was psychological because I invested the last six months trying various e-mail and newsletter platforms to assist build my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific choices for creating e-newsletters. Yet I could not find one that made me give a guaranteed “yes”.
The problem with numerous existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter platform that lets me fully customize my e-newsletter layouts, makes it incredibly simple to create and send out emails, and gives me devices that aid me examine metrics and get more customers.
I think I’ve ultimately located the right tool.
However, I understand beehiiv might not be for everyone. 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 system that makes it very easy to design, compose, send out, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Produced by previous staff members at the renowned newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist developers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this article, I’m going to clarify my personal experience with beehiiv, things I love (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to finally go with it as my newsletter system of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve watched for a contemporary e-newsletter platform for fairly a long time now. I’ve procrastinated hard when it involved ultimately launching my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few various other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up utilizing beehiiv.
I make certain lots of e-newsletter developers respect popular e-newsletters with millions of clients– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a great deal. They have fantastic web content, lots of customers, and a smart referral program that allows them to get back at much more clients.
So, I took place a search to determine how these big newsletters established their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain more clients? How do they produce a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to address all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this tool actually understand e-newsletter production and development.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the initial marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I knew this was going to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on designer development.
Due to the fact that, any maker recognizes, you require development to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the best newsletter pile (that scales) commonly indicates utilizing numerous various tools to help attain one goal– one platform for your newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to establish recommendations. It can get pricey.
So when I figured out beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was complimentary to begin making use of, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a fantastic platform used by countless independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own web site and make use of the system as your all-in-one remedy for sending out emails (while creating an archive of previous problems).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of far better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to get words out.
beehiiv also offers you a website comparable to Substack. But, if you have your own internet site already, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your internet site subscribers right to your beehiiv e-mail listing. On the exact same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Performance to permit people to subscribe to your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the adaptability to leverage various marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack alternative.
How to begin utilizing beehiiv email marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material developer that wants a system that enables them to send out customized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media firm, start-up, or material designer, you should seriously taking into consideration trying out beehiiv. It’s completely complimentary to get going and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your list.
If you actually wind up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly an excellent sign that individuals like reading your things.
Enroll in a free plan
The first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will certainly permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you accessibility to site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance modification, analytics, exterior embed kinds, and much more. It’s a really generous offering for those just starting out (or for those trying to find a new platform to move to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding procedure 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 subscribers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that develop a name and URL for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your website link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll also select your brand design and colors to make sure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
As soon as you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will have outlined info on how many sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Begin creating”, “Messages”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Generate income from”, “Style” and” Examine”. And at the really bottom you’ll see the setups alternative.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot above), Begin composing is where you produce and publish newsletters, Messages is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter editions, Audience is where you can watch who your subscribers are (and damage them down into sectors), Grow is where you have access 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, Layout is where you make your newsletter landing page and message template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can manage all of your admin things.
Writing your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start composing, with little to no friction. If you’re just beginning, and have an idea you intend to cover, I recommend just going to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking on “Beginning composing”.
You can tweak your template and designing later on– concentrate on the material first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a clean and straightforward interface for composing.
Once you begin writing, you can maximize headings, add web links, and style your web content how you such as.
beehiiv offers you tons of choices for various sorts of content like video clips, web links, images, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is likewise constantly releasing product feature and updates so I make sure there will be a whole lot extra material features relying on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send out, it’s time to create your e-mail template and adjust some setups.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, give it a description, add your logo design, switch on or off a welcome email to first time customers, and a lot more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify background shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, photo formats, and more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever before single thing you can maximize with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a lot. Simply experiment with the system absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of remarkable features that make it a terrific publishing system for any type of newsletter creator.
Here are several of the necessary features you can locate with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv Ashley Graham
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it very easy to write and send e-mails. I pointed out above some of the important things you can do with your setups and e-mail layout so I’ll save you some additional reading.
The thing to keep in mind with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely one of the better email editors I’ve ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you desire) survive on a web site. Consider it as an internet site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and a place where individuals can sign up for your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s virtually comparable to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, give you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan places your web site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a custom-made domain to eliminate 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 e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv internet site or through embed forms.
If you currently have an internet site, and desire individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have three various options– a complete width, a dealt with size, and a slim embed. I directly use the slim installed.
You can discover the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s also a choice for acknowledgment monitoring if you want to onward UTM specifications for tracking objectives– rather cool.
Nevertheless, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I make certain the team is servicing updates for these, but I stated a few problems I had in the advantages and disadvantages section below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is a solution for producing a referral program.
You can encourage existing clients on your list to ahead your e-mails to buddies and coworkers and if they obtain other people to sign up for your checklist, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever type you want. I’ve appear several newsletter companies offer benefits in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– offering you an additional opportunity for expanding your email listing.
However, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a much more premium plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this article.
Costs subscriptions
They claim all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Registration profits is most definitely a beast of its very 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 only sent out to paying customers. This can be very rewarding depending upon what your newsletter has to offer. As an example, Trends.co is a preferred premium newsletter that produces millions in revenue a year merely by having pay-only e-newsletter material.
Information analytics
One of things I love concerning beehiiv is exactly how tidy and straightforward the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and client count.
You get access to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye view on just how your newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that customer matter increase is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (free) Launch plan provides you everything you require to get started and grow your e-newsletter (approximately 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, customized domain, surveys, and access to costs memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) offers you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of concern assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly charitable in my viewpoint.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 each month for the exact same amount– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit option for many users.
I’m uncertain just how the system economics work with this, but beehiiv is most definitely less expensive (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Right here are several of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually personally experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of option:
- Easy to set up and start sending out newsletters for free
- Tidy and contemporary subscriber analytics
- Lots of versatility with email layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Ashley Graham
- Web site hosting
- Produce premium options to monetize
- Surveys
To be truthful, I haven’t seen an additional e-newsletter platform that has had the ability to package every one of these features together so well.
Yet certainly, I do not want to be biased so I’m going to mention some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are some of the disadvantages I have actually found while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding personalized fonts
I use Webflow as my internet site building system of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to enter too much information why I enjoy Webflow so much yet you can review my Webflow evaluation if you want to learn more.
Today, there actually is no other method I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site apart from making use of an iframe embed. I personally don’t like utilizing iframe’s because they often tend to reduce my website a bit. Whenever a page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last thing to pack on the page. It’s extremely noticeable when you’re on a slow-moving web connection. However I can navigate that.
The major complaint I have is that I can not use a regular Webflow kind (which I enjoy utilizing). There are methods around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would certainly simply add additional prices that I don’t need. To be truthful, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con but I believed I would state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much exceed the disadvantages here. I’m likewise hopeful that Webflow will eventually create a better method to integrate with beehiiv.
Verdict
On the whole, beehiiv is a great remedy for any individual aiming to study the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter platform much exceeds many that are presently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you actually have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are also fairly low-cost for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your listing is unheard of. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t write review messages frequently. I only do when I really use the tool myself and would certainly advise it to a close friend.
I hope you located some quality on whether or not beehiiv is a good platform for you.