I was reading one of my favorite e-mail 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 promptly began tearing up. Beehiiv Boost Marketplace…
Being a permanent developer is difficult. I’m frequently obtaining pitched various devices and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological since I invested the last six months checking out various e-mail and e-newsletter systems to help develop my e-newsletter. And to be fair, there are some excellent choices for composing newsletters. But I couldn’t discover one that made me offer a definite “yes”.
The concern with many existing e-newsletter systems is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter system that lets me completely personalize my e-newsletter layouts, makes it incredibly very easy to compose and send out e-mails, and provides me devices that aid me analyze metrics and get more subscribers.
I think I have actually finally found the right tool.
Yet, I recognize beehiiv may not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it very easy to layout, compose, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former employees at the famous e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to aid designers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this post, I’m going to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I like (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to finally go with it as my newsletter platform of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve watched for a modern-day e-newsletter platform for rather time currently. I’ve put things off hard when it concerned ultimately introducing my e-newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie systems. After that, Substack. And lastly, I ended up using beehiiv.
I make certain several e-newsletter makers look up to popular e-newsletters with numerous subscribers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a great deal. They have terrific web content, tons of clients, and a clever referral program that permits them to get even much more customers.
So, I took place a quest to identify just how these large newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more clients? How do they produce an e-newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to respond to every one of my concerns. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that developed this device really recognize newsletter development and growth.” I examined who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the very first marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I knew this was mosting likely to be a various newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on designer growth.
Since, any maker knows, you need growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the best e-newsletter stack (that ranges) typically suggests using multiple different devices to aid achieve one objective– one system for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to establish recommendations. It can obtain pricey.
So when I learnt beehiiv did every one of these things in one system, and it was free to begin using, 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 terrific system made use of by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own site and make use of the system as your all-in-one remedy for sending out emails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, even more style flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing customers to get words out.
beehiiv also provides you an internet site similar to Substack. But, if you have your own site already, you can likewise utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your website customers straight to your beehiiv email list. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Revue to allow people to register for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the versatility to leverage various marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a great Substack option.
Just how to begin utilizing beehiiv email marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material designer that desires a platform that enables them to send customized newsletters with or without requiring to have a web site.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv focuses on offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, start-up, or web content designer, you should seriously thinking about experimenting with beehiiv. It’s totally free to start and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 subscribers on your checklist.
If you in fact end up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s probably a good indication that people like reading your things.
Sign up for a free plan
The very first step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Start trial” switch on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you access to website hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advance customization, analytics, exterior embed kinds, and a lot more. It’s a really charitable offering for those simply starting out (or for those searching for a new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll experience an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any type of paying customers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that produce a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s site. On the free plan, your newsletter will survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site URL may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally pick your brand design and colors to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
When you reach your major dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have described details on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Start composing”, “Messages”, “Audience”, “Expand”, “Generate income from”, “Design” and” Analyze”. And at the very bottom you’ll see the setups choice.
Dashboard is your primary nerve center (screenshot above), Beginning composing is where you develop and publish e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter versions, Target market is where you can view who your clients are (and damage them down right 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 article template, Assess 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 very easy to start creating, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting out, and have an idea you intend to cover, I advise just mosting likely to the “Compose” section in the navbar and clicking “Beginning creating”.
You can tweak your template and styling later on– focus on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a clean and easy to use user interface for creating.
As soon as you start creating, you can optimize headings, add links, and design your web content how you such as.
beehiiv offers you tons of options for different sorts of web content like video clips, links, images, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is likewise regularly launching item feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a whole lot much more material features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your settings and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to make your email template and change some settings.
Right here, you can update the name of your newsletter, offer it a description, include your logo, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to first time subscribers, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can edit history shades, borders, spacing, typefaces, image layouts, and much more. I’m not going to experience ever before solitary thing you can optimize with your e-mail template because it’s a whole lot. Simply experiment with the platform free of charge and see it on your own!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of incredible features that make it a great posting system for any kind of newsletter designer.
Right here are some of the crucial features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Boost Marketplace
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting system. It makes it extremely easy to write and send e-mails. I discussed over some of things you can do with your settings and e-mail layout so I’ll save you some additional analysis.
The thing to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feeling. It’s most definitely one of the far better e-mail editors I’ve ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you want) survive on a web site. Think of it as a site for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your e-newsletter, and a location where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the complimentary one, give you an internet site. Nevertheless, the free plan areas your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to include a custom domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting subscribers is very important. Besides, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv internet site or via embed kinds.
If you already have an internet site, and want people to register for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed type. 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 article if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 different alternatives– a full width, a fixed width, and a slim installed. I personally use the slim embed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally a choice for attribution tracking if you intend to forward UTM specifications for tracking functions– quite cool.
However, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I’m sure the team is working on updates for these, but I discussed a couple of concerns I had in the advantages and disadvantages section below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is an option for developing a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your list to onward your emails to friends and associates and if they get other people to subscribe to your list, you can reward them. These benefits can be in whatever kind you want. I have actually appear numerous newsletter companies provide incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your clients right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you another opportunity for expanding your email listing.
However, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to an extra premium plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this write-up.
Premium subscriptions
They say all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 real followers. Membership profits is absolutely a beast of its own. If you’re looking for a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “costs” concerns of your e-newsletter that are only sent out to paying subscribers. This can be very financially rewarding relying on what your e-newsletter has to provide. For instance, Trends.co is a preferred premium e-newsletter that creates millions in profits a year merely by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Data analytics
One of the things I enjoy concerning beehiiv is exactly how clean and easy the analytics are. You get real-time day on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer count.
You get access to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on just how your newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that customer matter go up is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan offers you every little thing you require to start and grow your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, personalized domain, polls, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather generous in my point of view.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 each month. Instead of some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would charge $679 each month for the exact same amount– making beehiiv a great Kit choice for numerous customers.
I’m not sure exactly how the device economics deal with this, but beehiiv is definitely more affordable (presently) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Naturally, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are a few of the pros and cons I have actually personally experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of selection:
- Easy to set up and start sending out e-newsletters absolutely free
- Clean and contemporary customer analytics
- Great deals of adaptability with email layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Boost Marketplace
- Website hosting
- Create costs choices to monetize
- Surveys
To be truthful, I have not seen another newsletter platform that has actually been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
Yet obviously, I do not intend to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to mention some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the disadvantages I’ve discovered while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding personalized typefaces
I make use of Webflow as my website structure platform of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not going to go in too much detail why I like Webflow so much however you can read my Webflow testimonial if you would love to discover more.
Now, there really is no other means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site besides utilizing an iframe embed. I personally do not like utilizing iframe’s since they often tend to slow down my site a bit. Whenever a web page on my site (with a beehiiv embed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last thing to pack on the web page. It’s very recognizable when you get on a slow web connection. Yet I can get around that.
The main complaint I have is that I can’t make use of a normal Webflow form (which I like making use of). There are methods around this by using a tool like Zapier but that would simply add extra costs that I don’t require. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con however I thought I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far surpass the disadvantages right here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will ultimately develop a far better way to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Generally, beehiiv is a terrific service for anyone looking to dive into the globe of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter platform much exceeds several that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you actually have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally relatively cheap wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your list is unheard of. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well right into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I do not write testimonial blog posts usually. I only do when I actually utilize the tool myself and would suggest it to a close friend.
I wish you found some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent platform for you.