I read among my favorite email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked it and quickly started wrecking. Beehiiv Creator Network…
Being a full-time designer is difficult. I’m frequently obtaining pitched various tools and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional due to the fact that I invested the last six months experimenting with different email and e-newsletter systems to aid construct my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific alternatives for composing newsletters. But I couldn’t discover one that made me give a guaranteed “yes”.
The issue with several existing newsletter systems is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me fully customize my newsletter designs, makes it incredibly very easy to create and send out e-mails, and gives me tools that help me assess metrics and get more subscribers.
I think I’ve ultimately found the ideal device.
Yet, I know beehiiv may not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it simple to style, compose, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Developed by previous workers at the renowned newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to aid makers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking lots of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this write-up, I’m going to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, things I love (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to lastly go with it as my newsletter platform of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I mistakenly came across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I have actually watched for a modern-day e-newsletter platform for fairly time currently. I’ve hesitated hard when it concerned ultimately releasing my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie systems. After that, Substack. And finally, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I’m sure several newsletter designers respect popular e-newsletters with numerous clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a great deal. They have great content, tons of subscribers, and a clever referral program that permits them to get even more customers.
So, I took place a quest to identify exactly how these big newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get even more clients? How do they develop an e-newsletter design that remains on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to address every one of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn the people that built this tool actually recognize newsletter production and growth.” I questioned who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the first marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I knew this was mosting likely to be a different e-newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on developer growth.
Because, any developer understands, you require development to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the appropriate e-newsletter pile (that ranges) often means using several various tools to aid achieve one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one system to set up references. It can get expensive.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these points in one system, and it was complimentary to begin using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there currently a system for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a great system used by countless independent writers. With Substack you get your own web site and utilize the system as your all-in-one remedy for sending out e-mails (while producing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, more style flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to get words out.
beehiiv also provides you an internet site similar to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own internet site already, you can likewise make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your web site clients directly to your beehiiv e-mail list. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Revue to allow people to sign up for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This gives you the versatility to leverage different marketing networks to obtain your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv an excellent Substack choice.
Just how to begin using beehiiv email marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content maker that wants a platform that allows them to send out customized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media company, startup, or material developer, you must seriously taking into consideration trying beehiiv. It’s totally cost-free to get going and you only pay when you get to over 2,500 subscribers on your list.
If you actually end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a good indicator that people love reading your stuff.
Sign up for a free plan
The primary step is to enroll in a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you accessibility to website hosting, a newsletter CMS, advancement customization, analytics, outside embed kinds, and more. It’s an extremely generous offering for those simply beginning (or for those looking for a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you made use of?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that produce a name and link for your e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll additionally pick your brand name design and colors to make certain your e-newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
When you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have described info on the number of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Beginning creating”, “Articles”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Layout” and” Evaluate”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the settings choice.
Dashboard is your main control center (screenshot above), Start writing is where you create and release newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can watch who your subscribers are (and break them down right into segments), Expand is where you have accessibility 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 newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you make your e-newsletter landing page and post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can manage all of your admin things.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it very easy to begin composing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply starting out, and have a concept you intend to blog about, I advise just mosting likely to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking “Start creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– focus on the material first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a tidy and user-friendly user interface for creating.
When you begin writing, you can maximize headings, include links, and design your material just how you like.
beehiiv provides you lots of alternatives for different kinds of web content like videos, links, photos, and extra.
The group at beehiiv is likewise continuously releasing product feature and updates so I make sure there will be a great deal extra content features relying on when you’re reading this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
Once 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 upgrade the name of your newsletter, give it a summary, include your logo design, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time subscribers, and extra.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can edit background colors, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, image layouts, and extra. I’m not going to undergo ever before single point you can maximize with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a great deal. Simply check out the platform free of cost and see it for yourself!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of outstanding features that make it a terrific posting platform for any kind of e-newsletter developer.
Right here are several of the essential features you can locate with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv Creator Network
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing platform. It makes it incredibly simple to create and send emails. I mentioned over a few of the things you can do with your settings and e-mail style so I’ll spare you some additional reading.
The important things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really modern and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely among the better e-mail editors I’ve ever written in.
Web site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv newsletter, all of your newsletters (if you want) survive a website. Think about it as a website for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your newsletter, and a location where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, including the free one, provide you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a custom-made domain name to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is important. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your newsletter straight from your beehiiv site or with embed forms.
If you already have a site, and desire individuals to subscribe to your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to use an embed form. This is what I make use of on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have three various options– a full size, a fixed width, and a slim installed. I personally make use of the slim embed.
You can find the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s also a choice for attribution monitoring if you intend to forward UTM parameters for tracking functions– pretty neat.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I make certain the team is dealing with updates for these, but I pointed out a couple of issues I had in the pros and cons area below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is an option for producing a referral program.
You can encourage existing subscribers on your checklist to onward your e-mails to buddies and coworkers and if they get other people to sign up for your list, you can reward them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you want. I’ve appear numerous e-newsletter firms give rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your customers into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– giving you another opportunity for growing your email list.
Nevertheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to an extra exceptional plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this post.
Costs subscriptions
They claim all you need to make a living online is 1,000 real followers. Subscription revenue is absolutely a beast of its own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” concerns of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying customers. This can be extremely financially rewarding depending upon what your newsletter needs to offer. For example, Trends.co is a preferred premium newsletter that creates millions in income a year simply by having pay-only newsletter content.
Data analytics
One of the important things I love about beehiiv is how clean and basic the analytics are. You get real-time day on just how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer matter.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on exactly how your newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your control panel and seeing that subscriber count increase is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (totally free) Launch plan provides you every little thing you require to get going and expand your newsletter (as much as 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) gives you every little thing in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, customized domain, surveys, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you everything in the Grow plan with enhancement of concern assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are quite charitable in my viewpoint.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 per month. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the same amount– making beehiiv a terrific Kit choice for several individuals.
I’m not exactly sure how the system economics service this, however beehiiv is absolutely less costly (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Obviously, with every system, it has its pros and cons. Here are several of the pros and cons I’ve directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter platform of option:
- Easy to set up and begin sending out e-newsletters for free
- Clean and modern subscriber analytics
- Great deals of adaptability with e-mail designs.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Creator Network
- Website hosting
- Create premium choices to monetize
- Surveys
To be truthful, I have not seen another newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
But certainly, I do not want to be prejudiced so I’m going to point out some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Right here are several of the cons I’ve found while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including custom font styles
I utilize Webflow as my internet site building platform of option (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter way too much detail why I like Webflow a lot however you can review my Webflow evaluation if you ‘d like to find out more.
Today, there actually is nothing else way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow website apart from making use of an iframe embed. I directly don’t like utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they tend to decrease my web site a bit. Each time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last point to pack on the page. It’s very noticeable when you’re on a sluggish web link. Yet I can get around that.
The main complaint I have is that I can not make use of a regular Webflow kind (which I enjoy using). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier however that would certainly simply include extra expenses that I do not need. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage however I thought I would state it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros much outweigh the disadvantages below. I’m likewise enthusiastic that Webflow will at some point produce a far better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Generally, beehiiv is a fantastic remedy for anyone aiming to dive into the globe of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter platform much exceeds several that are presently on the marketplace. And with a charitable free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively inexpensive for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not write testimonial blog posts typically. I just do when I in fact use the tool myself and would advise it to a pal.
I wish you discovered some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is a good system for you.