I read one of my preferred email 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 For SaaS Founders…
Being a permanent developer is tough. I’m usually getting pitched various tools and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I presume I was psychological due to the fact that I invested the last six months checking out various email and newsletter platforms to aid construct my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some wonderful choices for creating e-newsletters. Yet I couldn’t find one that made me provide a guaranteed “yes”.
The problem with many existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter platform that lets me completely customize my newsletter styles, makes it very very easy to write and send e-mails, and gives me tools that assist me examine metrics and obtain more clients.
I believe I have actually lastly discovered the best tool.
But, I recognize beehiiv might 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 newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter system that makes it easy to design, compose, send out, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by former workers at the famous e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to assist developers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking lots of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to clarify my personal experience with beehiiv, things I love (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly select it as my e-newsletter system of choice.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I inadvertently stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve watched for a contemporary newsletter platform for quite a long time now. I have actually hesitated hard when it involved lastly introducing my e-newsletter.
First, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a couple of other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I make sure lots of newsletter creators respect prominent e-newsletters with millions of subscribers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I admired a lot. They have excellent content, tons of customers, and a creative referral program that allows them to get back at a lot more subscribers.
So, I went on a search to identify just how these huge newsletters established their logistics. What system do they use? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain more clients? How do they develop an e-newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to address every one of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this tool truly recognize newsletter production and growth.” I examined who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and growth staff members at Morning Brew– my mind blew up.
I knew this was going to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s concentrated on creator growth.
Due to the fact that, any kind of developer recognizes, you require growth to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And discovering the best newsletter pile (that ranges) commonly means using multiple various devices to help achieve one goal– one platform for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to set up referrals. It can obtain pricey.
So when I figured out beehiiv did every one of these points in one system, and it was complimentary to start utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a wonderful system utilized by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you get your own internet site and use the platform as your all-in-one option for sending out e-mails (while creating an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of far better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to get the word out.
beehiiv additionally provides you a website comparable to Substack. Yet, if you have your own site currently, you can also use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I utilize) to send your website subscribers straight to your beehiiv email checklist. On the same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to enable individuals to sign up for your newsletter straight from Twitter.
This provides you the versatility to utilize various marketing channels to get your newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a fantastic 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 platform that permits them to send custom newsletters with or without needing to have a site.
The most successful e-newsletters have the right tools to construct and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at providing you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, startup, or web content maker, you ought to seriously thinking about trying beehiiv. It’s totally free to get started and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 clients on your list.
If you really wind up having to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly a good indicator that people like reviewing your stuff.
Sign up for a free plan
The very first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Start trial” switch on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 customers, provide you access to web site hosting, a newsletter CMS, development personalization, analytics, external embed types, and more. It’s a very generous offering for those just starting out (or for those trying to find a new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your initial newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you utilized?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and more.
You’ll after that create a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your web site link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll also choose your brand name design and colors to make sure your newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
Once you reach your main control panel, you’ll see all 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 alternatives for “Begin composing”, “Blog posts”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Generate income from”, “Design” and” Evaluate”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the setups alternative.
Control panel is your main nerve center (screenshot above), Beginning creating is where you create and release e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see all of your previous e-newsletter versions, Target market is where you can watch who your clients 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 advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your e-newsletter with advertisements, Layout is where you make your e-newsletter landing page and article template, Evaluate is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle every one of your admin things.
Creating your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to begin composing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re just starting out, and have an idea you wish to discuss, I advise just going to the “Create” section in the navbar and clicking “Start writing”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later on– concentrate on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a clean and easy to use interface for composing.
As soon as you begin creating, you can optimize headings, include web links, and style your content just how you like.
beehiiv provides you lots of alternatives for various types of material like video clips, links, images, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally regularly launching item feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a lot a lot more material features relying on when you’re reading this.
Enhancing your setups and templates
Once you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to create your e-mail template and adjust some settings.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a description, add your logo design, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to first time subscribers, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can edit history colors, borders, spacing, typefaces, picture styles, and a lot more. I’m not going to experience ever before single thing you can enhance with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a whole lot. Just check out the platform completely free and see it for yourself!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of fantastic features that make it a terrific publishing platform for any type of e-newsletter creator.
Right here are a few of the crucial features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv For SaaS Founders
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it very very easy to write and send e-mails. I pointed out over a few of things you can do with your setups and e-mail layout so I’ll spare you some added analysis.
The thing to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely among the far better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you want) live on a site. Think of it as a site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous problems of your newsletter, and an area where people can sign up for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s practically comparable to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, provide you a site. Nevertheless, the free plan places your website on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a custom domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is essential. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can subscribe to your newsletter directly from your beehiiv website or with embed forms.
If you already have a website, and want people to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing website, you’ll have to make use of an embed form. This is what I utilize on this internet site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have three different options– a full width, a dealt with size, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim embed.
You can locate the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s also an option for acknowledgment monitoring if you intend to forward UTM specifications for tracking purposes– pretty neat.
Nonetheless, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it came to subscribe features. I make certain the team is servicing updates for these, but I mentioned a couple of problems 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 producing a referral program.
You can encourage existing subscribers on your listing to ahead your emails to good friends and associates and if they get other individuals to sign up for your list, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually seem several e-newsletter companies provide benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your e-newsletter– offering you an additional opportunity for growing your email listing.
Nevertheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a much more superior plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later in this article.
Premium registrations
They say all you need to make a living online is 1,000 true followers. Subscription revenue is definitely a beast of its very own. If you’re trying to find a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” problems of your newsletter that are just sent to paying clients. This can be very rewarding depending on what your newsletter has to offer. For example, Trends.co is a popular costs e-newsletter that generates millions in revenue a year simply by having pay-only newsletter material.
Data analytics
One of things I love concerning beehiiv is how tidy and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer matter.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging right into your control panel and seeing that client matter increase is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv provides four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan gives you every little thing you need to get started and grow your e-newsletter (up to 2,500 clients).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, customized domain, polls, and accessibility to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of top priority assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are rather generous in my point of view.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 monthly. In contrast to some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the same amount– making beehiiv an excellent Kit choice for numerous individuals.
I’m not exactly sure how the system business economics deal with this, yet beehiiv is certainly more affordable (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Of course, with every system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Below are some of the pros and cons I have actually personally experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of choice:
- Easy to establish and begin sending e-newsletters free of cost
- Tidy and modern-day customer analytics
- Lots of flexibility with e-mail layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv For SaaS Founders
- Site hosting
- Create premium options to monetize
- Surveys
To be sincere, I haven’t seen one more newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package every one of these features with each other so well.
Yet certainly, I do not wish to be biased so I’m going to state some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the disadvantages I’ve found while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom typefaces
I utilize Webflow as my site building platform of selection (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in excessive detail why I like Webflow a lot yet you can read my Webflow review if you wish to find out more.
Today, there truly is no other means I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow site apart from making use of an iframe embed. I personally don’t like utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they tend to reduce my internet site a bit. Each time a web page on my website (with a beehiiv embed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last point to pack on the web page. It’s extremely visible when you’re on a slow net link. Yet I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can’t use a normal Webflow type (which I love making use of). There are ways around this by using a tool like Zapier yet that would certainly simply add extra expenses that I don’t require. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage yet I thought I would mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much surpass the cons here. I’m also hopeful that Webflow will eventually develop a far better means to integrate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
In general, beehiiv is a wonderful service for anyone looking to study the globe of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter platform much surpasses several that are presently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you actually have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are also rather inexpensive for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your listing is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands each month.
Anyways, I don’t create testimonial articles commonly. I just do when I in fact make use of the tool myself and would certainly advise it to a close friend.
I wish you found some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent system for you.