I was reading one of my preferred email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked on it and immediately started destroying. Beehiiv Getting Started…
Being a full time maker is tough. I’m often getting pitched various tools and services that do not seem to be worth my time.
I presume I was psychological since I invested the last 6 months trying various email and e-newsletter platforms to help build my e-newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some wonderful alternatives for writing e-newsletters. But I couldn’t discover one that made me offer a precise “yes”.
The issue with many existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter platform that lets me completely customize my e-newsletter styles, makes it super easy to write and send out e-mails, and gives me tools that help me evaluate metrics and get more clients.
I think I have actually finally discovered the best tool.
But, I understand beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s really right for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it easy to style, write, send, promote, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Developed by previous employees at the renowned e-newsletter business Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help makers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking great deals of development principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this post, I’m going to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I enjoy (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly opt for it as my newsletter platform of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I mistakenly came across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve watched for a modern-day e-newsletter system for rather some time now. I have actually postponed hard when it concerned lastly releasing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a couple of other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up using beehiiv.
I’m sure numerous newsletter makers respect prominent newsletters with numerous customers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I admired a lot. They have excellent material, lots of customers, and a smart referral program that enables them to get back at much more subscribers.
So, I took place a hunt to determine exactly how these huge newsletters established their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get even more customers? How do they create a newsletter style that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it appeared to answer all of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn the people that constructed this tool actually understand e-newsletter creation and growth.” I questioned who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the first marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my mind took off.
I understood this was going to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s focused on creator growth.
Due to the fact that, any kind of maker recognizes, you need growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And locating the ideal e-newsletter stack (that ranges) usually indicates utilizing numerous different tools to assist attain one objective– one system for your newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one platform to set up references. It can obtain costly.
So when I found out beehiiv did every one of these things in one platform, and it was complimentary to start utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is a terrific system used by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your own site and make use of the system as your all-in-one service for sending e-mails (while creating an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to development. beehiiv enables you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing customers to obtain words out.
beehiiv additionally offers you an internet site comparable to Substack. However, if you have your very own site already, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I utilize) to send your web site customers straight to your beehiiv email checklist. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to allow people to sign up for your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This offers you the adaptability to take advantage of different marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a fantastic Substack alternative.
Just how to start using beehiiv email marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material designer that desires a platform that allows them to send custom e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
One of the most successful newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media company, startup, or web content designer, you should seriously taking into consideration trying out beehiiv. It’s completely free to get going and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your listing.
If you actually end up needing to spend for beehiiv it’s probably an excellent sign that people love reading your stuff.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Start trial” switch on beehiiv’s internet site.
The free plan will certainly permit you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, give you accessibility to web site hosting, a newsletter CMS, advance modification, analytics, exterior embed forms, and extra. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those simply starting (or for those seeking a new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll undergo an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you used?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and a lot more.
You’ll after that develop a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll likewise pick your brand colors and design to see to it your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
As soon as you reach your major dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have detailed details on how many sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see choices for “Beginning writing”, “Messages”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Generate income from”, “Design” and” Analyze”. And at the very lower you’ll see the settings option.
Control panel is your primary control center (screenshot above), Beginning composing is where you produce and publish e-newsletters, Messages is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can view 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 create your newsletter landing page and article template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can handle all of your admin things.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to start composing, with little to no friction. If you’re just beginning, and have an idea you wish to write about, I suggest just going to the “Write” area in the navbar and clicking on “Start writing”.
You can modify your template and designing later– focus on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a tidy and user-friendly user interface for composing.
When you begin composing, you can optimize headings, add links, and style your web content just how you like.
beehiiv offers you lots of alternatives for different kinds of content like videos, web links, pictures, and more.
The group at beehiiv is also continuously launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a whole lot more material features relying on when you read this.
Optimizing your setups and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to make your email template and change some settings.
Below, you can update the name of your newsletter, provide it a description, add your logo design, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time customers, and extra.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify history shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, picture layouts, and more. I’m not going to experience ever before solitary thing you can enhance with your e-mail template due to the fact that it’s a whole lot. Just try the system free of cost and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of impressive features that make it an excellent posting platform for any e-newsletter maker.
Right here are several of the essential features you can discover with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv Getting Started
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing system. It makes it super simple to create and send emails. I mentioned over several of the things you can do with your settings and e-mail layout so I’ll save you some extra analysis.
The important things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s absolutely among the much better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, all of your e-newsletters (if you desire) survive an internet site. Think about it as a website 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 sign up for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s basically similar to that.
All plans, consisting of the complimentary one, offer you an internet site. However, the free plan places your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a custom-made domain to eliminate all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is essential. Nevertheless, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can subscribe to your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv web site or via embed forms.
If you currently have a website, and desire individuals to sign up for your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to use an embed form. This is what I use on this web site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right hand column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have three different options– a full size, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I personally use the slim embed.
You can find 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 forward UTM specifications for tracking objectives– rather neat.
Nonetheless, there are a few features I desire beehiiv had when it involved subscribe features. I make certain the team is working with updates for these, but I discussed a few problems I had in the pros and cons area below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter platform, is a solution for developing a referral program.
You can encourage existing customers on your checklist to ahead your e-mails to friends and coworkers and if they get other people to register for your listing, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever type you want. I have actually seem several newsletter firms offer incentives in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your subscribers right into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– giving you an additional method for expanding your e-mail listing.
Nevertheless, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to a much more exceptional plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later in this post.
Premium subscriptions
They claim all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 real followers. Registration earnings is certainly a beast of its own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” issues of your newsletter that are only sent to paying customers. This can be very lucrative depending on what your e-newsletter has to offer. For example, Trends.co is a prominent premium newsletter that generates millions in income a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Data analytics
Among the things I like concerning beehiiv is just how clean and simple the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye view on exactly how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that client count go up is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan offers you every little thing you need to get started and grow your e-newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, personalized domain, polls, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) offers you everything in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority assistance and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly generous in my viewpoint.
As an example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 each month. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would bill $679 per month for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a terrific Kit alternative for numerous customers.
I’m unsure exactly how the unit business economics deal with this, yet beehiiv is absolutely cheaper (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Of course, with every platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Here are several of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve personally experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your newsletter system of selection:
- Easy to set up and start sending out e-newsletters free of charge
- Tidy and modern-day client analytics
- Lots of flexibility with email styles.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Getting Started
- Site hosting
- Create costs alternatives to generate income from
- Surveys
To be straightforward, I haven’t seen an additional e-newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package every one of these features with each other so well.
But of course, I don’t intend to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to discuss some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are some of the disadvantages I’ve discovered while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom fonts
I make use of Webflow as my site building system of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in excessive information why I love Webflow so much but you can review my Webflow testimonial if you want to find out more.
Now, there actually is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site aside from making use of an iframe embed. I directly don’t like using iframe’s due to the fact that they tend to reduce my site a bit. Whenever a web page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last thing to load on the web page. It’s extremely recognizable when you’re on a sluggish web connection. But I can navigate that.
The main complaint I have is that I can’t use a regular Webflow kind (which I love utilizing). There are means around this by using a device like Zapier however that would just include added expenses that I don’t need. To be truthful, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con yet I assumed I would mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far outweigh the disadvantages here. I’m additionally confident that Webflow will eventually produce a much better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Generally, beehiiv is a fantastic service for anyone aiming to study the globe of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system much outweighs lots of that are presently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you actually have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally fairly economical of what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your list is unheard of. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k clients, and all of these features beehiiv has, it can cost you well right into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t compose review messages often. I only do when I really utilize the device myself and would recommend it to a buddy.
I hope you discovered some clarity on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.