I was reading one of my preferred email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked on it and instantly began destroying. Beehiiv Greg Isenberg…
Being a full-time creator is difficult. I’m often obtaining pitched different tools and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I presume I was emotional because I invested the last six months experimenting with different email and newsletter systems to aid build my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some terrific alternatives for creating e-newsletters. But I couldn’t locate one that made me give a certain “yes”.
The problem with numerous existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I want an e-newsletter system that lets me completely personalize my newsletter designs, makes it incredibly simple to write and send e-mails, and offers me devices that help me analyze metrics and get more clients.
I think I’ve finally discovered the best tool.
Yet, I recognize beehiiv might not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter platform that makes it easy to layout, compose, send out, advertise, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by previous employees at the well-known e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to aid designers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M clients.
In this post, I’m going to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, the important things I love (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to lastly choose it as my e-newsletter platform of option.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I’ve watched for a modern-day newsletter system for rather some time now. I have actually hesitated hard when it came to ultimately introducing my e-newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up utilizing beehiiv.
I make certain several newsletter creators appreciate prominent e-newsletters with countless clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I appreciated a great deal. They have fantastic web content, lots of clients, and a brilliant referral program that enables them to get back at extra clients.
So, I went on a hunt to figure out how these huge e-newsletters established their logistics. What system do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they get even more subscribers? How do they produce an e-newsletter style that stays on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it appeared to respond to all of my concerns. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that constructed this tool truly recognize e-newsletter creation and growth.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the very first marketing and development staff members at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I understood this was going to be a various newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on maker development.
Due to the fact that, any kind of designer understands, you require growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And locating the right e-newsletter stack (that ranges) typically means making use of multiple various devices to aid accomplish one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one system to establish referrals. It can obtain pricey.
So when I learnt beehiiv did every one of these things in one system, and it was totally free 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 system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is an excellent system made use of by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your own internet site and make use of the system as your all-in-one service for sending e-mails (while developing an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of much better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing clients to obtain the word out.
beehiiv likewise provides you a web site similar to Substack. But, if you have your own website currently, you can additionally utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your website customers right to your beehiiv email list. On the very same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit people to sign up for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the adaptability to take advantage of various marketing channels to get your e-newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a great Substack choice.
How to start utilizing beehiiv email marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material creator that wants a platform that allows them to send out customized newsletters with or without requiring to have a website.
The most effective e-newsletters have the right devices to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv focuses on giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or material maker, you must seriously taking into consideration checking out beehiiv. It’s completely free to start and you only 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 sign that people enjoy reviewing your stuff.
Enroll in a free plan
The first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, offer you access to internet site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, advance personalization, analytics, external embed types, and much more. It’s a really generous offering for those simply starting out (or for those searching for a new platform to move to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask things like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying clients?”, and extra.
You’ll after that develop a name and link for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your site link may be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally pick your brand colors and design to make certain your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your dashboard
As soon as you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will have outlined info on how many sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Begin writing”, “Blog posts”, “Audience”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Style” and” Evaluate”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the settings option.
Dashboard is your main control center (screenshot over), Start writing is where you create and release e-newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter editions, Audience is where you can watch who your clients are (and damage them down right into segments), Expand is where you have access 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 newsletter with ads, Design is where you create your e-newsletter landing page and message template, Analyze 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 newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to begin creating, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply starting, and have an idea you wish to write about, I suggest just going to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking “Beginning creating”.
You can tweak your template and designing later– concentrate on the web content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor supplies a clean and user-friendly user interface for creating.
Once you start composing, you can maximize headings, include links, and design your web content just how you like.
beehiiv provides you lots of choices for various sorts of content like videos, links, pictures, and a lot more.
The group at beehiiv is also regularly launching item feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a great deal much more material features relying on when you’re reading this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
Once you have a newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to create your email template and adjust some settings.
Below, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a summary, include your logo, switch on or off a welcome email to first time customers, and extra.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify history shades, boundaries, spacing, font styles, image styles, and much more. I’m not going to undergo ever single thing you can enhance with your email template since it’s a great deal. Just try the system free of cost and see it on your own!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of fantastic features that make it a wonderful publishing system for any kind of e-newsletter designer.
Here are some of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv Greg Isenberg
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it very easy to create and send e-mails. I pointed out over several of the things you can do with your setups and email design so I’ll save you some additional analysis.
The important things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feel. It’s certainly among the much better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Site hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a website. Think of it as a site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and an area where individuals can register for your e-newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s virtually comparable to that.
All plans, including the free one, offer you an internet site. Nevertheless, the free plan areas your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to include a custom-made domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is necessary. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can register for your newsletter right from your beehiiv site or via embed types.
If you already have a site, and want people to subscribe to your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed kind. This is what I utilize on this internet site (you can see the sign-up embed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 various alternatives– a complete width, a repaired size, and a slim installed. I personally use the slim installed.
You can discover the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise an alternative for acknowledgment tracking if you wish to ahead UTM specifications for tracking purposes– pretty neat.
However, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I make certain the group is servicing updates for these, yet I stated a few concerns I had in the pros and cons area below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things concerning beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is an option for creating a referral program.
You can encourage existing subscribers on your listing to ahead your e-mails to buddies and colleagues and if they get other people to sign up for your listing, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever form you want. I have actually appear several e-newsletter business provide benefits in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your customers into a word of mouth growth engine for your e-newsletter– providing you another avenue for expanding your email list.
Nevertheless, to obtain access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a much more premium plan. I’ll review all the plans later on in this article.
Costs memberships
They claim all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 true fans. Registration income is most definitely a beast of its very own. If you’re searching for a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” problems of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying clients. This can be extremely financially rewarding depending on what your newsletter needs to supply. For instance, Trends.co is a prominent costs e-newsletter that produces millions in earnings a year simply by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Data analytics
One of the things I love about beehiiv is exactly how tidy and basic the analytics are. You get real-time date on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer count.
You obtain access to all the metrics you need to obtain a bird-eye view on exactly how your newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that customer matter go up is definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv supplies four various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you everything you require to start and expand your e-newsletter (approximately 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you whatever in the Launch plan with the enhancement the ad network, referral program, custom domain, polls, and accessibility to costs memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you every little thing in the Grow plan with addition of concern support and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather generous in my point of view.
For instance, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. As opposed to some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 per month for the same quantity– making beehiiv a great Kit option for several users.
I’m not sure how the system economics work on this, but beehiiv is absolutely cheaper (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Naturally, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are several of the pros and cons I have actually personally experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of selection:
- Easy to set up and begin sending e-newsletters free of cost
- Clean and modern-day subscriber analytics
- Lots of adaptability with e-mail styles.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Greg Isenberg
- Web site hosting
- Create premium options to monetize
- Surveys
To be sincere, I have not seen an additional newsletter system that has actually been able to package all of these features together so well.
However naturally, I don’t wish to be biased so I’m going to state some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are some of the cons I have actually located while using beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom typefaces
I make use of Webflow as my site structure system of selection (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a very long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter way too much information why I love Webflow a lot yet you can read my Webflow testimonial if you want to discover more.
Now, there actually is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site apart from making use of an iframe embed. I directly don’t such as using iframe’s due to the fact that they have a tendency to slow down my website a bit. Each time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) tons, the sign-up installed is the last point to fill on the page. It’s extremely noticeable when you’re on a slow-moving internet connection. But I can get around that.
The main complaint I have is that I can not utilize a routine Webflow form (which I love making use of). There are methods around this by using a tool like Zapier yet that would simply add additional expenses that I don’t need. To be truthful, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con but I believed I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far exceed the disadvantages here. I’m also confident that Webflow will eventually develop a better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
In general, beehiiv is an excellent service for any person seeking to dive into the globe of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter platform much surpasses many that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you truly have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally fairly cheap of what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist is unusual. 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 each month.
Anyways, I do not create testimonial posts often. I just do when I actually utilize the tool myself and would certainly advise it to a friend.
I wish you discovered some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is a good system for you.