I read one of my preferred 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 on it and instantaneously began tearing up. Beehiiv Home Page…
Being a full-time designer is difficult. I’m often getting pitched different tools and solutions that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological since I invested the last 6 months trying various email and newsletter systems to help build my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some wonderful options for composing newsletters. But I could not discover one that made me offer a definite “yes”.
The problem with lots of existing newsletter platforms is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter platform that lets me totally tailor my e-newsletter layouts, makes it very simple to compose and send emails, and gives me tools that help me examine metrics and obtain even more customers.
I think I’ve lastly located the best device.
But, I understand beehiiv may not be for every person. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually appropriate for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it simple to design, create, send, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Produced by former employees at the well-known newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist creators launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this write-up, I’m mosting likely to describe my individual experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to finally select it as my newsletter system of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A couple of months back, I accidentally came across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a modern-day newsletter system for fairly a long time now. I’ve procrastinated hard when it pertained to lastly releasing my e-newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie platforms. After that, Substack. And ultimately, I wound up using beehiiv.
I make sure several newsletter makers respect popular newsletters with millions of clients– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I admired a great deal. They have terrific material, lots of clients, and a smart referral program that permits them to get even extra clients.
So, I went on a hunt to figure out how these large newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain even more subscribers? How do they develop a newsletter design that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to answer every one of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that constructed this device truly understand newsletter production and growth.” I questioned who these designers of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were a few of the initial marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my mind took off.
I recognized this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s focused on creator development.
Since, any kind of designer recognizes, you require development to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And locating the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that scales) frequently implies utilizing numerous various tools to assist accomplish one goal– one platform for your newsletter, one system to generate income from, and one platform to establish referrals. It can obtain expensive.
So when I discovered beehiiv did all of these things in one system, and it was cost-free to start utilizing, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, of course there is. Substack is a terrific system made use of by hundreds of independent writers. With Substack you obtain your very own website and use the platform as your all-in-one remedy for sending out emails (while producing an archive of previous issues).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s commitment to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, even more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing subscribers to obtain words out.
beehiiv also offers you an internet site similar to Substack. Yet, if you have your very own site already, you can also make use of beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your web site customers right to your beehiiv email checklist. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to enable people to sign up for your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This offers you the adaptability to leverage different marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out right into the globe, making beehiiv a great Substack choice.
Just how to begin using beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material developer that wants a system that enables them to send out 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 aims at offering you those devices.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, start-up, or material creator, you ought to seriously considering experimenting with beehiiv. It’s absolutely free to get started and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your list.
If you actually wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a great indicator that individuals enjoy reviewing your things.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to register for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will allow you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, give you access to site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, breakthrough modification, analytics, exterior embed forms, and extra. It’s a really generous offering for those simply beginning (or for those seeking a brand-new system to move to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your very first newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying customers?”, and extra.
You’ll then produce a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will certainly survive on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Baking Cakes,” your site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll likewise pick your brand colors and design to make sure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
When you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have described info on the amount of sign-ups you’re getting and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Start writing”, “Blog posts”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Layout” and” Examine”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the settings choice.
Dashboard is your main control center (screenshot above), Start composing is where you create and release newsletters, Messages is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can watch who your customers are (and break them down 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 e-newsletter with advertisements, Design is where you create your newsletter landing page and article template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle all of your admin stuff.
Creating your newsletter
beehiiv makes it simple to begin writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting, and have an idea you intend to cover, I advise simply mosting likely to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking on “Start writing”.
You can modify your template and designing later on– concentrate on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor supplies a tidy and easy to use interface for composing.
As soon as you start composing, you can maximize headings, include links, and design your web content exactly how you like.
beehiiv provides you tons of choices for different types of content like video clips, links, photos, and extra.
The team at beehiiv is likewise continuously releasing product feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a great deal more content features relying on when you’re reading this.
Optimizing your setups and templates
As soon as you have an e-newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to create your e-mail template and change some settings.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your newsletter, offer it a description, include your logo, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time customers, and much more.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify history shades, boundaries, spacing, font styles, photo formats, and extra. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever before single point you can enhance with your e-mail template since it’s a great deal. Just check out the system absolutely free and see it for yourself!
Necessary beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of impressive features that make it an excellent posting platform for any kind of e-newsletter maker.
Below are several of the vital features you can find with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv Home Page
At its core, beehiiv is a newsletter posting platform. It makes it extremely very easy to write and send e-mails. I pointed out over some of the important things you can do with your setups and email style so I’ll save you some added reading.
The important things to note with beehiiv’s e-newsletter builder is that it has a truly contemporary and minimalistic feel. It’s certainly one of the better e-mail editors I’ve ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you produce a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a web site. Think of it as a web site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous issues of your newsletter, and a location where people can register for your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, including the totally free one, provide you an internet site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a custom domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is very important. After all, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can sign up for your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv internet site or via embed types.
If you already have an internet site, and want people to register for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to make use of an embed kind. This is what I utilize 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 3 different choices– a complete size, a taken care of size, and a slim embed. I personally utilize the slim installed.
You can find the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s likewise an alternative for attribution monitoring if you want to onward UTM parameters for tracking functions– quite cool.
However, there are a few features I want beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I make certain the team is servicing updates for these, but I stated a couple of problems I had in the advantages and disadvantages area listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter platform, is a remedy for producing a referral program.
You can encourage existing customers on your listing to ahead your emails to good friends and colleagues and if they get other individuals to register for your list, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever form you desire. I have actually appear many e-newsletter firms provide benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously turn your subscribers into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– offering you another method for growing your e-mail listing.
However, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a more exceptional plan. I’ll go over all the plans later on in this write-up.
Costs memberships
They state all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Registration profits is certainly a monster of its own. If you’re trying to find a platform to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “premium” concerns of your e-newsletter that are only sent to paying customers. This can be very financially rewarding depending on what your e-newsletter has to supply. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent costs newsletter that generates millions in income a year just by having pay-only newsletter material.
Data analytics
One of the things I love concerning beehiiv is how clean and basic the analytics are. You obtain real-time day on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber matter.
You get access to all the metrics you require to get a bird-eye view on just how your newsletter is really doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that customer matter increase is certainly a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses four different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (free) Launch plan gives you whatever you need to get started and grow your e-newsletter (up to 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, custom-made domain name, polls, and accessibility to premium registrations. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you everything in the Grow plan with addition of concern assistance and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are fairly generous in my viewpoint.
For instance, if you have 100,000 customers you will certainly pay around $329 per month. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 each month for the same quantity– making beehiiv a wonderful Kit alternative for many users.
I’m uncertain how the unit business economics service this, but beehiiv is most definitely more affordable (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Obviously, with every platform, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages I’ve personally experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are some of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of selection:
- Easy to establish and start sending out newsletters free of charge
- Clean and modern client analytics
- Great deals of flexibility with email layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Home Page
- Web site hosting
- Develop premium alternatives to monetize
- Surveys
To be honest, I haven’t seen another e-newsletter system that has been able to package all of these features with each other so well.
However obviously, I don’t wish to be biased so I’m mosting likely to state some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are some of the cons I’ve located while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including personalized fonts
I use Webflow as my internet site building system of choice (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to go in way too much information why I like Webflow a lot however you can review my Webflow testimonial if you wish to discover more.
Now, there really is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site other than making use of an iframe embed. I directly do not like utilizing iframe’s since they have a tendency to decrease my website a little bit. Every time a page on my website (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up installed is the last thing to load on the web page. It’s extremely obvious when you get on a slow web connection. But I can get around that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can’t make use of a routine Webflow type (which I love using). There are means around this by utilizing a device like Zapier but that would certainly just add extra expenses that I don’t need. To be truthful, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage however I believed I would mention it.
Besides that, I still think the pros far surpass the disadvantages below. I’m also confident that Webflow will eventually produce a far better method to integrate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
On the whole, beehiiv is an excellent solution for anybody wanting to study the world of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The capability of this newsletter platform much exceeds several that are presently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise rather cheap of what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your listing is unprecedented. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t create evaluation messages typically. I just do when I in fact use the tool myself and would certainly suggest it to a buddy.
I wish you found some quality on whether or not beehiiv is a great platform for you.