I read among my preferred email e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked it and instantly started tearing up. Beehiiv Impressions…
Being a full-time creator is difficult. I’m typically obtaining pitched various devices and services that don’t seem to be worth my time.
I guess I was emotional because I invested the last six months checking out various e-mail and e-newsletter platforms to aid develop my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some fantastic choices for composing e-newsletters. Yet I couldn’t find one that made me provide a definite “yes”.
The concern with lots of existing e-newsletter systems is that they do not feel creator-centered. I desire an e-newsletter platform that lets me fully personalize my e-newsletter designs, makes it extremely simple to compose and send out emails, and provides me tools that assist me evaluate metrics and obtain more subscribers.
I assume I’ve lastly located the ideal device.
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 platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it easy to design, write, send out, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by former employees at the well-known e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to aid designers launch and monetize their very own e-newsletter– taking lots of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this article, I’m going to clarify my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) concerning it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to lastly choose it as my newsletter system of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern newsletter system for fairly a long time now. I have actually put things off hard when it came to ultimately introducing my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a few various other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up utilizing beehiiv.
I make certain many newsletter designers look up to preferred e-newsletters with numerous clients– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I appreciated a lot. They have excellent web content, tons of clients, and a creative referral program that permits them to get back at a lot more clients.
So, I took place a hunt to find out exactly how these big e-newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get even more subscribers? How do they create an e-newsletter layout that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to respond to every one of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn the people that constructed this tool truly recognize e-newsletter production and development.” I questioned who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the very first marketing and development employees at Morning Brew– my mind exploded.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s focused on maker growth.
Due to the fact that, any type of creator understands, you need development to be able to earn a living off of an e-newsletter. And finding the appropriate newsletter pile (that scales) typically indicates utilizing multiple different tools to help achieve one objective– one platform for your e-newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one platform to set up references. It can obtain costly.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was free to start utilizing, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You may be asking, “isn’t there already a system for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a terrific platform utilized by countless independent authors. With Substack you get your very own website and use the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending e-mails (while creating an archive of previous concerns).
What collections beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, more style flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to get words out.
beehiiv also provides you a website comparable to Substack. However, if you have your own website already, you can also make use of beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I use) to send your web site subscribers directly to your beehiiv email checklist. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Revue to enable individuals to register for your e-newsletter straight from Twitter.
This provides you the adaptability to leverage different marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out into the globe, making beehiiv a terrific Substack option.
How to start utilizing beehiiv email marketing software.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material developer that desires a system that permits them to send out custom newsletters with or without requiring to have a site.
One of the most effective e-newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those devices.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or content designer, you ought to seriously thinking about trying beehiiv. It’s entirely cost-free to get started and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 clients on your checklist.
If you in fact end up needing to pay for beehiiv it’s possibly an excellent indicator that individuals like reviewing your things.
Enroll in a free plan
The first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will certainly enable you to have up to 2,500 customers, provide you accessibility to internet site hosting, a newsletter CMS, development customization, analytics, outside embed kinds, and extra. It’s a really charitable offering for those simply starting (or for those trying to find a new platform to migrate to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what various other platforms have you made use of?”, “do you have any paying subscribers?”, and extra.
You’ll then create a name and link for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site link might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding procedure, you’ll likewise choose your brand colors and design to ensure your e-newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
When you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see all of your analytics and setups.
You will certainly have detailed details on how many sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Begin writing”, “Posts”, “Audience”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Design” and” Analyze”. And at the very lower you’ll see the setups alternative.
Dashboard is your main nerve center (screenshot over), Begin composing is where you produce and release newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous e-newsletter versions, Audience is where you can see who your clients are (and damage them down into sections), Expand is where you have accessibility 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 design your newsletter landing page and post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle all of your admin things.
Creating your e-newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start composing, with little to no rubbing. If you’re simply starting, and have an idea you wish to discuss, I recommend just going to the “Create” area in the navbar and clicking “Begin creating”.
You can tweak your template and styling later– focus on the web content first.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a tidy and user-friendly user interface for writing.
Once you start writing, you can enhance headings, include web links, and design your web content how you like.
beehiiv provides you lots of alternatives for various types of web content like videos, web links, photos, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally constantly launching item feature and updates so I make certain there will certainly be a lot much more content features depending upon when you’re reading this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
Once you have a newsletter that prepares to send, it’s time to design your e-mail template and readjust some settings.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, give it a summary, add your logo, turn on or off a welcome email to first time clients, and extra.
Next off, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your style.
You can modify background shades, boundaries, spacing, typefaces, photo formats, and a lot more. I’m not mosting likely to undergo ever solitary thing you can enhance with your email template because it’s a great deal. Just experiment with the system absolutely free and see it on your own!
Important beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of amazing features that make it an excellent posting platform for any newsletter designer.
Here are a few of the vital features you can discover with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv Impressions
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing system. It makes it super simple to create and send e-mails. I pointed out above some of things you can do with your settings and e-mail style so I’ll spare you some extra analysis.
The important things to keep in mind with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern and minimalistic feeling. It’s absolutely one of the far better email editors I have actually ever before written in.
Site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you desire) survive a site. Think of it as a site for your newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous concerns of your newsletter, and an area where people can subscribe to your newsletter.
If you recognize with Substack, it’s virtually comparable to that.
All plans, consisting of the free one, give you a site. Nevertheless, the free plan places your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a customized domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining subscribers is essential. Nevertheless, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can subscribe to your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv web site or via embed kinds.
If you already have an internet site, and desire individuals to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to utilize an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this web site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have three different options– a complete width, a dealt with width, and a slim embed. I directly make use of the slim embed.
You can locate the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your settings.
There’s additionally an option for acknowledgment monitoring if you want to onward UTM parameters for tracking functions– rather neat.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I make certain the group is servicing updates for these, yet I discussed a couple of problems I had in the benefits and drawbacks area below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things regarding 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 subscribers on your checklist to onward your e-mails to friends and colleagues and if they obtain other individuals to sign up for your checklist, you can reward them. These rewards can be in whatever form you want. I have actually seem several e-newsletter companies give benefits in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your clients into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– providing you another opportunity for growing your e-mail list.
Nevertheless, to obtain accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a more premium plan. I’ll go over all the plans later in this write-up.
Premium memberships
They say all you require to make a living online is 1,000 true fans. Subscription profits is absolutely 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 create “costs” issues of your newsletter that are only sent to paying customers. This can be really financially rewarding relying on what your newsletter needs to provide. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent costs newsletter that produces millions in income a year merely by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Data analytics
Among the important things I love about beehiiv is exactly how tidy and simple the analytics are. You get real-time day on how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and subscriber count.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye sight on just how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that client count go up is most definitely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out listed below.
The (cost-free) Launch plan gives you everything you require to get started and grow your e-newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) provides you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, custom domain, polls, and accessibility to premium subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) provides you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of concern support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are quite charitable in my viewpoint.
For instance, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 each month. As opposed to some competitors, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly bill $679 per month for the exact same quantity– making beehiiv a fantastic Kit alternative for several users.
I’m uncertain how the system economics work with this, yet beehiiv is absolutely more affordable (right now) than what it can be.
beehiiv advantages and disadvantages
Obviously, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Right here are a few of the pros and cons I’ve personally experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of choice:
- Easy to establish and begin sending out newsletters completely free
- Tidy and modern client analytics
- Great deals of versatility with e-mail layouts.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Impressions
- Web site hosting
- Produce costs choices to monetize
- Polls
To be truthful, I have not seen an additional newsletter system that has had the ability to package all of these features together so well.
Yet of course, I do not want to be biased so I’m going to discuss some disadvantages.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the cons I have actually discovered while utilizing beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom-made fonts
I utilize Webflow as my internet site structure platform of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not going to enter excessive detail why I like Webflow so much but you can read my Webflow evaluation if you would love to find out more.
Now, there really is no other way I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow website besides utilizing an iframe embed. I personally do not such as utilizing iframe’s due to the fact that they tend to slow down my site a bit. Each time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up embed is the last thing to load on the page. It’s extremely recognizable when you get on a slow-moving web link. Yet I can get around that.
The primary complaint I have is that I can’t make use of a normal Webflow type (which I love using). There are methods around this by utilizing a tool like Zapier yet that would certainly just include extra expenses that I do not need. To be truthful, this is even more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv con but I thought I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far exceed the disadvantages here. I’m additionally confident that Webflow will ultimately produce a better method to integrate with beehiiv.
Verdict
Overall, beehiiv is an excellent option for anyone aiming to dive into the globe of email marketing and e-newsletters.
The functionality of this e-newsletter system much surpasses lots of that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you actually have nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise rather low-cost wherefore they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your list is unheard of. If you were to have an e-newsletter with 100k customers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t create testimonial messages usually. I just do when I in fact utilize the tool myself and would advise it to a close friend.
I hope you discovered some clearness on whether beehiiv is a great system for you.