I was reading one of my favorite e-mail e-newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo for the very first time. I clicked on it and quickly started tearing up. Beehiiv iOS App…
Being a full time developer is tough. I’m frequently obtaining pitched various tools and solutions that do not appear to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological due to the fact that I invested the last 6 months experimenting with various email and e-newsletter platforms to aid develop my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some great alternatives for creating newsletters. But I couldn’t locate one that made me give a definite “yes”.
The concern with numerous existing e-newsletter platforms is that they don’t really feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter platform that lets me totally personalize my newsletter layouts, makes it extremely simple to write and send emails, and offers me tools that aid me assess metrics and get more clients.
I believe I’ve finally located the ideal tool.
However, I understand beehiiv might not be for every person. 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, monetize, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by previous workers at the well-known newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist developers launch and monetize their own e-newsletter– taking great deals of development concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to clarify my individual experience with beehiiv, the important things I like (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I determined to lastly opt for it as my e-newsletter system of selection.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months earlier, I unintentionally stumbled across beehiiv. The amusing tale is that I’ve watched for a modern-day e-newsletter system for rather a long time now. I have actually hesitated hard when it involved ultimately releasing my e-newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a couple of various other indie systems. Then, Substack. And finally, I wound up making use of beehiiv.
I make sure numerous newsletter designers admire popular newsletters with countless customers– I understand I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I appreciated a lot. They have great web content, lots of subscribers, and a smart referral program that allows them to get back at a lot more subscribers.
So, I went on a hunt to identify exactly how these big e-newsletters set up their logistics. What system do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their e-newsletters? How do they obtain more subscribers? How do they produce an e-newsletter layout that remains on-brand?
When I found beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to address all of my inquiries. I thought to myself, “damn individuals that developed this device really comprehend newsletter creation and growth.” I questioned who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the very first marketing and development workers at Morning Brew– my brain exploded.
I knew this was going to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s focused on creator development.
Due to the fact that, any type of designer recognizes, you need development to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the ideal e-newsletter stack (that ranges) usually means making use of numerous different devices to assist achieve one objective– one system for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to establish references. It can get costly.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these points in one system, and it was complimentary to start making use of, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, indeed there is. Substack is an excellent platform used by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your very own site and make use of the system as your all-in-one solution for sending emails (while creating an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv permits you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to motivate your existing clients to obtain words out.
beehiiv additionally offers you a web site similar to Substack. But, if you have your very own site currently, you can also utilize beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I make use of) to send your site clients right to your beehiiv email checklist. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Performance to allow individuals to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the flexibility to utilize different marketing networks to get your e-newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack option.
Just how to start making use of beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean material designer that wants a platform that allows them to send out custom-made e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a website.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent author, media firm, startup, or content designer, you should seriously considering checking out beehiiv. It’s completely cost-free to get going and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your checklist.
If you really wind up having to spend for beehiiv it’s most likely a great indicator that individuals enjoy reviewing your stuff.
Enroll in a free plan
The initial step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking the “Begin trial” switch on beehiiv’s website.
The free plan will certainly allow you to have up to 2,500 subscribers, offer you accessibility to internet site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, development customization, analytics, outside embed forms, and a lot more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those simply starting out (or for those seeking a new system to move to).
Onboarding
After producing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask points like, “is this your initial e-newsletter?”, “what various other systems have you utilized?”, “do you have any paying customers?”, and much more.
You’ll after that produce a name and link for your newsletter’s website. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly reside on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally select your brand name design and colors to make certain your newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your control panel
When you reach your primary control panel, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will have detailed information on how many sign-ups you’re getting and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see options for “Beginning writing”, “Blog posts”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Generate income from”, “Design” and” Assess”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the setups alternative.
Dashboard is your primary control center (screenshot above), Start composing is where you produce and release e-newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter versions, Audience is where you can view who your customers are (and damage them down right into sectors), 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 ads, Design is where you make your newsletter landing page and post template, Analyze is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can handle every one of your admin things.
Writing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting out, and have a concept you wish to cover, I suggest just going to the “Write” section in the navbar and clicking on “Begin creating”.
You can modify your template and styling later– concentrate on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor uses a tidy and straightforward interface for composing.
Once you start composing, you can enhance headings, include web links, and style your material just how you like.
beehiiv offers you lots of alternatives for different kinds of web content like videos, web links, pictures, and a lot more.
The team at beehiiv is additionally constantly launching product feature and updates so I make sure there will certainly be a lot extra content features depending upon when you read this.
Optimizing your settings and templates
When you have an e-newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to make your email template and adjust some settings.
Right here, you can upgrade the name of your e-newsletter, offer it a description, include your logo, turn on or off a welcome email to very first time customers, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify background shades, borders, spacing, fonts, photo layouts, and extra. I’m not going to undergo ever before single point you can enhance with your email template since it’s a whole lot. Simply try out the system free of charge and see it for yourself!
Essential beehiiv features
beehiiv has tons of incredible features that make it an excellent posting system for any type of e-newsletter designer.
Below are a few of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder Beehiiv iOS App
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter publishing platform. It makes it very easy to compose and send out emails. I stated over some of the things you can do with your setups and email style so I’ll save you some added analysis.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a truly modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s absolutely one of the much better e-mail editors I’ve ever before written in.
Website hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you desire) survive on an internet site. Think of it as a site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous issues of your newsletter, and an area where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s practically similar to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, provide you a web site. Nonetheless, the free plan areas your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you intend to add a customized domain name to get rid of all the beehiiv branding you’ll require to upgrade to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting customers is important. After all, that’s why you have an e-newsletter right?
With beehiiv, people can register for your e-newsletter right from your beehiiv internet site or via embed kinds.
If you currently have an internet site, and desire people to subscribe to your e-newsletter from your existing site, you’ll need to use an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this website (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed forms, you have 3 various choices– a full width, a taken care of width, and a slim embed. I directly use the slim installed.
You can locate the code fragment for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s additionally a choice for acknowledgment tracking if you intend to onward UTM specifications for tracking purposes– rather cool.
Nevertheless, 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 section listed below.
Referral program
Among the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is an option for creating a referral program.
You can urge existing customers on your listing to ahead your emails to friends and colleagues and if they get other people to subscribe to your listing, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever form you want. I’ve seem lots of e-newsletter firms offer incentives in the form of merch and stickers.
This can seriously transform your subscribers right into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– providing you one more avenue for growing your email checklist.
Nonetheless, to get access to the referral program feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a much more premium plan. I’ll review all the plans later in this article.
Costs memberships
They state all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership revenue is certainly a monster of its own. If you’re trying to find a system to monetize your e-newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can create “costs” problems of your newsletter that are only sent out to paying clients. This can be very rewarding relying on what your newsletter has to offer. As an example, Trends.co is a prominent premium newsletter that produces millions in income a year just by having pay-only e-newsletter content.
Data analytics
Among the important things I like regarding beehiiv is how clean and basic the analytics are. You get real-time date on exactly how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and subscriber matter.
You get access to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that customer matter increase is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan provides you whatever you need to get going and grow your newsletter (approximately 2,500 customers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, custom-made domain, polls, and access to costs subscriptions. This is the plan I get on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you whatever in the Grow plan with addition of top priority support and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are quite charitable in my point of view.
For instance, if you have 100,000 clients you will certainly pay around $329 per month. Rather than some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would bill $679 each month for the exact same amount– making beehiiv a great Kit choice for numerous individuals.
I’m not sure just how the device business economics deal with this, but beehiiv is most definitely cheaper (at the moment) than what it can be.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Naturally, with every system, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Below are some of the benefits and drawbacks I have actually directly experienced while utilizing beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Right here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of selection:
- Easy to establish and start sending e-newsletters for free
- Tidy and contemporary subscriber analytics
- Great deals of versatility with e-mail styles.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv iOS App
- Web site hosting
- Produce costs alternatives to generate income from
- Polls
To be truthful, I have not seen another e-newsletter system that has had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
But naturally, I don’t intend to be biased so I’m going to discuss some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the disadvantages I have actually found while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around incorporating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around including custom fonts
I use Webflow as my website structure platform of option (I graduated from WordPress and Squarespace a long time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in excessive detail why I enjoy Webflow a lot yet you can review my Webflow evaluation if you would love to find out more.
Now, there actually is nothing else way I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow internet site other than utilizing an iframe embed. I directly don’t such as utilizing iframe’s since they have a tendency to decrease my site a little bit. Every time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) tons, the sign-up embed is the last thing to fill on the page. It’s really obvious when you get on a slow web connection. Yet I can get around that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can not make use of a normal Webflow type (which I enjoy making use of). There are ways around this by utilizing a device like Zapier yet that would certainly simply include additional prices that I don’t need. To be honest, this is more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv disadvantage however I thought I would certainly mention it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far outweigh the disadvantages right here. I’m likewise enthusiastic that Webflow will at some point produce a better means to incorporate with beehiiv.
Final Thought
Generally, beehiiv is a wonderful service for anybody aiming to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter system much exceeds lots of that are currently on the marketplace. And with a generous free plan, you really have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are likewise relatively economical for what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers 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 can cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I do not write testimonial articles often. I only do when I really make use of the device myself and would advise it to a good friend.
I hope you located some clearness on whether beehiiv is an excellent system for you.